- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, despite dropping out of Harvard, still values college for the life experiences and relationships it offers—such as meeting his wife and future business partners—rather than its role in career preparation. However, he voiced concerns about the current college system for being costly, leaving many students in debt, and not adequately preparing them for today’s job market. He added that society’s views are shifting on the necessity of a degree.
Mark Zuckerberg is one of a handful of famous billionaires who dropped out of college, yet he’s still an advocate of higher education. That being said, the Meta founder backed college as an opportunity for life experience as opposed to career prospects.
Speaking to the ‘This Past Weekend’ podcast with Theo Von in an episode released last night, Zuckerberg recounted the relationships he made while studying at Harvard—including meeting his wife, Priscilla Chan—and the positive impact of this on his life overall.
But college is no longer needed to land a role in the current jobs market, he added: “I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that and all the student debt issues are…really big.
“The fact that college is just so expensive for so many people and then you graduate and you’re in debt.”
Zuckerberg—who until recently funded two tuition-free schools for low income families—then agreed with a point made by Von that college students aren’t guaranteed any rate of employment after graduating.
“It would be one thing if [college] was just kind of like a social experience, but you started off neutral. The fact that it’s not preparing you for the jobs that you need and you’re kind of starting off in this big [financial] hole then I think that’s not good,” Zuckerberg added.
“There’s going to have to be a reckoning…and people are going to have to figure out whether that makes sense. It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say ‘Maybe not everyone needs to go to college’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require that…people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago,” he added.
Many Gen Z doing the math on how much their degree could cost them are understandably alarmed. According to analysis from the U.S. News & World Report, the average cost of tuition at a private, out-of-state college is more than $43,000 a year.
However, for some of America’s most elite schools that price tag has soared to more than $90,000 a year. Last year Ivy League colleges such as Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown confirmed the price for the coming academic year was at least $91,000 before any financial aid or grants.
And younger workers potentially saddled with debt are entering an exceedingly tight labor market, with the St Louis Fed reporting that in February 2025—the most recent data available—there was approximately 1.1 jobs available per every unemployed person as demand for labor continues to cool post-pandemic.
The value of college may be the people
Zuckerberg, now worth $195 billion per the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, notoriously dropped out of Harvard after having launched Facebook from his dorm room.
The tech titan was already on thin ice with the Ivy League school, having been called in front of a disciplinary hearing for creating a website named Facemash which encouraged people to vote between two individuals on who was more attractive. Some narratives have framed Facemash as a predecessor to Facebook, Zuckerberg added, which is incorrect.
It was just prior to these disciplinary meetings that Zuckerberg met his wife, Chan, with whom he shares three children. And this building of human relationships is where Zuckerberg—who has since been given an honorary degree from Harvard—said college can be invaluable.
“There’s a question of how much [college] is about learning and how much of it is about…learning how to be a grown-up before you go out into the world,” the Meta founder added. “I mean for me the classes were fine, that was a fun sort of entertaining part of college. But I met a lot of people who were really important in my life.
“I mean Priscilla, my co-founders at my company, a bunch of people who are still close friends to this day. So I think that’s almost more of it than like whatever class you took.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
