What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?
If someone asked me today, “What’s something you believed as a kid that seems ridiculous now?”, my answer would be immediate.
That a good degree is the passport to success.
Growing up in India during the 1980s, this wasn’t just advice—it was treated as an unquestionable truth.
The roadmap was simple.
Study hard.
Score well in Class 10.
Choose Science over Commerce or Arts if you were “bright.”
Survive Class 12—the Mount Everest of school life.
Get into engineering or medicine.
Secure a good job.
Find a good spouse.
Retire comfortably.
Life, we were told, was now settled.
Parents, teachers, relatives—everyone believed it. Marks were discussed at family gatherings as though they determined the rest of a person’s life.
Thirty-five years after earning my engineering degree and spending most of my career in manufacturing and business, I have come to believe that this is one of the most misleading ideas we ever planted in young minds.
Don’t get me wrong. Degrees are valuable. Education is priceless.
But a degree is not a passport to success.
Mark Twain famously said,
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
As a child, I didn’t understand that quote.
Today, I do.
What we glorified was schooling, not education.
Schooling teaches subjects.
Education teaches life.
Education happens while playing sports, losing matches, getting injured, arguing with friends, speaking on stage, acting in school plays, reading beyond textbooks, accepting failure, solving problems, working in teams, and learning how to deal with people.
Unfortunately, many of these experiences have been removed out of childhood by our obsession with marks.
Ironically, the world outside school values these qualities far more than examination scores.
The workplace rarely asks us to reproduce textbook definitions under timed conditions.
Instead, it demands judgment, communication, integrity, curiousity, adaptability, leadership and the ability to solve problems that have no model answers.
As careers progress, subject boundaries disappear.
An engineer suddenly needs to understand finance.
A production manager must negotiate with suppliers.
A business owner deals with technology, psychology, marketing, law, people management and strategy—often without formal education in any of them.
The higher you rise, the less your degree matters and the more your ability to keep learning matters.
Artificial Intelligence has accelerated this shift.
Facts are available in seconds.
Search engines and AI can retrieve information faster than anyone can memorise it.
The competitive advantage is no longer remembering information.
It is asking better questions, exercising sound judgment, thinking critically, collaborating with others, and continuously learning.
Schools have spent generations measuring excellence through marks and grades.
Perhaps it is time to measure something more meaningful.
Imagine if every school devoted one hour each day to life skills like financial literacy, communication, critical thinking, negotiation, entrepreneurship, ethics, emotional intelligence, decision making, learning how to fail and recover.
These lessons would prepare children not just to pass examinations, but to succeed in life.
Textbooks should remain the foundation.
But they should never be mistaken for the entire building.
Knowledge provides information.
Marks may open the first door.
But curiosity, discipline, integrity, resilience and the ability to work with people determine how far you travel.
Parents should absolutely encourage their children to earn degrees.
But they should encourage life building skills discussed above.
Because employers hire competence.
Customers reward value.
Society respects contribution.
And life has never demanded a degree.
It has always demanded growth.
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give the next generation is not the belief that a degree guarantees success, but the confidence that continuous learning, courage and perseverance can create success—regardless of the certificate hanging on the wall.
Nice write-up.
Great article 👏