Zoho Corp Founder Sridhar Vembu said on Wednesday that a transformative shift in the relationship between education, youth empowerment, and employment, particularly focusing on trends emerging in the United States has started. He even urged India to take a note of it.
Quoting a post on X (formerly Twitter), Vembu praised Palantir's 2025 Meritocracy Fellows program, which recruited 22 high school graduates out of 500 applicants for paid tech roles and Western civilisation seminars, bypassing traditional college paths amid rising US tuition costs averaging $36,000 annually.
In a post on X, he wrote, "Smart American students now skip going to college and forward-thinking employers are enabling them. This is going to be a profound cultural shift."
He argued that bypassing traditional college education allows young men and women to avoid the burden of heavy debt while gaining real-world skills, which he terms "the real ‘youth power’."
This new trend, according to Vembu, not only changes individual futures but has the potential to reshape culture and politics.
He urged educated Indian parents and high schoolers, as well as leading companies to pay attention.
Vembu shared an internal policy that defies conventional norms of hiring. "At Zoho, no job requires a college degree and if some manager posts a job that requires a degree, they get a polite message from HR to remove the degree requirement!," he said.
Zoho has enforced a no-degree hiring policy since at least 2013, automatically removing college requirements from job postings, enabling a Tenkasi technical team with a median age of 19 to deliver high-energy contributions that challenge even senior leaders.
Vembu then mentioned his young technical team in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu. He wrote, "In Tenkasi, I closely work with a technical team whose median age is 19. Their energy and can-do spirit is infectious. I have to work hard to keep up with them!"
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