"Success has no connection with one’s education background,” said my 19-year-old son two years ago, when I was trying to convince him that some courses at university could lead him towards a path with diversified options for a financially comfortable career.
Millennials like him associate achievements with control over who they work with and what they work on; and most of the time are driven by passion to seek their own mission.
For these compatriots in Gen Y, chasing paper qualifications is not always the most sensible option; a diploma or degree, while a critical career path for many, is not the stronghold of information nor a guarantor of success.
As it may be, the millennials do have a point if we were to associate this with the recent heated discussion on the presence (or absence) of educational achievement that had raised the question of whether a certain level of schooling is a prerequisite for leadership or, in this case, political office.
The comments among netizens on the recent appointment of Kedah Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Ahmad Bashah Md Hanipah gave broad sweeping proclamations on formal educational attainment as a rough measure of the quality or competence of leaders.
With experience in administering the state as well as holding a position in the Federal Government, one would think Bashah’s career in politics would make his lack of credentials irrelevant.
But, many seem to believe everyone they know has a university degree, so it must be essential to getting ahead in leadership. Of course, our six prime ministers, who were all graduates, set the standard with the first three — Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein and Tun Hussein Onn — possessing law degrees before they took office.
If we look farther, United States President Barack Obama’s cabinet is composed entirely of university graduates with almost 35 per cent having an Ivy League graduate degree, showing the value of a degree qualification as not only a source of useful knowledge, but a class signifier, too.
By right, if we stick to the notion that education produces better decision-makers, most countries should then have the most efficiently and intelligently run governments. But, have we not witnessed leaders with educational credentials plunging countries into military conflicts or embarking on ruinous economic agenda, too?
If we wish to understand the links between education and leadership quality, we will need to move beyond the blunt presumption that the higher the educational qualification, the better it is. A university degree is not a proxy for the ability to do any job.
Just like teachers with master’s degrees do not necessarily produce better students, so chief executive officers from the best business schools might not produce higher profits. Those without university degrees could make great leaders and some with walls full of framed academic achievements do make awful leaders, as we have observed.
Already we can point to many high-profile successful people who have enjoyed success without completing tertiary education — among them Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates or, perhaps one closer to home, the late Tan Sri Lim Goh Tong, who made it on the Forbes’ 2007 list of billionaires worldwide.
Outside the political scene, it is the trend in many corporations nowadays to no longer emphasise on good grades as criteria to select new employees. Ernst and Young (EY) the accountancy firm, for instance, has removed academic and educational details from its trainee application process to make way for four core personal skills — leadership, commerciality, networking and influence — which it says are “invaluable to securing and succeeding in a first professional role”.
EY managing partner for talent, Maggie Stilwell, said that from their own internal research, “it found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken” but “there are positive correlations between certain strengths and success in future professional qualifications”.
So, does this mean that tertiary education is worthless? Of course, not. It goes without saying though, that complex jobs require specialised training and plenty of supervised experience, in which degrees are still very much relevant. Ask any doctor, lawyer, nurse or engineer.
Likewise, we do not want young people to assume that if some people could do it, then they can, too. Although it can certainly be done, it would take an extraordinarily rare person to be able to reach that level outside of formal education — the same reasoning I gave to my son earlier on my disagreement of his view of success.
So, a university degree is not the be-all and end-all. Accomplishments and practical skills are in the end more important than credentials. Going forward, we should then consider exactly how education can enhance the performance of the next generation of leaders with or without the right credentials. General educational attainment is definitely not a marker of leadership quality. Competencies are far more important.
Hazlina Aziz is NST’s education editor, and is an ex-teacher who is always on the lookout for weirdly-spelled words