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Or maybe these "dropouts" were so smart and business apt that the educational system was holding them back. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Or maybe these "dropouts" were so smart and business apt that the educational system was holding them back. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html I have the luck of having IQ in the low 150s, I have barely had the need to to ever study. I can make up all the formulas, proof and laws needed for math, physics,chemistry on the fly. And these guys - they have way more raw brainpower than me, and some of them dumb luck. I suppose the Bill Gates was even more bored back in the time without lolcats to waste his time on. So unless you can read 500 pages of detailed excel spec, understand and follow the IDispatch and COM while keeping the whole of the previous versions of excel quirks in your head in a few hours - don't drop out. Of course the question why college is so expensive, while in the rest of the world is affordable is another thing.

kelnos 14y ago
Agreed. Most articles that try to make the argument "these great successes dropped out of college, so college is superfluous" fail to recognize that these great successes are unusual people. Whether that means they were much smarter than their peers, were more tenacious or hard-working, or just ended up at the right place at the right time, these stories are not common. By all means, if you're a Gates, Zuckerburg, Carmack, Ford... drop out of college and do your own thing. But for every one of those, there are scores of people who would fail hard, to their extreme detriment, if they followed that path.