Don’t count on a college degree to land your dream job in Silicon Valley.
Increasingly, founders and tech companies are judging talent by how quickly someone can learn, adapt, and build — not on how long they spent in a lecture hall — reshaping traditional pathways into the workforce.
Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer science professor widely known as the “Godmother of AI,” is one example of this.
In an interview on “The Tim Ferriss Show” this week, she spoke about the value of a degree when it comes to hiring for her AI startup, World Labs.
“When we interview a software engineer, I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now,” Li said.
“Now, it’s more about what have you learned, what tools do you use, how quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools — and a lot of these are AI tools,” she said. “What’s your mindset toward using these tools matter more to me.”
Her hiring bar has become even clearer: she won’t hire software engineers who resist AI.
“At this point in 2025 — hiring at World Labs — I would not hire any software engineer who does not embrace AI collaborative software tools,” Li said.
It’s not about automating humans out of the equation, she added — it’s about identifying people who can grow as fast as the technology around them.
“If you’re able to use these tools, you’re able to learn. You can superpower yourself better,” she said.
AI is rewriting the rules
Li’s stance is part of a broader shift playing out across Silicon Valley, where more founders and even major tech firms are openly questioning the value of higher education.
Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has openly challenged the value of a college education, urging young entrepreneurs to skip the lecture hall and learn by doing instead — a view echoed by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, who has said that adaptability and AI fluency now matter far more than the “fanciest degrees.”
“AI makes skill sets based on years of education irrelevant,” Dan Rhoton, CEO of Hopeworks, told Business Insider. Hopeworks is a tech-training nonprofit that prepares underrepresented talent for AI-enabled jobs.
After 13 years of preparing unemployed young adults ages 17 to 26 in Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia for tech careers, Rhoton said he has watched firsthand how AI is upending the value of a college degree.
“We’re seeing more and more employers coming to us, saying, ‘We used to require a bachelor’s degree in this, but we don’t understand why.'”
Instead, he said, employers now want a “value proposition,” which he said any job seeker can achieve by showing an AI-generated solution to a company’s specific problems.
“This is the age of: I’m someone who’s going to deliver business value,” Rhoton said. “Not: I have the right degree.”
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