"The United States has the highest dropout rate of any developed country for kids who start a higher-ed program"
that worked out pretty well for him.
that worked out pretty well for him.
Or heck, it's not even that uncommon for successful people as long as we're not talking about something like lawyers (TV doesn't enter the equation, Suits.).
I guess what I'm trying to say is, Bill Gates is an outlier in a heck of a lot more than education. Maybe it's time to consider that "being successful" has little to do with formal education and more to do with skills learned later in life. Which implies that being successful at a young age requires those skills to come earlier (which they are less likely to if you spend most of your time in college).
Reference?
Maybe it's time to consider that "being successful" currently has little to do with formal education or with skills, but instead has more to do with family money.
Consider a list of recent, spectacularly successful entrepeneurs -- Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and others. Most of them are not at all reliant on inherited wealth, often quite the contrary. I think the "family money" idea doesn't stand up to scrutiny, indeed in my experience those born to wealth don't accomplish much at all.
Richard Branson: born the son of a barrister and grandson of a knighted member of the High Court. Also attended an English public school. Exceptional for not attending university.
Steve Jobs: son of a mechanic/carpenter (finally someone blue-collar!) and... oh no wait, an accountant who worked as a payroll clerk at one of the first Silicon Valley high-tech companies. Attended an expensive private college.
Bill Gates: son of lawyers, got Microsoft's first OS contract for MS-DOS through his mother's connections to the board of IBM. Attended the University of Washington.
Being merely well-off to start with is also family money.
Sorry, no. Steve Jobs was an orphan.
> Attended an expensive private college.
Dropped out of Reed College.
> Richard Branson: born the son of a barrister and grandson of a knighted member of the High Court.
These are genetic references, not financial ones. Genetics isn't the issue under discussion.
You managed to overlook the fact that none of the examples had inherited money at the time of their greatest success. Attending an exclusive school is certainly no assurance of later success, often the contrary, and can't be equated with the classic case of inheriting family money.
> Being merely well-off to start with is also family money.
That twists the earlier premise so far as to render it meaningless. And how can the orphan Steve Jobs be described as "well-off to start with"?
Not so, and certainly not so in the case of Steve Jobs, an orphan. Each of the stories is of someone who certainly wouldn't have succeeded to the degree they did without personal qualities that transcended their origins, rather than family wealth, the original argument. Richard Branson didn't build his present empire by buying it with his family's money -- he created it out of his wits. Elon Musk is another story of the same kind -- it's hyperbolic to argue that he became successful because of inherited wealth as opposed to personal ingenuity and drive.
> Even the lowest of them started within the professional upper-middle class (roughly where you and I probably are), which is already most of the way up the class scale, in percentile terms.
But this isn't about class -- it might be about genetics, and it certainly isn't about family money, the original offered explanation. For these stories, class and family background are correlations, not causes.
What we're talking about here are stories of exceptional success with no obvious cause apart from personal drive and ingenuity. They can't be dismissed as resulting from high birth or privilege -- it would be more consistent with logic to examine them on their self-evident merits.
It's too facile (and clearly somewhat tempting) to argue that race, or old-boy networking, played a part. Most of these people (some of whom I have met) are so driven that the idea of joining a club of rich white guys would seem like torture. Some will argue that they're all Aspies anyway, thus very unlikely to be joiners of anything.
> They won the exploding-market lottery by being in the right place and executing well?
That makes more sense -- the role of blind chance. When I wrote Apple Writer for the Apple II in 1979, at the time I didn't fully appreciate the vacuum in which I was working, and how my program would seem more remarkable than it was, simply by being the only one.
This wasn't businees-side jobs, this was the tech industry, all around the country (I was willing to relocate). Being a college dropout, no matter what the reason and to a certain degree, no matter your skills, still hurts your employability in the US.