Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and CEO of the AI startup World Labs, is known as the “Godmother of AI” for her work building a large-scale database of labeled images, which changed the way computers comprehend digital images and videos.

Li, also the founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, said she values candidates’ experience and relationship with AI tools more than their educational background.

“When we interview a software engineer, I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now,” Li said of the talent search process for her AI startup in an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show this week.

“Now, it’s more about what have you learned, what tools do you use, how quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools — and a lot of these are AI tools,” she added. “What’s your mindset toward using these tools matter more to me.”

When discussing the broader impacts of AI on education and the labor market, Li said assessing qualified workers used to rely on which school job candidates graduated from and the degree they earned. But “that will be changing with AI being at the fingertip of so many people,” she said.

For her own talent acquisition, Li added that she wouldn’t hire software engineers who don’t “embrace AI collaborative software tools.” She explained this requirement is not because she believes AI software tools are perfect, but because she believes they show a person’s ability to grow with fast-moving technologies and them being able to use AI to their own benefit.

Li’s view of AI skills and their value proposition compared to college degrees echoes a similar sentiment from other leaders in the industry.

In October, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, said skills outweigh a flashy college degree when hiring for Meta—but he noted that entry-level roles at his company still require a bachelor’s.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has even challenged the value of a college education by recently launching a four-year paid internship for young entrepreneurs not enrolled in college to instead learn by doing and to “skip the debt, skip the indoctrination.” 

As more tech leaders look for AI-fluent candidates, Li looks for candidates that can help realize her company’s mission.

World Labs aims to build AI that can process and replicate the three-dimensional world through spatial reasoning—a feat that would revolutionize the tech all over again. Li bootstrapped the startup into a more than $1 billion valuation after only four months, according to the Financial Times.

As she works towards the next AI breakthrough, Li said during the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in 2024 that AI could change the world, and that “everyone who cares” should have a place in the technological shift.

“It’s so important that people from all backgrounds feel they have a role,” Li said.

The ripple effect of those strains is already showing in campus accessibility offices,  where diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and depression are rising—and so are requests for extended time on coursework.

At Harvard, 21% of undergraduates received disability accommodations last year, an increase of more than 15% over the past decade, according to data published by the National Center for Education Statistics analyzed by the Harvard Crimson. Top schools like Brown, Cornell, and Yale reported similar numbers, roughly in line with national trends. But the increase is more pronounced at other institutions: 34% of students at UMass Amherst and 38% at Stanford are registered as disabled, according to The Atlantic. 

In the 2011-12 school year, the number of undergraduates with a disability was about 11%, based on U.S. Department of Education data—highlighting just how much of a dramatic shift this phenomenon has become.

One founder says students are trying to get a leg up in today’s tough job market

Experts note that many students have medical conditions that merit accommodations, and the increase is in part linked to broader access to mental-health care and reduced stigma around seeking support.

The rise has nonetheless drawn national attention, with some critics arguing that students are abusing the system to secure lighter workloads or an edge in hypercompetitive classrooms.

Derek Thompson, author of the recent bestseller Abundance called the numbers “mind-boggling,” arguing that colleges may be overcorrecting after years of underrecognizing disability. 

“America used to stigmatize disability too severely,” he wrote on X. “Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.”

Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder, expressed similar concerns, suggesting some families are seeking diagnosis just to give students “a leg up.”

After all, the post-graduation job hunt has tightened into a numbers game few can win.

In 2023 and 2024, more than 1.2 million applications were submitted for just under 17,000 open graduate roles in the U.K., according to the Institute of Student Employers. And in the U.S., lawmakers warn the funnel is narrowing further. Sen. Mark Warner has warned that joblessness among recent graduates could hit 25% in the next two to three years, as AI reshapes entry-level work.

But in reality, there is no evidence of widespread misuse, and not all students registered with a disability receive accommodation in every class. Still, the scale of requests has raised questions among some faculty members about how accommodations intersect with academic expectations.

Faculty grapple with balancing support of students and avoidance of stigma

For instructors, the rise in accommodations can be challenging to navigate. Many say they want to support students with legitimate needs but worry that requesting clarification could be seen as insensitive or ableist.

One adjunct professor, posting to Reddit, said the number of students with accommodations has “increased exponentially” across the three schools where they teach.

“I had an increasingly large number of students at this particular school be given the accommodation to turn work in 48 hours late, and I got tired of constantly having to extend due dates for just them,” the professor wrote, noting that they themselves have ADHD and autism.

“The students I’ve had on this accommodation would use it pretty much every week since they were perpetually behind.”

Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, expressed a related concern to the Harvard Crimson.

“The whole system of accommodations for things other than physical disabilities just seems badly mismatched with the educational purposes that students and faculty share,” he said.

However, Katy Washington, CEO of the Association of Higher Education and Disability, argued that students seeking accommodations are not “unfair burdens” on professors, and rather than questioning whether too many students qualify—which can perpetuate stereotypes—the focus should be on designing assessments that are inclusive for all learners.

“For decades, students with invisible disabilities were denied support because their struggles were dismissed as laziness or lack of effort,” Washington wrote in a letter to her organization’s members, shared with Fortune. “The rise in accommodations reflects a cultural shift toward acknowledging mental health, not a decline in academic integrity.”

A shifting skill-based job market could leave some students unprepared

For students, the increase in accommodations coincides with employers rethinking what actually matters in hiring. Fewer companies are prioritizing degrees, and more are evaluating on what they can do—through portfolio, projects, and real-world problem-solving.

Less than half of U.S. professionals at the director-level and above say a university degree is essential for getting ahead, according to LinkedIn. Moreover, nearly 1 in 5 job postings on the platform do not require a degree.

That shift could complicate the picture for students who’ve grown accustomed to extended deadlines or extra time. Whether a small number of students are abusing the system, workplace assessments typically don’t come with accommodations—and performance is often judged on speed, accuracy, and consistency.  Some Gen Zers have already faced the pink slip just months into the start of their career due to employers being unimpressed with some of their soft skills, like organization.

In other words: even as college becomes more flexible, the job market is moving in the opposite direction.

Today, Hinge has more than 30 million users, with a date being set up every two seconds. But in 2011, when it launched, McLeod was just a young Harvard Business School student when he came up with the idea for the app “designed to be deleted.” And the fresh-faced, 20-something entrepreneur was so desperate for people to sign up to his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.

At the time, online dating largely took place on desktops and required real effort. The idea of swiping to find the love of your life (or a one-night stand) on your mobile phone seemed alien.

So convincing fellow students (who had no shortage of opportunities to meet people in class, dorms, and parties) to sign up to Hinge was challenging, McLeod tells Fortune.

“I remember the days of running around the college library in Washington, D.C., at this college, Georgetown, and bribing kids with KitKats to come try my app,” he laughs. “We would get dozens of users a day—maybe, if that.” 

Financing Hinge also required a lot of scrappiness, with McLeod recalling he had to “beg and borrow a lot” to get the app off the ground.

“I was out there networking and talking to as many people as I could and taking money from anyone who would give it to me. That’s just what it takes sometimes,” he says. “I was collecting—me—literally like, $5,000 checks and $10,000 checks to come and start Hinge.”

Hinge CEO’s big break came from a McKinsey job offer

These days, it’s hard enough landing an internship while studying—let alone walking straight into a full-time job right after graduating. But for McLeod, that wasn’t the case: He hadn’t even finished his second year of business school when McKinsey offered him a spot on its coveted grad scheme. 

A career in consulting would have set McLeod on a path to a six-figure salary, with Glassdoor estimating that the average consultant earns between $173,000 to $233,000 a year. McLeod’s sign-up bonus alone was $12,000.

It turned out to be the big break he needed—to finally get Hinge off the ground.

“I was able to keep putting off my offer for like a couple of years,” he recalls while adding that he “borrowed” the money to build his app.

“Once Hinge started to become successful and they saw I was the founder of it, they were like, ‘You’re probably not coming to be an analyst here are you?’ And, of course, by that time I had to pay it back.”

Why did McLeod choose the highly risky path of entrepreneurship when he could have had a comfortable career at McKinsey?

“I turned down my offer and started to work on Hinge, really because I was just so passionate about the idea. Once I started thinking about it, it was hard for me to stop. I really knew this was what I was meant to work on.”

Of course, it paid off: By 2015, Hinge had raised $26.35 million and had an estimated valuation of $75.5 million, before Match Group bought the company off McLeod for an undisclosed amount. 

The founder treated himself and his family to a nearly $13 million apartment in New York soon after. Meanwhile, Hinge brought in $396 million in 2023, last year and an estimated $550 million last year.

Advice for entrepreneurial Gen Z grads

Like McLeod, young people today aren’t dreaming of holding down a 9-to-5 gig after college or climbing the corporate ladder. Research consistently shows they want to be their own boss.

And they’re already making those dreams a reality: In fact, the second fastest-growing job title among Gen Z grads right now is “founder,” according to LinkedIn.

His advice for young entrepreneurs? “You have to be hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time—that’s how you create something big and successful.”

“Some people who are like too in the hopelessly idealistic camp, dream, but never make something a reality, and people who are too in the ruthlessly practical camp do things but nothing that big or game-changing,” McLeod explains.

Instead, he says successful founders like himself constantly balance the two: Essentially dream big, but “pay attention to the very practical day-to-day realities in order to make that come to life.”

Meanwhile, to Gen Zers who don’t know what they want to do career-wise after school, his advice is to stop overthinking it—just give work a go, whether that’s starting your own business or dipping your toes in the rat race.

“I think people who get too self-involved in, like, what’s my career going to be? What am I going to do? They miss the opportunity to cultivate that passion, that interest for something out there in the world,” he says.

“I would never have figured out what I wanted if I just sat around like meditating about it. I had to work a summer in healthcare and realize that’s not it. I worked on a few other startup ideas before Hinge came to me and it was a lot of figuring out what I didn’t like or what didn’t resonate with me. But each time, I got a little bit smarter and a little bit closer.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on September 22, 2024.