Source: Fortune
Summary
Valerie Capers Workman, former VP of people at Tesla, contradicts her former boss Elon Musk’s views on higher education, saying that a degree is more valuable today than ever. She argues that skills developed through education, such as reasoning, questioning, and leading with humanity, are precisely what artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Workman advises graduates to pair their degree with AI fluency and learn prompt engineering and asking great questions to succeed in the job market.
Our Reading
The strategy enters a familiar phase.
Valerie Capers Workman’s optimism about degrees comes at a time when landing a job right out of college has become significantly harder. Despite the anti-college rhetoric from Silicon Valley, total postsecondary enrollment in the United States grew 1.0% in fall 2025. Workman’s advice to graduates is to pair their degree with something their predecessors never had to learn: AI fluency. The graduates who win this decade will not be the ones with the best answers, but the ones with the best questions.
The numbers tell one story, but the noise tells another.
Author: Evan Null
