Gwyneth Paltrow has won an Academy Award. She’s launched her own lifestyle brand, starred in dozens of movies and is worth tens of millions of dollars. But all that didn’t qualify her for a job at Yahoo.
According to Sunday’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer didn’t want to hire the popular actress to be a contributing editor at Yahoo Food -- at least in part because she never graduated from college.
“Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food,” the article reads. “According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college.”
Mayer, who earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Stanford, took over Yahoo two years ago. Since then she has struggled to remake the company into the successful tech giant it once was, and some have been critical of her management style.
Paltrow reportedly dropped out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to pursue an acting career.
Of course, a college degree can be quite helpful in landing a job, and college graduates tend to earn a lot more than their peers without a degree. But there are some very successful people without that credential. Both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.
