The Test of Reality

We like simple criteria because they let us classify quickly. At school, we look at grades; at university, at degrees. In recruitment, at level of education. In social life, at appearance, reputation or status. In the senior civil service, at competitive examinations and elite schools. These markers have a real use: they tell us something about a person’s path, the knowledge acquired, a capacity for work and, sometimes, the difficulty of the selection they passed. The problem begins when we ask them to say more than they can, when we turn an indicator, a reputation or an appearance into a final verdict, and a title into a general presumption of superiority.

Because the decisive question, in professional life as in running a company or a country, is not only what a person has learned. It is what that person can do with that knowledge when confronted with a customer, a crisis, a machine that does not work, a changing market, a war the textbooks had not foreseen, or a decision whose consequences they will have to bear. That is where the degree meets what we might call its most demanding judge: the test of reality.

This article is therefore neither an indictment of education nor a plea on behalf of people without degrees. Statistics in fact show that higher-education graduates experience markedly lower unemployment on average. The question is broader: what does a degree actually measure, what does it not measure, and how far can it reasonably be used to predict competence, adaptability or the quality of a decision? More generally, how far can we turn a selection criterion, a reputation or a first impression into a lasting judgment about what a person will be capable of accomplishing?

What a degree measures, and what it does not

Four ideas are often mixed together even though they do not mean the same thing. A degree is a certification awarded at the end of a course of study and an assessment. A qualification refers to a level of preparation or to the recognition of abilities to perform an activity. Competence appears when knowledge, methods and know-how are mobilized correctly in a concrete situation. Performance, finally, is the result actually obtained. These four realities can overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

An excellent academic path often increases the probability of having solid knowledge. It can also signal discipline, perseverance, an ability to think abstractly or an aptitude for succeeding in a demanding framework. But it cannot certify in advance judgment, imagination, the courage to challenge a method that has become obsolete, the ability to persuade, commercial sense, interpersonal intelligence, speed of learning, or the ability to decide when information is incomplete.

History provides striking contrasts. Michael Faraday received only a rudimentary formal education before becoming an apprentice bookbinder and educating himself by reading the books he was binding; yet he would become one of the founding figures of experimental electromagnetism. Conversely, Maurice Gamelin had an exceptional academic and military record before finding himself, in 1940, at the top of a command structure unable to respond quickly enough to a new strategic situation. Neither example proves that education is useless. They simply show that a curriculum and an outcome belong to two different categories.

One essential precaution must be added: competence is never entirely abstract or universal. It is exercised in a field, with constraints, tools, a team and specific objectives. Being an excellent investment banker does not automatically mean knowing how to conduct macroeconomic policy; being an outstanding entrepreneur does not guarantee that one would make a great minister; brilliantly passing a competitive examination says no more about the ability to manage an organization in crisis. Performance also depends on context, available resources, collective decisions and sometimes external events. This distinction takes nothing away from the value of recognized competence; it simply reminds us that no degree, no position and no previous success can become a general certificate of infallibility.

When the absence of a degree closes a door

I have personally faced this issue several times in my professional life. Some years ago, my CV was available online and the director of a large bank in Clermont-Ferrand, whose name I will not give, took the initiative to contact me because she was interested in my background. The discussion was going well until the question of qualifications arose. I explained that I had not obtained the required Bac+2 qualification, roughly two years of higher education after the French baccalauréat. According to what she told me at the time, a European rule applicable to her institution imposed a minimum qualification level for that recruitment, with sanctions possible otherwise. Years later, I do not claim to reconstruct precisely the legal rule that applied to that particular job. What struck me was much simpler: my experience and background had been interesting enough for a bank director to pick up the phone and call me spontaneously, yet the absence of one line in the “degrees” section was enough to make everything else secondary before anyone had concretely tested what I could actually do.

I experienced an even more caricatural situation when applying for a job selling clothes. The company required a BTS, a French two-year higher-education diploma. I did not have it and was not selected. A few weeks later I returned to the store to buy a suit and was served by the person who had obtained the job. I did not reveal that I had also been a candidate and deliberately behaved like a customer who knew nothing about the subject, waiting for the advice of the professional the company had chosen. The welcome was hesitant, the person was biting their nails, and the advice I received seemed particularly poor. I said nothing and continued to play the role of the uninformed customer, even though that was not really the case. I still remember the question I asked myself: I was rejected in favor of this? That does not mean this person was incapable of improving, nor that holders of a BTS are poor salespeople. It means that using a degree as a filter had not guaranteed the commercial quality the company was actually seeking, whereas a simple real-life sales exercise might have revealed far more about the candidates.

The example that now seems most revealing to me does not even concern recruitment. When I was in my twenties and beginning to invest in property around Vichy, I approached BNP, among others, to finance the purchase of additional houses. Sitting opposite me was a bank adviser in his forties. I had looked into his background and learned that he had spent his entire career at the bank, that he was considered a very good professional there, and that he held a master’s degree. On paper, then, he had everything that should have allowed him to assess my project more relevantly than a man in his twenties asking him for money. His verdict was very clear: in his view, my property investments were doomed to fail and the bank did not want to support me.

I could have assumed that the man on the other side of the desk necessarily knew better. After all, he had experience, the position, a banking career, university training and a degree. I could have concluded that a professional with a master’s degree and many years in banking inevitably understood the property market, financing and the economic viability of my project better than I did. I did the opposite: I left BNP and went to Banque Populaire, which agreed to finance the following property purchases. The houses were bought, operated and rented out. More than twenty years later, those investments still exist and today constitute a significant part of my monthly income.

I find this example particularly interesting because the outcome cannot be fudged. It is no longer a question of which of us had the better CV, the higher degree, or the more polished theory of property investment. There were two different analyses of the same project. One concluded that it would not work; the other was to believe that it could work and then actually implement it. This does not mean that the adviser was incompetent in his profession. He may have been excellent in many areas and simply wrong on this file. That is precisely what makes the story useful: even an experienced, recognized and highly educated professional can make an error of judgment. A degree brings knowledge. It does not confer infallibility.

Five years of higher education as an entry ticket

I still see many job advertisements today in which a Bac+5 requirement — roughly five years of higher education after the French baccalauréat — appears almost automatically. In some cases this is perfectly understandable. I would not like to discover that the surgeon about to operate on me replaced years of medical training with a few videos watched online. To design certain structures, work on critical systems, practice a regulated profession or intervene in fields where an error can cost lives, academic training is an indispensable safeguard. But the same logic is sometimes applied to functions where making it compulsory is far less obvious: business development, partnerships, communication, management, institutional relations, project management or business-to-business relations are all areas in which experience, personality, interpersonal intelligence, initiative and the ability to obtain results can matter as much as knowledge acquired in a university curriculum.

I recently came across a job that interested me enormously. It involved developing relations and partnerships among different players in the space sector. For me, space is not just another economic sector: it is an absolute passion. The advertised salary was around €50,000 a year and, for a role of that nature, I would probably have accepted much less, even considering pay close to the French minimum wage, because being able to work professionally in a field you are passionate about is a rare privilege. I could bring years of commercial experience, hands-on knowledge of business, experience negotiating, building projects and professional relationships, and a level of motivation that is difficult to manufacture artificially. But the advertisement required Bac+5. One can still send a CV; some candidates do. In this particular case, however, the employer was connected to the university world, which made the situation almost ironic: trying to explain to an institution whose missions include educating students and awarding them degrees that five years of study might perhaps not be essential for this particular function borders on paradox.

The question remains: did the employer want to recruit someone with Bac+5, or someone capable of effectively developing partnerships in the space sector? These are not necessarily the same people. The phenomenon has even been studied under the name “degree inflation”. Research by Harvard Business School with Accenture and Grads of Life, based on 26 million US job postings, showed that university degrees had gradually become mandatory for some jobs that had historically been performed successfully by workers without them. The example of production supervisors is striking: in 2015, 67% of job postings required a university degree even though only 16% of people actually holding those jobs had one. Employers interviewed also acknowledged that experienced workers without degrees could be just as productive as, or even more productive than, graduates in the same jobs. A degree can therefore be an indicator. The problem begins when it becomes an automatic filter that excuses us from looking at the person.

It is nevertheless necessary to acknowledge a fact that runs against an overly easy reading of my argument: educational attainment has real statistical value. In France, the national statistics institute Insee measured for 2025 an unemployment rate of 14.7% among economically active people with no diploma or only the lower-secondary certificate, compared with 5.3% among holders of a qualification at Bac+2 level or above. If I claimed that education serves no purpose, these figures would prove me wrong. They show a clear association between education level and labor-market situation. For an employer, a degree can therefore be a useful signal of acquired knowledge, work capacity and perseverance, without that statistical relationship proving that every graduate is individually more competent or performs better.

That statistical reality does not, however, answer the question raised in this article. A statistic describes a population; it does not allow us to decide that Pierre, with Bac+5, will necessarily be more competent than Jean, who does not have that qualification. A degree may improve an average probability without becoming individual proof of performance. That is the difference between a useful indicator and an automatic verdict.

France already has a public recruitment tool that applies almost exactly this principle. The Méthode de recrutement par simulation, or MRS, developed by France Travail, sets aside the usual criteria of degree and experience and begins by identifying the abilities actually required for the job. Candidates then perform exercises built from concrete work situations; those who demonstrate the expected abilities are introduced to the employer. France Travail states that a CV, degree or prior experience are not prerequisites in this method and that nearly 130 specialized teams implement it across the country. In other words, the public institution responsible for employment itself recognizes that there are situations in which the best way to recruit is not to ask candidates which credential they possess, but what they can actually do.

Validation des acquis de l’expérience, or VAE — France’s system for recognizing experience-based learning — takes the reasoning one step further. The official state portal presents VAE as a third route to certification, alongside initial, continuing or work-study training. The principle is to recognize skills acquired through experience and compare them with the reference framework of a diploma or professional title; regulations also provide for additional training where certain skills are missing. Our own system therefore already recognizes two distinct realities: completing a training program, and demonstrating that one possesses the skills that program was intended to develop.

Do the top students always get it right?

History offers fascinating examples of the difference between academic success and the ability to face a real situation. Maurice Gamelin is a particularly interesting illustration. His record was remarkable: a philosophy prize in France’s Concours général, Saint-Cyr where he graduated top of his class in 1893, then eighth place in the entrance competition for the École de guerre, where he attracted the attention of figures including Foch and Lanrezac. If a commander had been selected only on the basis of his academic and professional file, it would have been difficult to imagine a stronger candidate. When Germany attacked France in May 1940, however, the French high command was rapidly overwhelmed by highly mobile warfare combining armored forces, aviation, communications and rapid breaches of the opposing system. It would be historically absurd to attribute France’s defeat to Gamelin alone; its causes were multiple — political, military, doctrinal, industrial and organizational. But his example is a reminder of something obvious: one can attend the best schools, obtain the best rankings and accumulate immense experience without being guaranteed to find the right answer when a radically new situation appears.

Napoleon Bonaparte offers almost the opposite example. He was by no means uneducated: he attended the military college at Brienne, then the École militaire in Paris, and became an artillery officer. But he was not top of his class. In 1785, among 58 students who qualified as second lieutenants, he ranked 42nd. If a recruitment system had treated school ranking as a mechanical predictor of future potential among young officers, Bonaparte would probably not have appeared near the top of the list. A few years later he was commanding armies, transforming Europe and becoming Emperor of the French. His education had given him indispensable knowledge, notably in mathematics and artillery, but what made the difference also involved qualities much harder to measure on an examination paper: capacity for work, memory, strategic intuition, speed of decision, ambition, command, and an ability to exploit exceptional circumstances. Chateaubriand, a fierce opponent of Napoleon, summarized his power with the image of a man bent over the world, overthrowing kings with one hand and bringing down the revolutionary giant with the other.

A darker example reminds us that competence and moral worth are separate questions. Adolf Hitler had no degree from an elite school and had never been a senior military officer; he had notably failed to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and held only a junior rank during the First World War. Yet he succeeded in seizing power, mobilizing a gigantic political and military apparatus, and dragging Europe into a war that led to mass crimes and the Holocaust. This is not admiration: the example merely shows that no degree by itself determines the ability to organize, persuade or take power, and that competence is never synonymous with virtue.

The danger of snap judgments

History has a rather cruel way of mocking our certainties when we turn them too quickly into final verdicts. The Roman emperor Claudius provides an illustration that goes beyond the question of degrees. Long kept away from much of public life, partly because his physical characteristics and behavior made him appear an unlikely heir, he was hardly destined in the eyes of his entourage to exercise supreme power. He was mocked and treated as a fool. After Caligula’s assassination in AD 41, he nevertheless became emperor after being chosen by the Praetorian Guard, who saw him as a weak and vulnerable puppet. His reign, which lasted until 54, was marked by active administration, major public works and expansion of the Empire, including the conquest of Britain beginning in 43. Claudius does not prove that a despised man will necessarily become a great leader; he simply reminds us that the image a person projects before being given the chance to act can be a very poor predictor of what they will accomplish once placed in a position of responsibility.

Charles Darwin offers a different example, even more interesting because it directly concerns how we evaluate intellectual aptitude. In his autobiography, he recalled that his teachers and even his own father had regarded him as a very ordinary boy, rather below average intellectually. His father once reproached him, in exasperation, for caring only about shooting, dogs and pursuits with no future. Yet Darwin already possessed a quality school reports measure poorly: a stubborn curiosity for the subjects that fascinated him and an ability to sustain his attention when a problem genuinely interested him. A few decades later, the publication of On the Origin of Species would transform biology. Again, his schooling had not necessarily failed to transmit knowledge; rather, the judgments made about him in his youth had failed to predict the exceptional use he would later make of intellectual dispositions that were then difficult to see.

Ignaz Semmelweis adds another dimension, essential if this reflection is not to become a simplistic opposition between graduates and self-taught people. Semmelweis was a physician. He belonged to the learned and institutional world himself. In the 1840s, working in a Vienna maternity clinic, he observed that the mortality of women fell dramatically when doctors and students washed their hands with a chlorinated solution after autopsies and before examining patients. His result was observable, quantified and spectacular, yet part of the medical establishment of his time rejected his conclusions. The World Health Organization now recalls that he was mocked and did not live to see his ideas fully recognized. His story shows something deeper than the limits of a degree: even a community of trained, experienced and legitimate professionals can resist a result that contradicts its habits. Competence therefore also requires a faculty rarely written on a diploma: accepting that facts can force us to change our minds.

When the education system does not see talent

Michael Faraday deserves a closer look because his story lies at the very heart of the production of knowledge. The Royal Institution recalls that he had received an education he himself described as very ordinary, limited to the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. At fourteen, he went to work for a bookbinder. By reading the scientific books that passed through his hands, and later taking extraordinarily careful notes at lectures, he built much of his education. Hired as a laboratory assistant to Humphry Davy, he would help reveal electromagnetic induction and lay essential foundations for the electric motor and generator. His path does not prove that physics can be learned without hard work; it proves exactly the opposite: one can work and learn at an exceptional level without having begun with the academic path we would now regard as compulsory.

Srinivasa Ramanujan offers an even more troubling example for our way of selecting people. Brilliant in mathematics, he lost his scholarship because he neglected other subjects, failed the examination that should have given him the conventional route into university, and then continued his research largely on his own. When he wrote to the British mathematician G. H. Hardy in 1913, he presented himself as a man who had not received a conventional university education. Yet his notebooks contained results that would contribute profoundly to number theory, infinite series and other areas of mathematics. He later obtained a research degree at Cambridge. What makes his story interesting is therefore not a simplistic opposition between school and genius; it is the fact that an examination system initially failed to measure an extraordinary mathematical ability correctly.

These examples lead to an essential distinction. An education system must evaluate people using common criteria and cannot design a different examination for every personality. Such standardization is necessary if degrees are to be comparable. But it inevitably creates blind spots: some forms of talent express themselves poorly within the very framework used to measure them. The right conclusion is not to abolish examinations; it is never to forget what they leave outside the frame.

Business is full of paths a CV might have eliminated

The business world also provides many trajectories that do not fit the conventional degree model. Henry Ford received relatively little formal education and learned enormously through practice, mechanics and experimentation. Richard Branson left school at sixteen before building Virgin. Amancio Ortega, future founder of Inditex and Zara, also left school very young. In Japan, Soichiro Honda provides an especially telling industrial example: after elementary school, he left for Tokyo at fifteen to become an apprentice in an automobile workshop. He learned the trade through machines, repairs and competition before founding the company that bears his name in 1948. The lesson of Honda is not that an engineering degree would have been useless; it is that world-class industrial competence can also be built through a deeply practical learning trajectory.

Xavier Niel offers a particularly telling French example. He attended scientific preparatory classes but did not continue through to a major university or engineering-school degree. Very young, he learned computing through practice, developed telematics services and later built, through Iliad and Free, a group that helped transform the French telecommunications market. His case does not show that engineering training would have been useless; it shows that sufficiently deep technical and economic understanding can also be built outside the academic path that would have seemed, on paper, the most logical one for the head of a telecom operator.

François Pinault pushes the contrast even further. He has himself said that he left school very young without a diploma. He started in the timber trade, founded his first company in the early 1960s and gradually built a group that moved from distribution into luxury goods, while becoming one of the major collectors of contemporary art. The trajectory is all the more interesting because it looks nothing like the curriculum we would now associate with the leadership of an international group. Again, the absurd conclusion would be that HEC or a management school serves no purpose. The only reasonable conclusion is that an exceptional ability to negotiate, invest, spot an opportunity and build an organization can emerge in someone an academic filter might have placed very far from the expected profiles.

At the other extreme, some of the most famous entrepreneurs in the digital world did enter prestigious universities, but left before obtaining the degrees those institutions were supposed to award: Steve Jobs officially dropped out of Reed College after a few months while continuing to attend some classes; Bill Gates left Harvard to develop Microsoft; Michael Dell interrupted his studies at the University of Texas as his company took off; Larry Ellison completed none of the university programs he began; Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard to develop Facebook. These stories do not prove that dropping out makes you rich. They show that the absence of a final degree does not justify concluding that potential is absent.

Jack Ma provides another illustration, slightly different because he is not a man without a degree. He eventually obtained an English degree and became a teacher, but his earlier path was marked by rejection. At the World Economic Forum in Davos he told one of his best-known stories: when 24 people applied for jobs at KFC, 23 were hired and he was the only one rejected. He also said he had been rejected by Harvard ten times. The man whom several selection processes judged inadequate would go on to create Alibaba, one of China’s most important companies. The KFC recruiter was probably not stupid; that person had a limited set of information and had to make a decision at a given moment. That is exactly the problem: recruitment never measures a whole person. It measures a few indicators available about that person at the moment a choice has to be made.

We must therefore remain intellectually honest. For every Gates, Jobs or Branson, there are millions of people who left education without creating a multinational company. The reverse reasoning would be just as foolish as the one I am criticizing. Not having a degree is no more proof of competence than having one. These paths prove something more modest but essential: the absence of a degree does not entitle us to conclude that talent, learning ability or exceptional potential is absent.

Even in the conquest of space, a degree is not enough

Wernher von Braun is an especially instructive counterexample here, because it would be false to portray him as a self-taught man without formal education. On the contrary, he was highly educated: in 1932 he obtained an engineering diploma from the Berlin Institute of Technology, continued his studies at the University of Berlin, and in 1934 received a doctorate in physics for work directly related to liquid-propellant rockets. His path therefore perfectly illustrates the value of high-level scientific training. But it simultaneously illustrates the limits of all training: when von Braun became fascinated with rockets, the space industry as we know it did not yet exist. He could learn mathematics, physics, mechanics and thermodynamics, but no university could yet teach him in detail how to design a modern orbital launch vehicle or, decades later, lead a lunar program. One had to experiment, build, fail, understand the failure and try again.

His German career forces us to add a moral dimension that cannot be avoided: von Braun worked for the Nazi regime’s military program, joined the Nazi Party and became an SS officer, while V-2 production exploited concentration-camp labor under murderous conditions. This does not alter the scientific point his case illustrates, but it is another reminder that high technical competence is never a moral guarantee. Knowledge gives the capacity to act; it does not determine what one chooses to do with that capacity.

Decades later, SpaceX offers another example of the mixture between academic training and learning through action. Elon Musk himself holds university degrees in physics and economics, but not in aerospace engineering. When he entered rocketry, he learned extensively through reading and by surrounding himself with experienced engineers. It would be absurd to tell the story of SpaceX as that of one man who read a few books in his living room: the company rests on thousands of engineers, technicians and specialists, many of them highly trained. But it has also developed a culture of rapid iteration, testing, failure and successive correction. At a certain level of innovation, no school can provide the recipe for a machine that does not yet exist; part of the profession has to be invented by practicing it.

The recruitment philosophy publicly defended by Elon Musk is therefore interesting. In 2020, while looking for specialists for Tesla’s artificial-intelligence team, he explained that a PhD was not necessary and that even the absence of a high-school diploma was not disqualifying if a candidate demonstrated a deep understanding of artificial intelligence and the ability to apply it. But he added an essential counterpart: candidates had to pass a particularly demanding programming test. That nuance changes everything. Removing the degree requirement does not mean removing standards; it can mean replacing academic presumption with a concrete demonstration of competence. In practice, many highly technical roles at Tesla or SpaceX still require specific training. The real idea is therefore not “degrees are useless”, but rather “when possible, prove what you can do”.

Artificial intelligence changes the question even further

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence forces us to reopen the entire debate from a new angle. For decades, we assumed that one had to accumulate a considerable body of knowledge over several years before being able to perform certain intellectual functions. Much of that logic remains perfectly valid: one does not truly understand a complex field without mastering its fundamental principles. But what happens when everyone suddenly has access to a tool able to search, explain, compare, translate, summarize, correct, simulate or propose a method in seconds? Is it still relevant to select primarily the person who can recite information if another person can define the problem correctly, question the tool intelligently, verify the answer, detect an error and turn the information into an operational decision?

The question can be put deliberately provocatively: could a person who starts out less trained, but is extremely motivated, curious, able to learn quickly and properly assisted by artificial intelligence, produce better work than a demotivated Bac+5 graduate who cannot adapt? In some fields, empirical research already suggests that the answer can be yes. A study published in 2025 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics observed 5,172 customer-service agents during the rollout of a generative-AI assistant. Access to AI increased productivity by 15% on average, with particularly large gains among the least experienced and lowest-performing workers. The tool appeared to accelerate the diffusion of some best practices and shorten the learning curve.

Work carried out by Boston Consulting Group goes even further. In an experiment involving consultants faced with data-science tasks outside their usual expertise, those using generative AI reached, on a Python-programming exercise, an average level equivalent to 86% of the performance of specialist data scientists, even though many had never really coded before. That is considerable. But the same research also shows the limit of the argument: when a task lies outside the tool’s reliable capabilities, AI can mislead the user and degrade performance. Another BCG experiment showed that on some problems for which GPT-4 produced misleading answers, users could perform worse than those working without AI.

Artificial intelligence therefore does not instantly make a person competent when they know nothing. It changes the nature of competence. It can provide a method, explain a concept in several ways, review a document, detect some inconsistencies, translate, produce a first analysis, compare hypotheses and try again as many times as necessary. But one still has to know how to ask the right questions, distinguish a plausible answer from a correct one, verify sources, understand enough of the field to detect absurdity, and retain responsibility for the decision. Knowledge does not disappear; part of its value shifts from memorization toward judgment, verification, adaptation and the capacity to learn.

That makes the question of five years of study even more interesting. To become a doctor, pharmacist, engineer working on certain critical infrastructure, or to practice regulated professions directly affecting other people’s safety, it would be absurd to replace long training with a few conversations with an AI. But should five years of study be imposed systematically on someone whose future work will mainly consist of managing commercial relationships, coordinating partners, negotiating, developing a network, organizing projects or solving concrete problems? Perhaps we should recruit less on what people were supposed to have learned yesterday and more on what they are capable of producing today, verifying correctly and learning tomorrow.

Political power without an elite school: Abraham Lincoln

Politics also offers counterexamples that force us to put academic pedigree in perspective. Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, had almost no institutional schooling comparable to that of today’s national leaders. The Library of Congress estimates his total formal education at around eighteen months. Born into very modest circumstances, he read everything he could find, educated himself to a large extent, and later studied law without attending law school. Admitted to the Illinois bar in 1837, he became over the years a respected lawyer and then a national political leader.

Nothing in this path means that a self-taught person is naturally better than a Harvard or Sciences Po graduate. But there is something striking in the fact that one of the most consequential presidents in American history, confronted with a civil war and the central issue of slavery, built most of his intellectual formation outside a traditional higher-education curriculum. Lincoln reminds us that a society can find reasoning, writing, persuasion and decision-making ability in paths its academic criteria would not necessarily have placed at the top of a ranking. The contrast becomes especially interesting just before looking at France, where access to the highest administrative responsibilities has long been much more closely associated with elite schools and the grands corps of the state.

When the best degrees govern: fifty years put to the test of reality

The question becomes even more sensitive when we leave business and look at those to whom we entrust the highest responsibilities of the state. If there is one country that can hardly be accused of neglecting the education of its elites, it is France. Sciences Po, the ENA — now the Institut national du service public — École Polytechnique, HEC, École Normale Supérieure, the Inspection des finances and the Cour des comptes have supplied a large share of our senior leaders. Succeeding in such institutions requires work, analytical ability and a genuine aptitude for learning. It would therefore be absurd to claim that their graduates are, by principle, incompetent. The question is exactly the reverse: because these trajectories are often used as a presumption of competence, what does the evolution of actual outcomes teach us once those elites exercise power?

Public debt is not a presidential report card. It can rise because of a recession, a banking crisis, a pandemic, a military effort, support for the economy, or investments whose effects will appear only later. Its weight as a percentage of gross domestic product also depends on growth and inflation. I therefore do not use it to establish a simplistic ranking of presidents. Here it is one indicator among others used to test a much more modest proposition: the best academic credentials and the most selective careers do not, by themselves, guarantee better macroeconomic outcomes.

To keep the comparison readable, the figures below mainly use public debt under the Maastricht definition as a percentage of GDP. The years in which a president arrives or leaves office are transition years shared between two presidencies; they cannot be turned into personal invoices. National accounts are also regularly revised, which explains why some older publications differ by a few tenths of a percentage point from the latest series. What matters here is the order of magnitude and the trajectory, not false precision to the nearest tenth.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was almost the archetype of the French academic elite: Lycée Louis-le-Grand, École Polytechnique, École nationale d’administration, then the Inspection des finances. It is difficult to imagine, in the France of the period, an education more directly linked to the state and to economic questions. For his presidential term, from 1974 to 1981, there is nevertheless a methodological difficulty: the homogeneous Maastricht-debt series used by Insee in the historical tables cited here begins in 1980. It would therefore be misleading to invent a comparable debt figure for 1974 using a different perimeter. We can, however, observe the public balance: long-run series reproduced in a public report indicate a small surplus of around 0.3% of GDP in 1974, compared with a deficit of around 2.2% in 1981. Maastricht debt is estimated at 20.7% of GDP at the end of 1980 and 22.0% at the end of 1981. The consequences of the first oil shock of 1973–1974, prolonged by the 1975 recession, explain a large part of this break and prevent any simplistic verdict on one man. Yet the Giscard case is already revealing: even a president exceptionally trained in economics could not prevent reality from overflowing the framework of knowledge and models.

François Mitterrand had a less technocratic educational path than Giscard, but still that of a man with solid higher education in literature, law and at the École libre des sciences politiques. When he arrived at the Élysée in 1981, public debt represented around 22% of GDP. In 1994, the last full calendar year of his presidency, it was already close to 49.2%; at the end of the 1995 transition year it reached around 55.5%. Even using the more cautious comparison, the weight of debt had therefore more than doubled. His fourteen years in office included two periods of cohabitation, several governments, the recession of the early 1990s and profound European changes, which makes any personal attribution of this rise inappropriate. But those years show that an administration largely composed of highly educated people did not prevent the lasting installation of public indebtedness.

The Mitterrand period is also important for industrial transformation. Insee places the beginning of the long-term decline in manufacturing employment at the start of the 1980s. Manufacturing’s share of value added in the economy fell from 20.8% in 1979 to 17.7% in 1989. Again, it would be absurd to see this as the product of a single policy: productivity gains, outsourcing to services, foreign competition, the structure of demand and international economic integration combined. The fact remains that deindustrialization took hold during a period when the French state already had one of the most selective and highly educated senior civil services in the world.

Jacques Chirac had a CV that would reassure any recruiter attached to elite schools: Sciences Po, where he finished among the very top of his class, then ENA and the Cour des comptes. Before reaching the Élysée, he had already been junior minister for the Economy and Finance, minister, twice prime minister and mayor of Paris. Debt stood at around 55–56% of GDP in 1995 and around 64–65% in 2007, an increase of roughly nine points over the period. That average, however, masks two different movements: the ratio stabilized and then fell in the late 1990s and early 2000s before rising again. Five years of cohabitation with Lionel Jospin make any personal attribution particularly artificial.

The industrial side is harsher. Insee estimates that manufacturing’s share of value added fell from 15.7% in 2000 to 12.7% in 2007 and stresses that the decline was particularly marked over that period. This figure does not mean that Jacques Chirac alone caused a three-point fall: relative industrial prices, productivity gains, outsourcing and international competition all play major roles. It does show, however, that a whole period of global growth and European integration was not used to reverse the relative loss of weight of French industry.

Nicolas Sarkozy had a different academic background: he was neither a Polytechnique graduate nor an ENA alumnus, but held a master’s-level degree in private law, studied at Sciences Po and obtained the qualification to practice as a lawyer. He had above all already served as budget minister and then minister for the Economy, Finance and Industry. Debt stood at around 64.5% of GDP in 2007 and reached around 90.6% in 2012, an increase of roughly 26 points. This was the most spectacular increase across recent presidential transitions before the pandemic, but it would be intellectually dishonest to isolate it from the global financial crisis of 2008, the recession that followed, and the measures taken to stabilize the banking system and the economy.

That nuance is precisely what makes the case interesting for our subject. Nicolas Sarkozy had exercised economic responsibilities before entering the Élysée; he was not arriving without knowledge of the file. Yet a systemic crisis originating abroad abruptly changed all the assumptions underlying the forecasts. In 2009, the public deficit reached around 7.2% of GDP. The question is not what degree could have prevented Lehman Brothers, but rather that political competence is also measured by the ability to act when acquired knowledge meets an event that nobody had correctly anticipated.

François Hollande almost perfectly embodies the French model of elite education: HEC, Sciences Po, ENA in the Voltaire class, then the Cour des comptes. On paper, it is difficult to imagine an academic path more directly related to business, administration and the supervision of public finances. Debt rose from around 90.6% of GDP in 2012 to around 98.4% in 2017, almost eight additional points. The raw figure could fuel an easy criticism; yet one must also look at what improved. The annual deficit, which was around 5% of GDP in 2012, was reduced to 2.8% in 2017. This reminds us that debt can continue to rise even as the deficit falls, and that an economic record can never be reduced to one thermometer.

That is precisely why the comparison of presidents must be used cautiously in support of this article’s argument. François Hollande can be criticized for many choices, but it would be false to claim that every indicator deteriorated. What his term shows for our purpose is simpler: even when a leader has an almost ideal background for understanding the public accounts, outcomes remain the product of political decisions, economic constraints, inherited conditions and trade-offs for which no degree automatically supplies the right combination.

Emmanuel Macron is probably the most interesting case because he combines exactly what our system presents as guarantees. After literary preparatory classes, Sciences Po and higher studies in philosophy, he entered ENA and then the Inspection générale des finances. He joined Rothschild & Cie in 2008 and became a managing partner, a senior role in investment banking. He notably participated in Nestlé’s acquisition of Pfizer’s infant-nutrition business, a transaction of around nine billion euros, before becoming deputy secretary-general of the Élysée, minister for the Economy and then President of the Republic. It would be inaccurate to write that he “ran Rothschild”; his actual career is already remarkable enough to show that he lacks neither education nor selective professional experience.

Consider the profile: Sciences Po, philosophy, ENA, the Inspection générale des finances, investment banking, managing-partner status, a multi-billion-euro transaction, the presidential staff, the Economy ministry and then the presidency. One does not pass through such a succession of filters by chance. It implies real intellectual, interpersonal, political and professional abilities. That is exactly what makes the comparison interesting: it is not about taking a poorly trained man and demonstrating that he failed, but observing what becomes of the presumption of excellence when the holder of an almost ideal CV confronts the complexity of a country.

In 2017, public debt stood at around 98–99% of GDP depending on the statistical series used. Before the pandemic it remained broadly near that level, around 98% in 2019. Because the national accounts have been revised several times, these orders of magnitude are more rigorous here than false precision to one decimal place. Covid-19 then caused a historic break and pushed the 2020 deficit to 9.2% of GDP, with massive support measures designed to prevent the collapse of economic activity. It would therefore be dishonest to present the entire subsequent rise as the product of ordinary management. But several years after the initial shock, the deficit remained at 5.8% of GDP in 2024 and 5.1% in 2025. Debt reached 115.7% of GDP at the end of 2025 and 117.5% in the first quarter of 2026. Compared with 2017, that represents roughly 17 additional points by the end of 2025 and almost 19 points by the first quarter of 2026. The second term is not yet over, so this is obviously not a final assessment.

This trajectory makes the conclusion much more interesting than an attack on “technocrats”. Emmanuel Macron has the degrees, experience in senior public administration, experience in investment banking and experience as economy minister. Yet none of those elements guarantees that, once at the top of the state, budgetary objectives will be achieved. That is precisely the distinction running through this article: a qualification can be remarkable and competence can be real, without the final result being guaranteed.

A second thermometer: industrial decline

Debt is not the only indicator that can place this story in time. Manufacturing provides a complementary perspective. According to Insee, its share of French value added fell from 22.3% in 1970 to 20.8% in 1979, 17.7% in 1989, 15.7% in 2000, 12.7% in 2007 and 11.2% in 2014. Between 1980 and 2012, manufacturing employment in full-time equivalents fell from around 5.1 million to 2.8 million, a decline of more than 40%. France is not the only developed economy to have experienced such transformations, and Insee emphasizes the roles of productivity gains, relative prices, outsourcing, demand and international competition.

These precautions do not make the trajectory insignificant. They simply prevent it from becoming a prosecution of one particular president. From Giscard to Macron, France changed political majorities, economic doctrines, currency arrangements, European frameworks and global circumstances. It was governed by lawyers, ENA graduates, Polytechnique graduates, HEC and Sciences Po alumni, finance inspectors and magistrates from the Cour des comptes. Yet neither public indebtedness nor the relative decline of industry was durably reversed. If degrees were sufficient to produce the right decision, that continuity would be difficult to explain. If a degree is only one element among many, it becomes much less mysterious.

One final figure summarizes the paradox fairly well without pretending to explain it by itself: compulsory levies represented 39.8% of GDP in 1981 and 45.3% in 2017; they still stood at 43.6% in 2025. In other words, the historical rise in debt did not occur in a state that had stopped raising resources. That does not prove the incompetence of its leaders; it reminds us that controlling a public system depends on choices, priorities, constraints and execution capacities that academic excellence alone cannot guarantee.

On an infinitely smaller scale, my property experience brings me back to the same distinction. An experienced bank adviser, reputed to be competent and holding a master’s degree, told me that my investments around Vichy were doomed to fail. All the traditional markers of competence seemed to be on his side: age, experience, job, institution and degree. I did not have his master’s degree, but another bank agreed to back me and, more than twenty years later, the investments still exist and contribute to my income. The adviser certainly possessed many skills I did not have; on that specific decision, he was wrong. At some point, reality must be allowed to correct the CV.

What school measures… and what it finds much harder to measure

This reflection also reminds me of an anecdote often told by the economist and entrepreneur Charles Gave about his time in the United States. He says a professor asked his students why companies would want to hire them. Some reportedly answered, in substance, because they were the best. The professor challenged that certainty: succeeding within the university system demonstrated above all their ability to succeed within that system. They had learned, worked, understood their professors’ expectations and passed their examinations. All of that was real. But it did not automatically mean they would be better entrepreneurs, better leaders or better decision-makers than people who had followed different paths. I am reporting the general idea of the anecdote here, not a word-for-word verified quotation.

The formula may sound harsh, but it contains a fundamental idea. School measures some qualities remarkably well: learning ability, memory, discipline, written expression, abstraction, reasoning, understanding instructions and the ability to sustain effort over several years. All of those qualities are useful and often precious. But how does an examination paper measure the ability to sell, lead a team, take a personal risk, discover an opportunity no one else has seen, absorb ten failures and try an eleventh time, persuade someone who initially did not want to listen, work fifteen hours on a problem simply because it fascinates you, abandon a brilliant theory when the facts show it to be wrong, improvise when no manual describes the situation, or build something that did not exist before? These qualities are much harder to grade out of twenty.

The degree is not the problem

A degree is therefore not the enemy. It is often extremely valuable and sometimes indispensable. Society needs properly trained engineers, doctors, researchers, scientists, lawyers and technicians. The organized transmission of knowledge is one of the foundations of our civilization. The problem begins when we ask a degree to prove something it cannot prove. A degree certifies training and academic success at a given moment. It does not certify genius, courage, imagination, motivation, judgment, charisma, practical intelligence or the ability to make the right decision when nobody yet knows the answer.

Conversely, the absence of a degree guarantees nothing either. Some self-taught people are brilliant; others are completely incompetent. Some graduates are mediocre; others are exceptional. The real revolution might simply consist of looking at human beings as a whole. A degree should be one element among others: experience, achievements, passion, learning ability, the way a person solves problems, reliability, interpersonal intelligence, judgment, work accomplished and, above all, results should also weigh in the decision.

When the nature of the job allows it, why not actually put candidates in a real situation? Give them a problem to solve, ask them to prepare a strategy, negotiate with a customer, write a document, program, build, present, explain or sell depending on the job. Observe their reasoning, their ability to listen, learn and correct an error, and then look at what they produce. France Travail already applies this logic with the MRS. It does not suit every profession, but it reminds us that before rejecting a candidate because one line is missing from a CV, it is sometimes possible to give that person the chance to demonstrate what they can actually do.

Ultimately, the question was never whether degrees are useful. They are. The far more uncomfortable question is how many talented people our companies, administrations and society may have eliminated without even taking the time to test them because they did not possess the right piece of paper. And conversely, how many responsibilities have we entrusted to people while implicitly treating their degree as a guarantee of competence in itself? My own path has taught me to distrust that certainty: I have seen professional doors close because I lacked the expected qualification; I saw a sales job denied to me in the name of a BTS; I gave up applying for a role in a sector I am passionate about because it required Bac+5; and I heard an experienced banking professional tell me that property investments that support me today were doomed to fail. The adviser’s degree was real, his experience was real, and his skills were probably real too. On that occasion, he was wrong.

The examples gathered in these pages do not tell a single story. Claudius is not Faraday, Darwin is not Lincoln, Semmelweis is not François Pinault, and none of them can be used to build a simple rule according to which the outsider, the self-taught person or the non-graduate is necessarily right against the institution. Their common point lies elsewhere: they show how imperfect our selection instruments become when they claim to deliver final verdicts. A degree can inform; a reputation can guide; a first impression can alert; an elite school can select real abilities. But none of these pieces of information excuses us from looking at what a person understands, learns, builds, decides and produces when they finally meet the test of reality.

Perhaps that is what we collectively need to relearn: a degree deserves the respect due to the work required to obtain it, but it does not deserve the infallibility we sometimes attribute to it and that it never promised. A degree validates academic success; only the test of reality validates the relevance of a decision.

Do you think that because your neighbor has a degree, they would necessarily be the person best able to command and choose?

Main sources and factual checks

This list brings together the main sources used to check the numerical data, academic backgrounds and historical examples. The personal experiences reported in the article naturally remain the author’s testimony. Links are provided so readers can retrieve the documents used.

Insee, “Dette et déficit public”, historical series, notably 1980–2012. Source ↗
Insee, “PIB, croissance et déficit public”, public debt 2001–2018. Source ↗
Insee, “Le compte des administrations publiques en 2025”, 29 May 2026, detailed data. Source ↗
Insee, public debt at 117.5% of GDP at the end of Q1 2026, 25 June 2026. Source ↗
Insee, “L’industrie en France depuis 2008 : quelles ruptures ?”, manufacturing employment data since 1980. Source ↗
French Presidency, biography of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Source ↗
French Senate, biography of François Mitterrand. Source ↗
Sciences Po, “Jacques Chirac, le panache et l’ambition”. Source ↗
French Presidency, biography of Nicolas Sarkozy. Source ↗
French Presidency, biography of François Hollande. Source ↗
French Presidency, biography of Emmanuel Macron. Source ↗
Le Monde, background on Emmanuel Macron at Rothschild & Cie and the Nestlé–Pfizer transaction. Source ↗
French Ministry of the Armed Forces, biography of Maurice Gamelin. Source ↗
Fondation Napoléon, biographical material and education of Napoleon Bonaparte. Source ↗
Institut de France, “Chateaubriand, Byron et Pouchkine face à Napoléon”. Source ↗
NASA, biography of Wernher von Braun. Source ↗
Harvard Business School, “Degree Inflation Hurting Bottom Line of U.S. Firms”, analysis of 26 million job postings. Source ↗
World Economic Forum, “Jack Ma Wants Alibaba To Serve 2 Billion Consumers”, Davos 2015. Source ↗
Stanford Graduate School of Business, Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, “Generative AI at Work”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025. Source ↗
Boston Consulting Group, “GenAI Increases Productivity & Expands Capabilities”, experiment on data-science tasks. Source ↗
Insee, “L’essentiel sur… le chômage”, 2025 unemployment by education level. Source ↗
France Travail, Recruitment by Simulation Method (MRS), employer presentation. Source ↗
France Travail, Recruitment by Simulation Method (MRS), candidate presentation. Source ↗
France VAE, official portal: VAE as a third route to certification. Source ↗
Légifrance, order of 3 July 2025 on VAE support and complementary training when skills are missing. Source ↗
Elon Musk, posts of 2–3 February 2020 on recruiting Tesla’s AI team: understanding and coding tests rather than academic pedigree. Source ↗
Elon Musk, 3 February 2020: “Educational background is irrelevant, but all must pass hardcore coding test”. Source ↗
Charles Gave, anecdote about education, intelligence and decision-making, reproduced in a 2018 publication; the article paraphrases it rather than quoting it verbatim. Source ↗
Vie-publique, report reproducing long Insee series of public balances since 1970, used for 1974–1981. Source ↗
Insee, “L’industrie manufacturière de 1970 à 2014”, change in its share of value added. Source ↗
Royal Institution, Michael Faraday archives and biography, including his education, bookbinding apprenticeship and scientific work. Source ↗
MacTutor History of Mathematics, biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, schooling, exam failures and mathematical work. Source ↗
Honda Global, history of Soichiro Honda, leaving school and entering an automotive workshop as an apprentice at fifteen. Source ↗
British Museum, biography of Emperor Claudius, his early exclusion from public life, reign and conquest of Britain. Source ↗
Darwin Online, Charles Darwin’s autobiography, including judgments made about his abilities in youth. Source ↗
World Health Organization, tribute to Ignaz Semmelweis and reminder of the resistance to his work on hand hygiene. Source ↗
Library of Congress, “Young Lincoln”, on roughly eighteen months of formal schooling and self-education. Source ↗
Library of Congress, “Practicing Law”, on Lincoln’s self-directed legal studies and admission to the Illinois bar. Source ↗
Le Monde, “Xavier Niel, le franc-tireur du Net”, on his education and early work in computing and Minitel. Source ↗
Le Monde, biographical material on François Pinault, who said he left school young without a diploma before building his group. Source ↗
Insee, compulsory levies as a share of GDP, annual series 1959–2025, used for 1981, 2017 and 2025. Source ↗