The Most Successful young People Aren't going to College: Because, AI

When an 18-year-old with a $30 million AI company gets rejected by Stanford—a school that supposedly worships at the altar of entrepreneurship—something has broken in the machinery of American higher education. Zach Yadegari's story isn't just another Silicon Valley fairy tale. It's a referendum on institutions that still measure success in credit hours while the world outside measures it in monthly recurring revenue.

We're watching two conflicting narratives collide. On one hand: a self-taught coder who built Cal AI, a calorie-tracking app processing millions in monthly revenue, attending the University of Miami for what he openly calls a "six-figure vacation." On the other: an entire educational infrastructure pretending that philosophy electives and entrepreneurship seminars can teach someone who's already running a business how to run a business.

Both perspectives matter. And both expose the same uncomfortable truth: higher education is sprinting toward irrelevance while pretending it's standing still.

The Case for Obsolescence

Let's be blunt. Yadegari taught himself to code at 7. By 10, he was charging $30/hour for lessons. By high school, he'd built a six-figure gaming platform. By 16, he'd co-founded an app that would hit $30 million valuation before his college acceptance letters arrived. What exactly was Stanford going to teach him? How to pivot? How to validate product-market fit? How to scale user acquisition?

He'd already done all of it.

According to CB Insights, 88% of millionaires have bachelor's degrees—but that statistic increasingly reflects the past, not the future. The research predates the AI coding explosion that's democratized software development. GitHub's 2024 data shows that 41% of code on the platform is now AI-assisted, a number that was single digits just two years ago. The barrier to entry for building sophisticated applications has collapsed.

When your education consists of building real products, acquiring real users, and generating real revenue, what value does a theoretical framework add? Yadegari sits in entrepreneurship classes learning concepts he's already pressure-tested in markets with actual stakes. It's like teaching swimming to someone who's already crossed the English Channel.

The velocity of AI tooling makes this gap worse daily. Cursor, v0, Replit, and other AI-native development environments mean that a motivated teenager can now build in weeks what would have taken a team of engineers months just three years ago. Universities teaching Python fundamentals are preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

The Case for Evolution (Not Elimination)

But here's the uncomfortable counterpoint: Yadegari is an outlier, and outliers make terrible policy.

For every teenage founder running a $30 million app, there are thousands who need structured learning, mentorship, credential signaling, and—yes—time to mature before they're ready to navigate complex professional environments. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that median earnings for bachelor's degree holders remain 67% higher than those with only high school diplomas. That gap hasn't closed; if anything, it's widened.

The real issue isn't whether college has value. It's that colleges are teaching industrial-era skills in an intelligence-era economy. They're preparing students for jobs that involve executing tasks AI can now handle autonomously while ignoring the skills that actually matter: prompt engineering, AI workflow design, cross-functional AI integration, and strategic human-AI collaboration.

According to MIT's 2024 Work of the Future report, the most successful workers aren't those who know how to code—they're those who know how to orchestrate AI systems to achieve business outcomes. That's a fundamentally different skill set, one that requires judgment, taste, strategic thinking, and domain expertise. All things that benefit from structured education.

The problem is speed. University curriculum committees move at the pace of academic governance—slowly, deliberately, requiring multiple approvals and semester-long implementation cycles. AI capabilities are doubling every few months. By the time a new course gets approved, the tools it teaches are obsolete.

What Comes Next

We're witnessing the unbundling of higher education in real-time. The credential is separating from the learning. The network is separating from the institution. The skill development is separating from the degree.

Yadegari attends Miami for the social experience—the parties, the peer network, the memories. He's essentially paying $200,000+ for what amounts to an extended networking event with housing included. That's not education; it's expensive community building.

Meanwhile, the actual education—the technical skills, the business acumen, the product intuition—came from doing. From shipping code. From acquiring users. From iterating based on feedback loops measured in revenue, not grades.

The future isn't "college versus no college." It's "what does college become when the informational component has been completely disrupted by AI and the credentialing component no longer signals competence?"

Some institutions will adapt. They'll become finishing schools for AI-native professionals, teaching the human skills that complement machine intelligence. They'll focus on judgment, ethics, communication, and strategic thinking. They'll measure success in products shipped, not papers written.

Most won't. They'll continue teaching Java to students who should be learning how to architect AI agent systems. They'll assign essays when they should be assigning AI-assisted business launches. They'll optimize for accreditation requirements instead of employability outcomes.

And students—the smart ones, anyway—will vote with their feet. Or in Yadegari's case, vote with their time, treating formal education as an optional social experience rather than a necessary professional foundation.

If you're rethinking how to prepare your team for an AI-first future—or struggling to integrate AI capabilities faster than your competitors—let's talk. Winsome's growth experts help organizations move at the speed of AI, not the speed of committee meetings.