What Ensures Success: Money or Education?

"Education has become the main provider of individual opportunity in our society. Just as property and money once were the keys to success, education has now become the element that most ensures success in life."

In your opinion, how accurate is the view expressed above? Explain, using reasons and examples based on your own experience, observations, or reading.

Money and property cannot guarantee success but they can definitely help one to reach success. They can help in networking and investing in the right opportunity. However, it is not difficult for a fool to loose his material possessions, to let them go as easily as they come and not use them wisely. 

On the other hand, education can ensure success in a more effective way than money or property can ever do. It is so as education brings in knowledge with itself. Money and property can be lost but knowledge stays forever. If anything it just grows and becomes stronger with experience. This makes people with knowledge valuable and helps them to be recognized in the society for their contribution. To add to this we live in an information age and there is a lot of focus on specialists. This demands deep knowledge. Quality education can ensure that the person has that knowledge. This will be more re-assuring to a prospective employer than knowing that the candidate is very rich. 

I may add that spectacular success is often not the result of either money or education but vision. The biggest example is Microsoft that was founded by a college dropout and not by some academician or a billionaire. Richard Branson's Virgin Group is another point in case. Education and money can at best be tools that help the vision but can never be a substitute for it. A determined person can find opportunities with them or without them. 

Concluding, given all things equal I feel there is only one key to success: vision. However even the best of people may need the opportunity to prove themselves. Once having money and property could help people get that chance. In the changing world of today education has indeed come up as an even stronger factor and can be seen as the main provider of individual opportunity.