I couldn't agree more with your conclusions about the reverse-signaling involved in academic degrees. My father used to say that BS actually meant "Bullshit", MS meant "More of the Same" and PhD meant "Piled higher and deeper."
Harvard voted against offering Nabokov an associate professorship in Russian Literature after one of the incumbent professors asked the committee, "Do we really want an elephant teaching zoology?"
The greatest Shakespeare scholar, whose books I have but whose name escapes me, never earned a PhD. When asked by a student why he didn't just go ahead, submit his next book as his thesis, and get his Doctorate, he asked, "And who would examine me?"
Let's face it, especially these days, a college degree increasingly signals its owner to be a mid-wit.
God loves midwits, too. And there is a place for midwits, cubicle jockeys, timeservers, jobsworths, office hacks and the like - a world full of profound genius pioneer visionaries wouldn't last for long, although it might be interesting for a while.
Yes, the problem with midwits though is that because they serve bureauocracies so well, tending towards meticulous rule following and easily led by ideology, they are often elevated past thier ability and then begin mucking things up. Covid is a great example. If they stayed cubicle jockeys, timeservers and jobsworths it would be fine. Currently, they are waaaay over-represented in high levels of government, NGO's and education.
But eventually those institutions will face unexpected challenges and start to fail if there are only midwits. Then you have the pernicious effect of destructive and bogus ideologies.
Well, I'm not sure it's useful to conflate those of "merely average" intellect (God forbid!) with those who are simply self-serving, lazy, and/or easily manipulated.
Yes, that's supposed to be some sort of insult, being of "average" intellect and capacity. Everyone is supposed to be far above average, but I'm not really sure how that would work on a practical level, much less a mathematical one.
Mathematically, if there is one guy extremely below average, then just about everyone can be above average. It's harder to get almost everyone above the median.
But what on earth would be the satisfaction in that? All those intellectual heavyweights feeling superior to a precious few? No, the masses must be inferior.
The other development I see is that the economic aspect of a four year degree has come to be emphasized at the expense of academics or learning. Why would anybody study Sanskrit at an elite university? The cost-benefit ratio makes such an endeavor tantamount to financial suicide.
Is the purpose of college to earn a good living or to learn how to lead a good life? If it's the former majoring in business, engineering, etc. on the way to a law degree or MBA is the way to go. If it's the latter time spent in the library reading poetry or listening to jazz might be more productive. Is there any question that in the modern university the balance has been tilted overwhelmingly in favor of career and profession? That's why humanities departments across the country are going bankrupt even as college enrollment has climbed.
And there's one final, even more pernicious effect: college as professional finishing school encourages conformity and acceptance of authority. Keep your head down, your nose clean, study hard for the test, pursue the right extracurriculars: that's the pathway to acceptance at a good school. I recommend _Excellent Sheep_ by William Deresiewicz as an exploration of this topic.
Humanities are essentially being discredited and wrecked at many institutions now, so really, higher education is culturally an enforcement of compliance
Simple solution - do what most European countries do (and Britain did before Thatcher) and make higher education free. People are much more likely to study something obscure that they're passionate about if they aren't going to be facing a ton of student debt
HIgher ed was free and still is (mostly) free or low cost in European countries. But only about a quarter or less of high school graduates are qualified to go on to higher ed. If we did that here (that is, return to the 1970s or 80s), it would be a revolution. And none of those European schools are burdened with the gigantic administrative bureaucracy that ours have acquired in the last 30 years. There are no offices of student services or DEI etc.
This is one of the fatal problems with all these proposals to make this or that "free" -- it's not free, someone has to pay for it, and we have a dismal record of containing costs in academia, as well as in health care.
Another difference is that, european universities are pretty slack, but at the same time, you don't get five of six years in university to find yourself, change majors a few times, come back after a few years, etc..
Since the State is paying for it, you get your four years or whatever and then move.
After my third time teaching at Princeton (2000, 2002, 2006), I asked the relevant person, a sympathetic professor who had written fulsome blurb for my ‘The Dustbin of History’ in 1995, if I could come back on a regukar basis one semester a year, as I’d been doing—I’m a Californian and had no interest in moving permanently to the east. He said really couldn’t be considered because I didn’t have a Ph.d. I had dropped out of graduate school at Cal in 1972.
I've been waiting all my life for your article about dropouts. I am a two-time dropout myself so I relate deeply to every aspect of your piece. What college meant to me was: showing everyone how much you can tolerate of conformity and professorial inadequacy while being expected to find truth and meaning in the mess they call education. I am therefore an autodidact and a nobody today. BUT, that is okay and it is a safe and quality way of life and being that rewards itself mightily as someone like me goes about a real education of life and learning.
Being an autodidact is fine, which is what I am as well, but people learn the most when learning with others from those who really know and love what they are teaching.
And for some reason I’m reminded of my first practical Filmmaking course at NYU. At first everybody pussyfooted around critiquing others’ works. Until the guy who was driving a cab to pay his way through, “bitter” Ed D_______ had no time for dilettantes on daddy’s dime. After he spoke truth, everyone got cut down as appropriate.
Do people learn more when learning with others? I always found the pace too slow while the dimwits around me struggled to catch up. As for those teachers who really know and love what they are teaching, they are rarer than hen's teeth. I have three degrees in different fields, music performance, biochemistry and veterinary science and I have rarely encountered such a teacher.
Maybe I was just lucky with my teachers. While it is frustrating to have slow fellow students, I find that many people have insights or at least views different enough that I find valuable. It is just difficult to pull it out of them. Also, there are subjects that I have trouble with which makes me more accepting of the slowpokes.
Brilliant essay. But, just as an aside, Bill Gates was the scion of one of Seattle's power-families. His father was a big-time attorney, mom was politically powerful and sat on the board of the UofW. And Bill sold IBM n operating system without ctually having one--instead, went down the street and bought the OP from a developer who wouldn't meet with IBM...a modern legend.
Essentially, this means Bill Gates didn’t invent or develop anything - just invested in shoe leather. Dude was born on third base and assumed he’d hit a triple
He was chairman and CEO of Microsoft which is still one of the biggest companies and employers, he designed and developed the first Basic interpreter for the first microcomputer (Altair). Many children of lawyers and university administrators amount to nothing (born on third base and get tagged out?), Gates work created many times more wealth for others (myself included) than for himself.
Gates saw the big business opportunity and grabbed it, hiring others better than he at programming. Technical skills = OK, business acumen = stellar.
Isn't this also true of Elon Musk? He's invented nothing major, but managed to get in charge, not at the beginning, but early-ish, after the main technical inventions and just when the opportunities for the business use cases were ripe.
A friend of a friend was supposedly working at M$ in the early days and was reviewing some of their code. He exclaimed out loud "Who wrote this piece of shit?" Then he looked up and saw Bill Gates staring at him.
I'm not saying that Gates was undeserving of success but his technical skills have long been an object of techie lore.
My husband dropped out of college (a state school, nowhere fancy) after 3 years. He isn’t famous or a millionaire, but he certainly has a lot more intellectual ability and curiosity than many (most?) of his colleagues who do have degrees. Based on the work he does, he ought to be going places, but there is a ceiling of how far he can promote without a degree (which is honestly ok with me).
On the other hand I have 3 degrees (2 bachelors and 1 masters, also from a state school) and stay at home with the kids.
Neither of us have regrets, because we wouldn’t be where we are if we had made different choices, but I have a feeling we won’t be encouraging our kids to go to college.
An old friend of mine is a multimillionaire high school dropout autodidact computer genius and professional weirdo.
Of course, my friend also was the kind of professional weirdo who had a patent portfolio at the time he got kicked out of high school and is also the sort who would not do well in prison.
How many Nobel Prize winners in Physics dropped out? You can name a few, but there aren't any from the last 50 years. Likewise Chemistry and Economics.
Your examples are from writing, music, and business. Bill Gates was a genius businessman. He is merely a good programmer, and probably a mediocre Computer Scientist. Likewise with Mark Zuckerberg. None of the CEOs of successful Silicon Valley companies I know of were great at being engineers, though it helps a lot to know something about engineering.
The other thing I notice is that your list of dropouts describes people who dropped out to do something specific and particular that they had a passion for. Start a band, start a company, write novels. That passion is a lot more important than going to classes you don't care about.
(Side note: I had very few classes in college that I didn't care about. But enough about me.)
I have never been a guy who wanted - as his primary goal - to make a lot of money. I wanted to be able to solve cool problems and make cool things. If someone is focused on making lots of money, and they have some ability, then they probably will make a lot of money, and a college degree won't matter.
I could not read music when I applied to be a music major.
I made a deal with the music dean that if I was not at least a B in all my music classes, I would quit and change majors, no hassles.
I maintained a 4 in all my classes.
Upon transferring to ADSU I was put into an ongoing class that was being put together by two professors, a Dr. Fletcher, and Ronald LoPresti. I was an experiment in whether their ideas could be mainstreamed onto someone who was not a prodigy in music.
I maintained a 4.0.
I then won the first (and only) Arizona Composer Competition with first AND second place compositions.
At that point, the tenured Dr Fletcher became my worst enemy and described my music as "gay" and "unmasculine" (this was 1970, so not the same as today),and tried to have me moved to a lower orchestration level since, after hearing my award-winning music, he could see that I sucked at composition.
No one at the uni would help me, or call this rabid POS.
I left music school and composition.
I have recently, at age 75, begun composing again.
I have been quite successful in most all that I have done.
I have met many Harvard, Yale, and Stanford graduates through my career as a professional artist and creative director for my own ad agency.
I wouldn't give them an upper seat at all based on their education. Most of them were kinda, well, dumb.
Harvard had its day.
It blew it a long time ago, we are just seeing the last breaths.
But, then, today the AP let us know that plagiarism is a right wing weapon against those people too stupid to write their own stupid shit.
Plagiarism is a right wing weapon.
So it is OK now to plagiarize if you are not weaponizing it?
Hey, does that work for copyright violations? Is that "right wing" too?
The madness of arrogance mixed with the self-awareness of pond scum is breathtaking.
The problem with college now is that it's schizophrenic in terms of purpose. Is it there to teach people about Camus and quantum physics? Or is it a glorified finishing school that puts the final stamp of approval on a white collar professional?
If it's the latter then as a simple matter of arithmetic tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars are justified. After all, that money will be made back over the course of a lifetime of work. The problem is that approach drives income inequality as college increasingly becomes the province of the haves while the have-nots can't muster the resources to attend.
Actually, it is not earned back any longer. It was once, if you went to college before the 1990s. For a modest charge in tuition, you enhanced your life income prospects quite a bit. The cost was moderate and up-front. It made sense for the 25-30% of high school graduates who could make the academic grade.
Since the 1990s and the explosion of academic cost structures and tuitions, you can't pay it all up-front. You have to heavily borrow against your future income or parental assets. If you become a highly-paid lawyer or medical specialist, or investment banker, it's still unambiguously worth it. For everyone else (even just in that 25-30%), it's questionable at best.
That's the point: even for those for whom college makes sense academically and career-wise, the cost has become so prohibitive that an economic trade-off that once made complete sense no longer makes sense for most, even those who are academically qualified.
Out here in New Zealand, anecdotal evidence is that many employers hiring for positions for which a university degree would have been considered essential just a few years ago, are now willing to hire people who got no further than high school.
Part of the reason for this is illustrated by a person I know whose career it is to tutor English to people who have graduated - graduated- from university functionally illiterate. Most of his students are engineering graduates who somehow missed the class that would have explained how much of their careers would be spent writing reports, but he has also tutored graduates who wanted to become journalists but whose writing skills weren't up to it (given the quality of modern journalism one wonders if they could write in English at all). A lot of us have seen a certain highly liked YouTube video of a Cambridge Union debate on slavery which made it clear that at least some of the students had no idea of the history of slavery. I could go on in this vein.
Clearly educational standards all the way up to tertiary level have declined this century (interestingly, in lockstep with the growth in the number of administrators at universities). Because a lot of this, at least at high school level, has to do with the increasing emphasis on ideological indoctrination, this decline is a fact that everyone knows but none dare speak about. Even the students are aware of it. Our son who has always been homeschooled goes to the Air Cadets (an air force squadron for adolescents) and he tells us that whenever they have an academic test the cadets who go to school assume that the homeschooled cadets will gain top marks, which they do. When even students are dissatisfied by their teachers and syllabi and say they don't do enough useful learning, you know something must be wrong.
Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, a good high school education, before about 1980 or so, would fill in for what amounts to the first two years of college now.
I graduated from a community college with highest honors. I enrolled in a four-year school but dropped out almost immediately. I hated it, and what they were teaching in the computer science section was a bit obsolete, as this was the early days of personal computing. Interestingly, my first book was widely used as a college text in courses I couldn't teach because I didn't have a four-year degree!
You would have broken your parents’ hearts if you dropped out. My Dad was the eldest son of 10 children, and had to help provide support for his family. I’m not sure that he even finished high school. But he always used to say, “Education is something they can never take away from you.”
College, and school of any kind, is not meant for everybody. Your examples show that.
But I spent a lot of time and effort earning my BA and MA degrees in History and I don't regret that since they helped me establish what I wanted to do in life. So for some people, it works.
that's right. I wanted to be a therapist and needed a formal education to do that. No regrets. Also learned some amazing things and met incredible people, one of whom introduced me to my future husband, the father of my incredible children.
The problem in the last 30 years is that, even when college makes sense academically and professionally, the economic trade-off has become no longer obvious. The tax on your parents' assets or your future income is too great. If you went to school in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s, it all worked without much thought.
I've pondered that question too. Attending a big name university like Harvard or Stanford opens doors that would otherwise be closed. I was told my SAT scores and grades would get me into any college, but I was too timid to apply to Radcliffe, which is the closest a woman could get to Harvard in 1963. And I'd never heard of Stanford as an institution of worth, having been raised in Massachusetts. Instead, I went to Brandeis University, which was rated one of the top 10 universities in the country that year, on a scholarship (the first in my family to attend college) and when I started I had dreams of being a Renaissance woman and having deep discussions with my peers and becoming part of the intellectual life of my era. But everyone seemed to be focused instead on getting a degree to start a career and find a mate, not interested in the life of the mind. I was disillusioned. I dropped out twice.
But I finally graduated with a BA and got an MA at the University of Minnesota after dropout life in the '60s brought me to the Midwest. Later I found that what I learned in college didn't apply in the workplace—except that I got a lot of practice learning about almost any topic, writing at the level of discourse appropriate for my readers, and formatting the results according to requirements, so those skills were a good fit in the technical writing world.
Obviously, a college degree is a ticket to get into a lot of jobs. If you don't have it, you won't get in. One example that seems to belie that is how my son only had some technical writing courses in a community college when he got an internship at CISCO Systems, a major computer storage company in Silicon Valley. After a short time, they hired him. By some coincidence, he was assigned to work in one of the scores of CISCO buildings right next to the one out of scores of Sun Microsystems buildings where I worked as a tech writer. And in a few years, he was doing similar work as I was and earning without a degree as much as I was with my masters. That seems to prove that a degree is not essential for successful performance of a job like that. But then when he was laid off in one of the industry's boom and bust cycles, he was excluded from other tech writing jobs because he didn't have a degree.
I wonder if this other anecdote has a lesson to be learned. When I worked at a supercomputer company in St. Paul I shared a cubicle with a Harvard graduate. And I was in the same group with a man who got the same Ph.D. in American Studies I had been pursuing when I left academia to find a job to support myself and my children. And I was a bit smug about how no matter what my cube mate gained from attending Harvard or my other coworker gained from having a Ph.D., we were all doing the same work as technical writers and getting paid the same.
I sometimes joke that God invented the computer boom for me to have a way to earn a professional salary since I'm not suited for much besides research and writing.
Oh, one more thing, the contacts you make when getting your education are very helpful. I was trying for years to be a published creative writer, but I had no luck in finding the way to publication. My memoir writing teacher, Patricia Hampl, was not a big seller, but she gained a solid reputation and an academic job, her books were published and well-reviewed by publications like the New York Review of Books, and I credit the contacts she made at the Iowa Writer's Workshop for her being published and having her work noticed. I pursued an M.A. emphasis on writing at UMINN MPLS because I couldn't afford to move my children and myself to Iowa. I thought if I could make a big sale before I finished the M.A. I would try to make a living as a fiction writer. By that time, the New Yorker was no longer reading its slush pile and the magazines that used to publish lots of short stories were not anymore, at least not the kind of stories I was writing. I think my path to publication would have been a lot easier if I could have moved to Iowa and studied there.
A move to Iowa may have helped or it may not. You may meet the people who can propel you ahead, they may even like you, a lot, but if you are from outside their "class" or you don't wear the same clothes or even if you do, but just not in the same way, they will find a way to marginalise you. I know, I have been there. In every field I have ever been in this has been my experience. I am well liked by my colleagues but because I am not motivated by status or money, because I am all about the work and doing it the best I can I am considered suspect. People will always promote their mates, not those who excel at what they do.
I know what you mean! You're a bird of the same feather. But I think outstanding looks allow people who have them to transcend class distinctions. Attractiveness is ususally the deciding factor when your family or the school you went to don't matter much in this democratized society. My son was often chosen over others who worked a lot harder and were more deserving because he is so attractive. When I was young, I was dark-haired, brown-eyed, serious, and studious. My slender blonde blue-eyed middle sister was never very good in school, but she made a lot of friends when she followed me as a freshman when I was a sophomore at Notre Dame Academy in Worcester MA, while I had not made any in my year there ahead of her. I had won a scholarship by coming in first in a city-wide test. But brains didn't count. And I noticed that kind of marginalization all my life. Yes, and being all about doing your work well alienates people who are just coasting, which most people seem to be. I have even been told that my working so hard to create usable manuals made others look bad. But one main lesson in life to get over is that things aren't fair.
My whole career, effectively, consists of cleaning up or rewriting wholesale better-educated people’s garbage technical writing. Can confirm in all areas.
Most people in my/our space coast and settle for mediocrity or worse, even in companies with the “customer obsessed” ideology. The place I work now is no different. I’ve spent the better part of two years rewriting my boss’s junky cloud development documentation and that of developers in a Docs as Code environment.
The stuff I’ve seen published by these people with no review or accountability is stuff that would justifiably get me fired. But since these people all have technical degrees, it’s all gravy for them. They live in a no-judgement zone 🤣 where merit doesn’t have the weight they seem to think it does
Hello Jeff! Welcome to my Substack! I'm delighted you joined. I didn't tell the rest of the story. Since I stopped tech writing, I've written full time. And my work has been published in many mostly Catholic publications, since I write about what is dearest to my heart, which is my Faith. This page has links to most of my published writings (it's a few months out of date though). Thanks! https://tinyurl.com/rtsullivanwritings
I couldn't agree more with your conclusions about the reverse-signaling involved in academic degrees. My father used to say that BS actually meant "Bullshit", MS meant "More of the Same" and PhD meant "Piled higher and deeper."
Harvard voted against offering Nabokov an associate professorship in Russian Literature after one of the incumbent professors asked the committee, "Do we really want an elephant teaching zoology?"
The greatest Shakespeare scholar, whose books I have but whose name escapes me, never earned a PhD. When asked by a student why he didn't just go ahead, submit his next book as his thesis, and get his Doctorate, he asked, "And who would examine me?"
Let's face it, especially these days, a college degree increasingly signals its owner to be a mid-wit.
God loves midwits, too. And there is a place for midwits, cubicle jockeys, timeservers, jobsworths, office hacks and the like - a world full of profound genius pioneer visionaries wouldn't last for long, although it might be interesting for a while.
Yes, the problem with midwits though is that because they serve bureauocracies so well, tending towards meticulous rule following and easily led by ideology, they are often elevated past thier ability and then begin mucking things up. Covid is a great example. If they stayed cubicle jockeys, timeservers and jobsworths it would be fine. Currently, they are waaaay over-represented in high levels of government, NGO's and education.
You want competent midwits running mature institutions.
But eventually those institutions will face unexpected challenges and start to fail if there are only midwits. Then you have the pernicious effect of destructive and bogus ideologies.
Yup, Nothing lasts forever.
Sic transit
(That's what I said while riding on the subway ....)
amen
Well, I'm not sure it's useful to conflate those of "merely average" intellect (God forbid!) with those who are simply self-serving, lazy, and/or easily manipulated.
I never did.
Yes, that's supposed to be some sort of insult, being of "average" intellect and capacity. Everyone is supposed to be far above average, but I'm not really sure how that would work on a practical level, much less a mathematical one.
Mathematically, if there is one guy extremely below average, then just about everyone can be above average. It's harder to get almost everyone above the median.
But what on earth would be the satisfaction in that? All those intellectual heavyweights feeling superior to a precious few? No, the masses must be inferior.
Just look at the open road, where everyone is an above-average driver ;)
Hey, who are you calling above average? :)
Can you clarify for the non-Keillorites among us?
Ah, thanks. And yepper.
The other development I see is that the economic aspect of a four year degree has come to be emphasized at the expense of academics or learning. Why would anybody study Sanskrit at an elite university? The cost-benefit ratio makes such an endeavor tantamount to financial suicide.
Is the purpose of college to earn a good living or to learn how to lead a good life? If it's the former majoring in business, engineering, etc. on the way to a law degree or MBA is the way to go. If it's the latter time spent in the library reading poetry or listening to jazz might be more productive. Is there any question that in the modern university the balance has been tilted overwhelmingly in favor of career and profession? That's why humanities departments across the country are going bankrupt even as college enrollment has climbed.
And there's one final, even more pernicious effect: college as professional finishing school encourages conformity and acceptance of authority. Keep your head down, your nose clean, study hard for the test, pursue the right extracurriculars: that's the pathway to acceptance at a good school. I recommend _Excellent Sheep_ by William Deresiewicz as an exploration of this topic.
Humanities are essentially being discredited and wrecked at many institutions now, so really, higher education is culturally an enforcement of compliance
Simple solution - do what most European countries do (and Britain did before Thatcher) and make higher education free. People are much more likely to study something obscure that they're passionate about if they aren't going to be facing a ton of student debt
HIgher ed was free and still is (mostly) free or low cost in European countries. But only about a quarter or less of high school graduates are qualified to go on to higher ed. If we did that here (that is, return to the 1970s or 80s), it would be a revolution. And none of those European schools are burdened with the gigantic administrative bureaucracy that ours have acquired in the last 30 years. There are no offices of student services or DEI etc.
This is one of the fatal problems with all these proposals to make this or that "free" -- it's not free, someone has to pay for it, and we have a dismal record of containing costs in academia, as well as in health care.
Another difference is that, european universities are pretty slack, but at the same time, you don't get five of six years in university to find yourself, change majors a few times, come back after a few years, etc..
Since the State is paying for it, you get your four years or whatever and then move.
That might have been possible before the national debt exploded to $30+ trillion.
After my third time teaching at Princeton (2000, 2002, 2006), I asked the relevant person, a sympathetic professor who had written fulsome blurb for my ‘The Dustbin of History’ in 1995, if I could come back on a regukar basis one semester a year, as I’d been doing—I’m a Californian and had no interest in moving permanently to the east. He said really couldn’t be considered because I didn’t have a Ph.d. I had dropped out of graduate school at Cal in 1972.
What a loss for Princeton.
If I ever have a full jazz band, I want to use the band name Stan Getz’s Legs.
I've been waiting all my life for your article about dropouts. I am a two-time dropout myself so I relate deeply to every aspect of your piece. What college meant to me was: showing everyone how much you can tolerate of conformity and professorial inadequacy while being expected to find truth and meaning in the mess they call education. I am therefore an autodidact and a nobody today. BUT, that is okay and it is a safe and quality way of life and being that rewards itself mightily as someone like me goes about a real education of life and learning.
Being an autodidact is fine, which is what I am as well, but people learn the most when learning with others from those who really know and love what they are teaching.
Not everyone thrives equally in a crowd.
And for some reason I’m reminded of my first practical Filmmaking course at NYU. At first everybody pussyfooted around critiquing others’ works. Until the guy who was driving a cab to pay his way through, “bitter” Ed D_______ had no time for dilettantes on daddy’s dime. After he spoke truth, everyone got cut down as appropriate.
Do people learn more when learning with others? I always found the pace too slow while the dimwits around me struggled to catch up. As for those teachers who really know and love what they are teaching, they are rarer than hen's teeth. I have three degrees in different fields, music performance, biochemistry and veterinary science and I have rarely encountered such a teacher.
Maybe I was just lucky with my teachers. While it is frustrating to have slow fellow students, I find that many people have insights or at least views different enough that I find valuable. It is just difficult to pull it out of them. Also, there are subjects that I have trouble with which makes me more accepting of the slowpokes.
Charter member of the club here
Brilliant essay. But, just as an aside, Bill Gates was the scion of one of Seattle's power-families. His father was a big-time attorney, mom was politically powerful and sat on the board of the UofW. And Bill sold IBM n operating system without ctually having one--instead, went down the street and bought the OP from a developer who wouldn't meet with IBM...a modern legend.
Essentially, this means Bill Gates didn’t invent or develop anything - just invested in shoe leather. Dude was born on third base and assumed he’d hit a triple
He was chairman and CEO of Microsoft which is still one of the biggest companies and employers, he designed and developed the first Basic interpreter for the first microcomputer (Altair). Many children of lawyers and university administrators amount to nothing (born on third base and get tagged out?), Gates work created many times more wealth for others (myself included) than for himself.
Rumor is he that he is/was a terrible coder, but at least he could code.
Gates saw the big business opportunity and grabbed it, hiring others better than he at programming. Technical skills = OK, business acumen = stellar.
Isn't this also true of Elon Musk? He's invented nothing major, but managed to get in charge, not at the beginning, but early-ish, after the main technical inventions and just when the opportunities for the business use cases were ripe.
A friend of a friend was supposedly working at M$ in the early days and was reviewing some of their code. He exclaimed out loud "Who wrote this piece of shit?" Then he looked up and saw Bill Gates staring at him.
I'm not saying that Gates was undeserving of success but his technical skills have long been an object of techie lore.
Good enough, good enough ... :)
good analogy!
My husband dropped out of college (a state school, nowhere fancy) after 3 years. He isn’t famous or a millionaire, but he certainly has a lot more intellectual ability and curiosity than many (most?) of his colleagues who do have degrees. Based on the work he does, he ought to be going places, but there is a ceiling of how far he can promote without a degree (which is honestly ok with me).
On the other hand I have 3 degrees (2 bachelors and 1 masters, also from a state school) and stay at home with the kids.
Neither of us have regrets, because we wouldn’t be where we are if we had made different choices, but I have a feeling we won’t be encouraging our kids to go to college.
An old friend of mine is a multimillionaire high school dropout autodidact computer genius and professional weirdo.
Of course, my friend also was the kind of professional weirdo who had a patent portfolio at the time he got kicked out of high school and is also the sort who would not do well in prison.
His life is not for everyone, nor should it be.
Kudos to you both.
Hermeto Pascoal dropped out at 4th grade...
Seems to me you're a late-bloomer dropout success. Kudos to you.
How many Nobel Prize winners in Physics dropped out? You can name a few, but there aren't any from the last 50 years. Likewise Chemistry and Economics.
Your examples are from writing, music, and business. Bill Gates was a genius businessman. He is merely a good programmer, and probably a mediocre Computer Scientist. Likewise with Mark Zuckerberg. None of the CEOs of successful Silicon Valley companies I know of were great at being engineers, though it helps a lot to know something about engineering.
The other thing I notice is that your list of dropouts describes people who dropped out to do something specific and particular that they had a passion for. Start a band, start a company, write novels. That passion is a lot more important than going to classes you don't care about.
(Side note: I had very few classes in college that I didn't care about. But enough about me.)
I have never been a guy who wanted - as his primary goal - to make a lot of money. I wanted to be able to solve cool problems and make cool things. If someone is focused on making lots of money, and they have some ability, then they probably will make a lot of money, and a college degree won't matter.
I could not read music when I applied to be a music major.
I made a deal with the music dean that if I was not at least a B in all my music classes, I would quit and change majors, no hassles.
I maintained a 4 in all my classes.
Upon transferring to ADSU I was put into an ongoing class that was being put together by two professors, a Dr. Fletcher, and Ronald LoPresti. I was an experiment in whether their ideas could be mainstreamed onto someone who was not a prodigy in music.
I maintained a 4.0.
I then won the first (and only) Arizona Composer Competition with first AND second place compositions.
At that point, the tenured Dr Fletcher became my worst enemy and described my music as "gay" and "unmasculine" (this was 1970, so not the same as today),and tried to have me moved to a lower orchestration level since, after hearing my award-winning music, he could see that I sucked at composition.
No one at the uni would help me, or call this rabid POS.
I left music school and composition.
I have recently, at age 75, begun composing again.
I have been quite successful in most all that I have done.
I have met many Harvard, Yale, and Stanford graduates through my career as a professional artist and creative director for my own ad agency.
I wouldn't give them an upper seat at all based on their education. Most of them were kinda, well, dumb.
Harvard had its day.
It blew it a long time ago, we are just seeing the last breaths.
But, then, today the AP let us know that plagiarism is a right wing weapon against those people too stupid to write their own stupid shit.
Plagiarism is a right wing weapon.
So it is OK now to plagiarize if you are not weaponizing it?
Hey, does that work for copyright violations? Is that "right wing" too?
The madness of arrogance mixed with the self-awareness of pond scum is breathtaking.
How else will they defend "our democracy?" They can hardly tie their shoes. Of course, having to think your own thoughts is considered racist.
The problem with college now is that it's schizophrenic in terms of purpose. Is it there to teach people about Camus and quantum physics? Or is it a glorified finishing school that puts the final stamp of approval on a white collar professional?
If it's the latter then as a simple matter of arithmetic tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars are justified. After all, that money will be made back over the course of a lifetime of work. The problem is that approach drives income inequality as college increasingly becomes the province of the haves while the have-nots can't muster the resources to attend.
I think you’ve just answered your own question 👍
Actually, it is not earned back any longer. It was once, if you went to college before the 1990s. For a modest charge in tuition, you enhanced your life income prospects quite a bit. The cost was moderate and up-front. It made sense for the 25-30% of high school graduates who could make the academic grade.
Since the 1990s and the explosion of academic cost structures and tuitions, you can't pay it all up-front. You have to heavily borrow against your future income or parental assets. If you become a highly-paid lawyer or medical specialist, or investment banker, it's still unambiguously worth it. For everyone else (even just in that 25-30%), it's questionable at best.
That's the point: even for those for whom college makes sense academically and career-wise, the cost has become so prohibitive that an economic trade-off that once made complete sense no longer makes sense for most, even those who are academically qualified.
Out here in New Zealand, anecdotal evidence is that many employers hiring for positions for which a university degree would have been considered essential just a few years ago, are now willing to hire people who got no further than high school.
Part of the reason for this is illustrated by a person I know whose career it is to tutor English to people who have graduated - graduated- from university functionally illiterate. Most of his students are engineering graduates who somehow missed the class that would have explained how much of their careers would be spent writing reports, but he has also tutored graduates who wanted to become journalists but whose writing skills weren't up to it (given the quality of modern journalism one wonders if they could write in English at all). A lot of us have seen a certain highly liked YouTube video of a Cambridge Union debate on slavery which made it clear that at least some of the students had no idea of the history of slavery. I could go on in this vein.
Clearly educational standards all the way up to tertiary level have declined this century (interestingly, in lockstep with the growth in the number of administrators at universities). Because a lot of this, at least at high school level, has to do with the increasing emphasis on ideological indoctrination, this decline is a fact that everyone knows but none dare speak about. Even the students are aware of it. Our son who has always been homeschooled goes to the Air Cadets (an air force squadron for adolescents) and he tells us that whenever they have an academic test the cadets who go to school assume that the homeschooled cadets will gain top marks, which they do. When even students are dissatisfied by their teachers and syllabi and say they don't do enough useful learning, you know something must be wrong.
Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, a good high school education, before about 1980 or so, would fill in for what amounts to the first two years of college now.
I graduated from a community college with highest honors. I enrolled in a four-year school but dropped out almost immediately. I hated it, and what they were teaching in the computer science section was a bit obsolete, as this was the early days of personal computing. Interestingly, my first book was widely used as a college text in courses I couldn't teach because I didn't have a four-year degree!
Ah yes, Fortran, COBOL and punch cards 🤣
You would have broken your parents’ hearts if you dropped out. My Dad was the eldest son of 10 children, and had to help provide support for his family. I’m not sure that he even finished high school. But he always used to say, “Education is something they can never take away from you.”
College, and school of any kind, is not meant for everybody. Your examples show that.
But I spent a lot of time and effort earning my BA and MA degrees in History and I don't regret that since they helped me establish what I wanted to do in life. So for some people, it works.
that's right. I wanted to be a therapist and needed a formal education to do that. No regrets. Also learned some amazing things and met incredible people, one of whom introduced me to my future husband, the father of my incredible children.
But master/apprentice instruction mostly takes place outside of college, in the workplace.
The problem in the last 30 years is that, even when college makes sense academically and professionally, the economic trade-off has become no longer obvious. The tax on your parents' assets or your future income is too great. If you went to school in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s, it all worked without much thought.
I've pondered that question too. Attending a big name university like Harvard or Stanford opens doors that would otherwise be closed. I was told my SAT scores and grades would get me into any college, but I was too timid to apply to Radcliffe, which is the closest a woman could get to Harvard in 1963. And I'd never heard of Stanford as an institution of worth, having been raised in Massachusetts. Instead, I went to Brandeis University, which was rated one of the top 10 universities in the country that year, on a scholarship (the first in my family to attend college) and when I started I had dreams of being a Renaissance woman and having deep discussions with my peers and becoming part of the intellectual life of my era. But everyone seemed to be focused instead on getting a degree to start a career and find a mate, not interested in the life of the mind. I was disillusioned. I dropped out twice.
But I finally graduated with a BA and got an MA at the University of Minnesota after dropout life in the '60s brought me to the Midwest. Later I found that what I learned in college didn't apply in the workplace—except that I got a lot of practice learning about almost any topic, writing at the level of discourse appropriate for my readers, and formatting the results according to requirements, so those skills were a good fit in the technical writing world.
Obviously, a college degree is a ticket to get into a lot of jobs. If you don't have it, you won't get in. One example that seems to belie that is how my son only had some technical writing courses in a community college when he got an internship at CISCO Systems, a major computer storage company in Silicon Valley. After a short time, they hired him. By some coincidence, he was assigned to work in one of the scores of CISCO buildings right next to the one out of scores of Sun Microsystems buildings where I worked as a tech writer. And in a few years, he was doing similar work as I was and earning without a degree as much as I was with my masters. That seems to prove that a degree is not essential for successful performance of a job like that. But then when he was laid off in one of the industry's boom and bust cycles, he was excluded from other tech writing jobs because he didn't have a degree.
I wonder if this other anecdote has a lesson to be learned. When I worked at a supercomputer company in St. Paul I shared a cubicle with a Harvard graduate. And I was in the same group with a man who got the same Ph.D. in American Studies I had been pursuing when I left academia to find a job to support myself and my children. And I was a bit smug about how no matter what my cube mate gained from attending Harvard or my other coworker gained from having a Ph.D., we were all doing the same work as technical writers and getting paid the same.
I sometimes joke that God invented the computer boom for me to have a way to earn a professional salary since I'm not suited for much besides research and writing.
Oh, one more thing, the contacts you make when getting your education are very helpful. I was trying for years to be a published creative writer, but I had no luck in finding the way to publication. My memoir writing teacher, Patricia Hampl, was not a big seller, but she gained a solid reputation and an academic job, her books were published and well-reviewed by publications like the New York Review of Books, and I credit the contacts she made at the Iowa Writer's Workshop for her being published and having her work noticed. I pursued an M.A. emphasis on writing at UMINN MPLS because I couldn't afford to move my children and myself to Iowa. I thought if I could make a big sale before I finished the M.A. I would try to make a living as a fiction writer. By that time, the New Yorker was no longer reading its slush pile and the magazines that used to publish lots of short stories were not anymore, at least not the kind of stories I was writing. I think my path to publication would have been a lot easier if I could have moved to Iowa and studied there.
A move to Iowa may have helped or it may not. You may meet the people who can propel you ahead, they may even like you, a lot, but if you are from outside their "class" or you don't wear the same clothes or even if you do, but just not in the same way, they will find a way to marginalise you. I know, I have been there. In every field I have ever been in this has been my experience. I am well liked by my colleagues but because I am not motivated by status or money, because I am all about the work and doing it the best I can I am considered suspect. People will always promote their mates, not those who excel at what they do.
I know what you mean! You're a bird of the same feather. But I think outstanding looks allow people who have them to transcend class distinctions. Attractiveness is ususally the deciding factor when your family or the school you went to don't matter much in this democratized society. My son was often chosen over others who worked a lot harder and were more deserving because he is so attractive. When I was young, I was dark-haired, brown-eyed, serious, and studious. My slender blonde blue-eyed middle sister was never very good in school, but she made a lot of friends when she followed me as a freshman when I was a sophomore at Notre Dame Academy in Worcester MA, while I had not made any in my year there ahead of her. I had won a scholarship by coming in first in a city-wide test. But brains didn't count. And I noticed that kind of marginalization all my life. Yes, and being all about doing your work well alienates people who are just coasting, which most people seem to be. I have even been told that my working so hard to create usable manuals made others look bad. But one main lesson in life to get over is that things aren't fair.
My whole career, effectively, consists of cleaning up or rewriting wholesale better-educated people’s garbage technical writing. Can confirm in all areas.
Most people in my/our space coast and settle for mediocrity or worse, even in companies with the “customer obsessed” ideology. The place I work now is no different. I’ve spent the better part of two years rewriting my boss’s junky cloud development documentation and that of developers in a Docs as Code environment.
The stuff I’ve seen published by these people with no review or accountability is stuff that would justifiably get me fired. But since these people all have technical degrees, it’s all gravy for them. They live in a no-judgement zone 🤣 where merit doesn’t have the weight they seem to think it does
Well, Roseanne: your circuitous path just earned your Substack a new follower.
Hello Jeff! Welcome to my Substack! I'm delighted you joined. I didn't tell the rest of the story. Since I stopped tech writing, I've written full time. And my work has been published in many mostly Catholic publications, since I write about what is dearest to my heart, which is my Faith. This page has links to most of my published writings (it's a few months out of date though). Thanks! https://tinyurl.com/rtsullivanwritings
I will look forward to your writings!