THE COLLEGE CONUNDRUM
Bill Gates is a college dropout worth $95 billion. Mark
Zuckerberg, who also didn’t graduate, is worth just under $70 billion. But is
dropping out of college a good idea?
According to a study,
one in eight of the 400 richest billionaires in the US, are college dropouts.
They came to this conclusion by looking at the 362 billionaires with publicly
available education information; 44 were dropouts.
Quite a few wildly successful entrepreneurs managed
to hit it big without a college degree, like Dell founder Michael Dell, Apple
cofounder Steve Jobs, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, to name a few.
From that list, it seems like having the guts to
eschew the typical path of a college education, and the average debt of $17,126
per graduate, coincides with hitting it big in the business world.
Investor Peter Thiel apparently agrees, having once
said at a student gathering that “college can be good for learning about what’s
been done before, but it can also discourage you from doing something new.”
Not all rosy
However, experts
really don’t recommend you drop out of college.
“There are always going to be the Jay-Zs of the
world. There’s going to be the Kobe Bryants. There’s going to be the Mark
Zuckerbergs, the people that drop out of college,” Scott Galloway, professor of
marketing at NYU Stern says. “You should assume you’re not that person and go
to college.”
While quite a few successful entrepreneurs and
billionaires did drop out, the vast majority have degrees.
Researchers Jonathan Wai and Heiner Rindermann found
that 94 per cent of US leaders, including top journalists, politicians, and
CEOs, attended college. Half of them attended what they defined as an “elite
school,” compared to 2-5 per cent of the overall US population.
businessinsider.in
ET 7NOV18
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