The debate around whether college is worth the time and money has been heating up.As AI reshapes what it means to be a white-collar worker, and amid high tuition fees, some young people are rethinking the traditional path of graduating from college before entering the workforce.By now, stories of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropping out of college before earning their degrees have become tech-industry folklore. However, the Meta and Microsoft founders aren't the only influential executives who have risen to the top without finishing college.The founders and CEOs of other tech companies — including a new generation of Gen Z AI talent — also left higher education to bet on the tech world.Here are 21 tech executives who never got their college degrees.
Mark Zuckerberg — founder and CEO, Meta
Zuckerberg is pictured wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
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Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, studied psychology and computer science at Harvard but left without completing a degree.In 2004, while a student at Harvard University, he launched "thefacebook.com," which later became Facebook, but he dropped out during his sophomore year to move to Palo Alto and work on his company full-time."It's sort of been this taboo thing to say, maybe not everyone needs to go to college because there's, like, a lot of jobs that don't require that," Zuckerberg told comedian Theo Von in a 2025 interview. "But I think people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago."Zuckerberg received an honorary degree from Harvard in 2017.
