Is a University Education Necessary for Success?

     Parents spend thousands of ringgit and even hundreds of thousands of ringgit for their children to get a university degree. They say that a degree will ensure/ guarantee a brighter future for their children. Is this necessarily true?

     First of all, Let us determine the criterion for judging success. Most parents equate a big income with success. They are not interested in the intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic development brought about by tertiary education. They measure success by the quantity of material rewards they can obtain with a university education. To them the bigger your bank account, house or car, the bigger is your success. So, if we judge success in this materialistic manner, does a tertiary education give/ bring you a bigger income? It is not necessarily so.

     Most successful people do not have/ posses a university degree. In fact, one very big success was a local multi-millionaire who did not even finish his primary education and could just write his name and no other words. It seems that the genius which created the world's most famous computer software and who earns millions of dollars each day did not complete his university studies. In fact, the number of successful people who are non-graduates are too numerous to enumerate. Many successful businessmen and women have not stepped inside a university. Still, they are very successful not only in their business but also other aspects of their lives.

     The truth is if you have a degree, you are less likely to succeed than someone who has none. You will only be thinking of working for others if you are a graduate in a certain discipline. Working for others will earn you only a modest fixed income, say RM2.000 per month or even RM5,000 per month. It is only for the man who does not have a university degree, who is willing to take risks and who wants only to be the boss that the sky is the limit. The world does not belong to graduates who are only thinking of working for others. If a man's success is judged by the size of his income, then the lowly educated hawker is even more successful than a university graduate. While a graduate may earn RM300 a day and think that it is a lot of money, there is one lowly-educated woman selling "pasembur" who earns twice that amount in a single day. In fact, any mildly successful hawker will out-earn a university graduate any time. In one of the local newspapers one day, a university professor wryly observed that the fried "keow teow" seller in his housing estate earned four times what he did!

     From all the above examples, we can clearly see that it is not necessary to have a university education to be successful.