This Self-Made Millionaire Doesn’t Think You Need College

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It’s been said before by many successful people that college isn’t the only ticket to riches. Just look at Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of Harvard.

James Altucher is a self made millionaire who is an investor, an author, and a podcaster. He himself went to college, an ivy league at that. Altucher attended Cornell University but his advice to young folk now are to skip college altogether.

The wealthy 49-year old said, “If you’re eighteen years old and you want to think about, ‘Well, how am I going to have millions of dollars later on?’, the first thing I’ll tell you to do is don’t spend two hundred thousand dollars on a college degree and waste four years of your life.”

“Maybe that was good for your parents’ generation, which means my generation. Maybe that was good ten years ago,” he says. “It is no longer relevant right now.”

Altucher majored in computer science at Cornell, but says he still doesn’t have the skills needed to enter the workforce. Instead he just accumulated massive debt by going to school.

“When I finally got a job, I was so bad at computer programming they had to send me to remedial classes for two months so I could be good enough to do the minimum required at my job,” he explains. “So I’m not sure what I went to college for.”
“Instead of going to college, young people can learn skills online, or by going to the library and reading books,” says Altucher.

“More and more companies are even saying you don’t need a degree,” he concludes. “You need skills. So spend those four years learning skills.”

Altucher has written “Choose Yourself” and “The Power of No.” Both are self empowerment books.