How do we define business success? Is it rising in the corporate ranks to a senior level position, acting as an administrator? For this substantive academic qualifications would be required, but purely from the perspective of accreditation. Any degree would not necessarily prepare a person in any substantive sense for such an administrative position. What it would do, however, is teach a person how the bureaucratic mind works, as education has become a very pronounced bureaucracy. Passing through the system prepares you to function within a similar system.

If we define business success as an entrepreneur who creates, plans, and builds a new business from the ground up, creating investment, products, and jobs for the economy, then the academic element becomes not only superfluous, but positively harmful. Let us remember that academia is essentially bureaucratic in nature, devoted to the goal of rendering students' thinking amenable to working within a bureaucracy.

Bureaucratic thinking is anathema to truly productive work, to creating and building something new. Bureaucracies are also essentially parasitic and self-perpetuating; they ride on the back of productive sectors of the economy. The irony in this is that large corporations at some indefinable stage in their development do morph into bureaucracies, and their productive years in terms of creating new products and processes are largely over.

The only beneficial aspect of academic preparation for a productive working life in business is learning how to learn, how to research, to gather data and analyze it quickly. Regrettably, these are precisely the sort of skills that education systems tend to under-emphasize. The better students learn them on their own.

The best route for an aspiring entrepreneur is to take part of a degree, complete a couple years during which he/she learns the above-noted skills from peers and mentors, and then move on before the deadening bureaucratization of the mind begins to take hold.

Learn more about this author, Stephen Carter.
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