Uber Technologies Inc's (NYSE:UBER) chief Dara Khosrowshahi says Gen Z leaders need two college pillars — "learning all of the… really important basics of engineering" and "marrying that with liberal arts."
What Happened: Speaking to students at Brown University — his 1991 alma mater — he called the double bill an "absolute necessity when you're in a leadership position."
Engineering, he said, taught him "how to solve complex problems," skills that powered a career jump from investment banking to orchestrating Expedia Group Inc's (NASDAQ:EXPE) $1.3 billion buyout from Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) and, ultimately, to the Uber driver seat.
Liberal‑arts coursework, meanwhile, "really taught me to communicate in a compelling way," a talent investors now prize as CEOs front‑facing everything from earnings calls to social‑media storms.
The Brown grad's résumé backs the advice: Expedia's revenue went from $2.1 billion to $8.7 billion under his watch, and Uber's market cap hovers near $141 billion.
For students wondering whether tuition is worth it, Khosrowshahi points to the earning power of hybrid fluency — technical IQ plus storytelling savvy — at a moment when AI competence and human empathy share top billing in the C‑suite.
Why It Matters: While Uber’s CEO believes studying engineering and liberal arts in college was critical to his leadership growth, many other business leaders don’t necessarily agree. Elon Musk, for one, told a conference in 2020 that he thinks “college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning.”
Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and an early Facebook investor, has a complicated relationship with higher education, too. The Stanford University graduate with a philosophy degree and a law degree thinks college is so overrated that he will pay students $100,000 to drop out.