LinkedIn Opens a Business School—No Degree Required

By Grace Kim

LinkedIn enrolled 30 of its own employees in a free 14-week program in September that trains workers to become their own bosses—and the company plans to take it public. The Academy of Economic Opportunity, launched quietly by the Microsoft-owned professional network, meets three times a week and teaches students how to handle PR crises, make hiring decisions, and pitch investors through simulations, according to a company spokesperson. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer, told Fortune that one of the pilot cohort's next sessions covers building an app from scratch.

The timing isn't accidental. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, well below economists' expectations of 90,000. More than a quarter of unemployed Americans—27.1%—have been out of work for six months or longer. As AI reshapes the skills employers demand and casts uncertainty over traditional career paths, LinkedIn is betting more workers will look beyond conventional jobs.

The numbers back that bet. Srinivasan wrote in an Oct. 9 LinkedIn post that the share of people putting "Founder" in their profiles rose nearly 23% over the past year.

"The program is focused on helping them learn how to build a business. Not because we believe everyone should become an entrepreneur, but because people are trying new ways to find economic independence in an uncertain world," Srinivasan wrote.

Why are workers rushing to start businesses?

Independent surveys point the same direction. Intuit QuickBooks surveyed 3,000 American adults and found a third planned to start a business or side hustle this year, up from 17% a year earlier. Gusto, the payroll company, surveyed 1,051 new business owners last year and found 51% cited building financial stability or a future asset as their motivation, up from 42% in 2024.

For now, the Academy is an internal pilot. Srinivasan wants to scale it internationally at an affordable price for workers outside LinkedIn, and wrote that "figuring this out is integral" to the company's mission. LinkedIn has not announced when public enrollment opens or what it will charge.

"There is not a current prerequisite for who can participate in this program," he told Fortune. "We're building an Academy that can serve people at any stage in their career and across industries and careers."

What does the degree-free model look like?

LinkedIn isn't alone in betting against traditional credentials. Harvard Business School launched a $699 startup boot camp that lets entrepreneurs practice investor pitches, sales calls, and board meetings with AI versions of Harvard professors—no degree attached. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz put $42 million into the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a college alternative that will teach 50 students in San Francisco next year, covering topics like AI inference engineering with guest speakers including Nvidia's Jensen Huang. It also awards no degrees.

LinkedIn's version ties directly to its own data. The company's 2026 labor market report showed U.S. job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70% year over year. Srinivasan wrote that AI makes it easier for employers to evaluate candidates' actual work—portfolios, code, products they've built—rather than using college degrees as "shorthand for talent."

"We've designed our program so students leave with real evidence of what they can do, not a degree," he wrote.

Does dropping degrees actually open jobs?

Employers haven't fully abandoned credentials, and the data is sobering. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that removing degree requirements increased the share of workers hired without bachelor's degrees by about 3.5 percentage points across the 11,300 roles analyzed. But because so few employers actually dropped those requirements, the researchers estimated the shift created opportunities for just 97,000 workers a year—out of 77 million annual hires.

"For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires," the authors wrote.

That gap between rhetoric and hiring reality is the market LinkedIn is moving into: if credentials keep losing signaling power, the company that runs the world's largest professional profiles has a strong incentive to sell the replacement.