Entrepreneurs’ Values Don’t Come with a University Degree
Before getting into this article—and to avoid any misunderstandings—I want to make it clear that I absolutely believe education and university degrees provide value. They are personal achievements and important assets among the resources we bring to our professional lives.
Education matters. It can provide us with financial, strategic, technological, and managerial knowledge; it can expand our networks and give us tools to make better decisions.
However, what I want to explore today is a different question—one that arose from the results of the study on entrepreneurial values I recently conducted with 244 entrepreneurs from 27 countries:
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”
Does having a university degree also determine the values with which a person runs a business?
In other words, is an entrepreneur with a postgraduate degree more disciplined, flexible, resilient, responsible, honest, or service-oriented than someone who became an entrepreneur after completing only secondary education?
The results of my study suggest that, at least in our sample of 244 entrepreneurs, the answer is mostly no.
I cross-analyzed the different variables in the study with the highest level of education attained by the participants. To my surprise—because I admit I expected a different result—I found very few significant differences. Just one, which I’ll discuss later.
Knowing More Does Not Necessarily Mean Valuing Differently
Competencies are one thing: the knowledge and skills we can acquire through education and training. There is no doubt that they make an important difference in the resources we have available to face the decisions required along the entrepreneurial journey.
And I am not referring only to competencies and knowledge related to the specific field in which we start a business, but also to the administrative, managerial, financial, and commercial skills that accompany us throughout the journey, regardless of the industry in which we operate.
Values, however, are something different: the principles and priorities that guide our choices, particularly when we have to decide what matters, what we are willing to sacrifice, and how we want to act.
Those values are not necessarily acquired through formal education. Their foundations are laid much earlier, beginning with the upbringing we receive at home during childhood. They are also reinforced through primary and secondary education. The friends we make, the places where we live, the environment in which we grow up, the people we admire, the experiences we go through, and the extracurricular activities we are exposed to all contribute to shaping our values from a very early age.
Later, our professional experiences also leave their mark. A boss we admire, a company whose culture inspires us, a failure that forces us to reconsider our priorities, or even a decision we regret can lead us to reassess what we consider important. Values are not completely fixed elements of our personality.
Of course, university education, in addition to technical knowledge, also brings its own share of values education. It exposes us to new people, ideas, realities, and ways of understanding the world, which may either align or conflict with the values we have already internalized. But that experience is necessarily built on a foundation that began taking shape long before we arrived at university.
And that creates nuances.
A university can teach us how to calculate the profitability of a decision. However, it is much harder for it to teach us what we are willing to do—or sacrifice—to achieve it.
It can teach us negotiation techniques, but it will not necessarily determine how honest we will be when we possess information the other party does not have. It can teach us how to design a strategy for dealing with a crisis, but the way we react emotionally to adversity will also depend on personal resources we have been building throughout our lives.
Education can expand what an entrepreneur knows how to do, but it does not necessarily change the values from which they choose to do it.
What the Data Tells Us
In the study I conducted, I identified five main dimensions that group entrepreneurs’ values:
Relational Integrity: how you relate to others in your business.
Adaptive Management: how you organize your resources to achieve your goals.
Personal Responsibility: how you take ownership of your role in your results.
Psychological Strength: how you deal with problems.
Intrinsic Motivation: how you stay motivated to keep moving forward.
I compared the results across four groups according to their level of education: secondary education, technical or technological education, university education, and postgraduate education. The averages are surprisingly similar across four of these five dimensions. It is almost a flat line.
The number of years of formal education may vary considerably. Yet the importance given to aspects such as honesty and service barely changes. Statistically, the same is true for Adaptive Management, Psychological Strength, and Personal Responsibility.
This does not mean that all entrepreneurs have the same values or that education is irrelevant. Naturally, there are individual differences within each group. What is interesting is that when we grouped participants according to their level of education, having more or fewer years of formal education was not a variable that significantly differentiated four of the five value dimensions studied.
In other words, entrepreneurs with postgraduate degrees were not, simply by virtue of having those degrees, significantly more resilient, responsible, or principled than those with secondary, technical, or university education.
The Exception: Intrinsic Motivation
The only dimension in which I found statistically significant differences among the four groups was Intrinsic Motivation.
But even here, the result deserves to be examined carefully.
We did not find a perfect upward trend in which more education = more intrinsic motivation. When we subsequently analyzed where the difference occurred, it was statistically significant specifically between the group with secondary education and the group with university education.
Entrepreneurs with university education showed higher Intrinsic Motivation than those whose highest level of education was secondary school. The groups with technical or technological education and postgraduate education also had higher averages than the secondary education group, but those differences did not reach statistical significance in the comparisons between groups.
What does this result mean?
Does it suggest that going through higher education may strengthen certain internal sources of motivation? Could the educational experience broaden our aspirations, interests, or perceptions of our own possibilities? Or could the opposite be true—that people with certain motivational profiles are also more likely to continue their education?
We cannot know from these data.
And that distinction is important. Finding an association does not mean we have found its cause. But the result does open an interesting avenue for further research into the relationship between education and motivation among people who choose to become entrepreneurs.
The Most Provocative Result: I Found No Differences in Achievement Either
There is another result that I find particularly interesting. In addition to values, the study collected information about the level of achievement participants perceived they had attained with their businesses. Once again, I found no statistically significant differences according to educational level.
This does not mean that education does not contribute to an entrepreneur’s success. It would be incorrect to draw that conclusion from these data. Education can provide tools, knowledge, contacts, and opportunities that may prove decisive in many circumstances.
What my results indicate is something more specific: in this sample, educational level did not produce statistically significant differences in the level of achievement reported by the entrepreneurs.
An academic degree can change the tools we bring to entrepreneurship. It can enable us to solve certain problems more effectively or even open doors that might otherwise be more difficult to access. But in this study, it did not emerge as a variable that clearly separated those who perceived themselves as having achieved more from those who perceived themselves as having achieved less.
And this brings us back to the central question of the article.
If formal education does not explain major differences in the values from which we approach entrepreneurship, what might?
We Develop Professionally, but We Also Develop as People
Family, school, culture, professional experiences, role models, successes, failures, personal relationships, difficult circumstances, good decisions, and bad ones… Many experiences can contribute to shaping and modifying our values throughout our lives.
We train ourselves to run businesses, but we also arrive at them already shaped, to a large extent, as people. And when we become entrepreneurs, both forms of development walk through the door together.
We bring our technical and professional knowledge, but also the way we react when something goes wrong. We bring what we have learned about finance, marketing, or strategy, but also the way we relate to an employee, a customer, or a business partner. We bring our academic credentials, but also our discipline, our honesty, our willingness to take responsibility, and the deeper reasons that drive us to keep going when things get difficult.
Of course, values can evolve. We can question them, reinforce them, and develop behaviors that are more consistent with them. But an MBA does not automatically transform the honesty, resilience, responsibility, or service orientation of the person who earns it.
Entrepreneurship requires preparation. The more complex the business, the more necessary certain technical, financial, or strategic competencies may become. But the results of my study suggest that there is also another kind of preparation—one that does not necessarily come with a diploma: the kind that determines how we respond to adversity, how we treat others, how much responsibility we take for our decisions, and what drives us to keep moving forward.
Perhaps the question is not only what a person needs to learn to become a better entrepreneur, but also which values they need to develop to become the entrepreneur they want to be.
If you would like to discover your current values profile as an entrepreneur and receive recommendations on how to strengthen the areas that are less developed, I invite you to take the EVE (Entrepreneurial Values Assessment), which I developed based on the results of this study.
It takes approximately five minutes and is completely free. You can find it at the following link.
If you would like to discover your current values profile as an entrepreneur and receive recommendations on how to strengthen the areas that are less developed, I invite you to take the EVE (Entrepreneurial Values Assessment), which I developed based on the results of this study.
It takes approximately five minutes and is completely free. You can find it at the following link.
