Steve Jobs: Quitting school made me smart

[ckramer]

If you want to work for Steve Jobs, go to college. If you want to be Steve Jobs, drop out.

Stanford University graduates were hit with an unlikely commencement message on Sunday.

Jobs, founder of both Apple Computer and Pixar Studios, told the nearly 5,000 graduates that dropping out of college was one of his best decisions ever.

Jobs said dropping out gave him more time to take courses in things like calligraphy. And to make a bazillion dollars.

The Apple founded dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., after eight months because it was two expensive. Then Jobs founded Apple out of his parents' basement. It seems to have worked out pretty well for him.

link

I believe what Job said is true.

[SteppingRazor]

1. I believe it isn't

For every Jobs who drops out of college and makes a mint, there's thousands of others who are still living in their parents' basements.

[Morose]

27. Playing the Lottery Made me Rich!

Ergo Gambling is the way to go!

Rationalization, or an insidious message meant to demotivate people from pursuing learning that might make them aspire to be more than sheeple...

Either way, I think it's a poor message to send.

[KlatooBNikto]

2. I had a teacher in College who used to say that children are full of

curiosity until they graduate from High School. Colege kills that curiosity.Kids become passive and bored by the drivel dished out in college.

[ckramer]

3. "two expensive"

I can't believe the reporter from Boston Herald wrote such poor English.

He must be a dropout from somewhere! He will be witch!

[NashVegas]

11. Probably an MBA Grad

Just a hunch.

[LisaM]

4. True for a few ---- but not for most

I find statements such as this dangerous. There are exceptional people who are going to make their way no matter what, but do you really think EVERYONE should drop out of college? Worse, I think people are starting to devalue liberal arts educations because of this type of pronouncement. I also don't know Steve Jobs' specific situation, but Bill Gates, who also dropped out of college to pursue a business model, went to a very exclusive private school before college and had an extremely successful father, so he didn't exactly pull himself up by his bootstraps and enter the business world as an uneducated boob.

[PinkTiger]

5. It's true for Jobs.

But for most students, they should stay in college, finish it, and then go seek a career. One of the perks? Finishing what you start.
Most of my students (I teach in a college) who drop out do so because they are non-finishers. Few have the pie in the sky luck that Steve Jobs experienced, and few lack his motivation and drive.
For most of us, the degree is a sign that we finish what we start, and it gives us a piece of paper that tells the world not only this, but that we are prepared to do a certain thing in the world.
It gives people confidence in their own abilities.
A degree is also the ticket necessary to enter certain careers.
However, I agree that a degree alone will do little to help a person succeed. My hope is that while here in college, we can also pass on the knowledge, skill and expertise a student needs to make it in the real world -- while giving them the satisfaction of a job well done.
Steve Jobs' story is unusual. Few could match his feat.

But wait: Here's some other parts of that same article:

"So, is spending a fortune on college just a path to middle management?

     ``You don't need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur,'' Babson College professor Andrew Zacharakis admitted.

     But betting on a Cinderella story like Jobs' is only slightly more likely than winning the lottery, he said.

     ``The college education is a chance to improve your odds,'' Zacharakis said.

     The statistics certainly back that up.

     A college degree can nearly double your annual income. College grads earn more than $51,000 a year on average, while those with only a high school diploma earn $27,915, according to the Census Bureau.

     So, despite the rags-to-riches stories of billionaires like Jobs, the message seems to be ``stay in school.''

[Daphne08]

6. True for some, not for everyone.

I personally have always encouraged my children to get as much education as possible, and they are doing that.


From the article:

"You don't need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur," Babson College professor Andrew Zacharakis admitted.

"But betting on a Cinderella story like Jobs' is only slightly more likely than winning the lottery," he said.

"The college education is a chance to improve your odds," Zacharakis said.

[amazona]

7. fine but you're not gonna be Steve Jobs

And the Beatles never studied music either. However we're not gonna be Jobs or Lennon. Most people are just going to be average people of average ability and they need all the advantages they can get.

[sasquatch]

8. Don't be saying that stuff now

These morons we have today will use this as a way to cut back on higher education.

[longship]

9. Smart, but ignorant.

.

[NashVegas]

10. Can't This News Outlet Afford a Copy Editor

"The Apple founded dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., after eight months because it was two expensive. "

No comment on the story itself yet. Sorry.

[DS1]

12. Not everyone has the genius of Woz to provide the saleable goods

Jobs just marketed.

[ckramer]

13. I guess what Job said is that

if you want to learn something and become an expert of it, or to accomplish something from what you have learned, college is waste of time.

As he said, you want to work for me? Go get a college degree (meaning that being a non-leader or a follower you need more knowledge to understand what your boss said - it's nice to have a smart slave, isn't it?). You want to work for yourself? Make a plan and start it today (meaning that you are wasting your time using 4 - 5 years to prepare to be a slave)!

The sentence "Bill Gates doesn't have a degree" says it all.

[Mojambo]

14. I hate the idea of going to college for a career

I like the idea of going to college to get a classical education.

College has become too much of a "career/intern training center" with very little actual learning.

I think that is where Jobs was going with this line.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

31. yes

this is why I went. It's not right for everybody, and it certainly hasn't helped me economically - but I feel like an educated member of society with a better understanding of the world around me.

[suziedemocrat]

15. I LOVE Steve Jobs!!!

I think it might be good for entrepreneurs to drop out. However, many people think they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, but they actually don't. For the rest of us mere mortals, that stupid piece of paper makes a difference. I'm of the opinion that formal education is over-rated, even though I've started working on my Masters. It opens doors in HR.

[Sandpiper]

16. Thanks for reinforcing the Horatio Alger myth Steve

Drop out of school and work hard enough, and you can be a billionaire too.

Too bad this model only works for a fraction of 1% of the population.

[The_Casual_Observer]

17. Better yet, spend your money on lotto tickets

You have a better chance getting rich doing that than starting the next Apple.

Reed College gives the impression that Jobs is a graduate in their sales literature.

[0rganism]

18. whaddaya know, I dropped out of Reed College too

Then I bummed around for a while, looked for work, couldn't land a job, was basically hemorhaging my parents' money. So I went back to school at Portland Community College, and ended up graduating from Portland State University. Now I have two engineering degrees, plenty of jobs on my resume', and -- when I'm lucky -- a salary. Oh well, maybe I went back too soon. Jobs' partner, Steve Wozniak, waited 7 years to finish his degree.

So I guess we can't all be Steve Jobs and co-found a computer company after dropping out of a liberal arts college. I've never worked for Apple, but I've worked for plenty of companies where the founders had PhDs from impressive-sounding institutions. As such, I'm inclined to doubt that Jobs' advice is representative of the population, any more than is the notoriously eclectic Reed student body.

College is not an impediment to innovation. For every bloke like Steve Jobs, I'll wager there's at least five like Howard Vollum who start their successful companies after graduating from Reed College.

[megatherium]

32. I did graduate from Reed.

All I wanted to do was get into an academic career, which I did (I am a math prof at a regional campus of Indiana University). One of my classmates, however, was a biology major who ended up becoming a Microsoft millionaire (he lead the DOS 6 project, among other things). Another acquaintence of mine, a physics major, learned Japanese and made a fortune in import/export; he endowed a physics professorship in his name back at Reed.

Of course, you do find extremely successful people with modest academic pedigrees; and you find losers and scoundrels who went to the finest of schools. Take President Bush, for example. Please!

[Warpy]

19. College prepares working class kids for middle management

Upper management in top corporations is reserved for the kids who inherited the positions.

Dropping out of college is great for somebody who doesn't want to be in middle management or who isn't preparing for a specific trade like law or medicine. I tell people to steer their kids towards trades like plumbing. They can't be offshored and the money is great.

Middle management will become increasingly vulnerable to offshoring, as will most of the white collar jobs. If someone is in college to try to assure the good life via the generic liberal arts degree, that will become increasingly difficult.

However, Jobs and Gates were children of a fair amount of wealth and both had access to a network of family and family associates they could tap for seed money when they were getting started. College for either would have been a waste of time unless they'd guessed wrong about a burgeoning market for home computers. Then they'd likely have been classified as "returning students."

[architect359]

24. A small correction:

Regarding Steve Jobs' family's "fair amount of wealth". His parents did not have a lot; they weren't paupers by any stretch. I think that his dad was a mechanic and did some repo work and in the end was a salesman (can't remember of what though). Additionally, Jobs stayed at his parents' house, using the garage (with Woz) to get Apple up and running.

[Turbineguy]

20. That statement

reminds me of a guy who survived an air crash because the smoking section of the aircraft did not get destroyed.

He thought that smoking was therefore a good thing.

It's an idiotic statement but maybe was taken out of context.

[tinrobot]

21. In other news - Bill Gates wholeheartedly agrees

The richest man in the world also dropped out of college (Harvard) to start his semi-successful software company.

[krkaufman]

22. I think the article's author followed Jobs' example...

The Apple founded dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., after eight months because it was two expensive. Then Jobs founded Apple out of his parents' basement. It seems to have worked out pretty well for him.

... or at least skipped the day they covered proof-reading in Composition 101.

[Karmadillo]

23. Make sure you have a Steve Wozniak on board before you drop out.

http://www.woz.org/letters/general/95.html

Comment from E-mail:
Is it true that the very first apple prototype that you and Steve Jobs built had a microprocessor, but no monitor, no memory and no keyboard?

Woz:
I built the first Apple prototype myself, before there was suggestion to start a company. I gave out schematics and code listings of it at the Homebrew Computer Club. Here's a little background on it. I had designed a terminal of my own in order to access the Arpanet, the forerunner of today's internet. This was in 1974.

I used the smallest, cheapest chips I could in my design. Most of the chips I got for free from our lab stock at Hewlett Packard. I kept my supervisor informed about my hobby and HP had a policy of allowing engineers to have chips to build things of their own design with a supervisor's approval. It was a very good and excellent policy for those, like myself, who wanted to design things, and therefore better themselves.

I had no money so I had to get almost everything for free. A $60 upper-case-only keyboard was the most expensive item of this terminal, and of the later Apple I. I could afford no output device in 1974 so I designed this terminal to display characters on my Sears TV. Everyone has a TV, right? The catch was that in 1974 no TV's had video input connections. I had to take my TV apart and find the proper point to substitute my own TV signal, using the schematics that were commonly included in TV manuals back then.

I saw all the computers of the world set up to deal with slow teletype machines that could only type 10 to 30 characters per second. So I used the smallest, cheapest video memory I could, recirculating shift registers containing the ASCII text characters of the entire screen. This serial video memory had to circulate an entire screen worth of characters just to write the next one. The display refreshed 60 times a second so I could only output 60 new characters per second this way. But that was still faster than teletypes.

more...

[truthisfreedom]

25. i dopped out and eventually built a manufacturing business. i'll be in the

alternative minimum tax bracket this year (for the first time). on the other hand, as a recording engineer, i never made more than $20K/yr between 1985 and 1995. so i certainly wasn't in a rush to be successful. 8^)

[NNguyenMD]

26. does this mean that his knowledge in computer software and hardware was

self-taught? I would imagine you still need to stake a few college course to fine tune your software and computer engineering skills. Or maybe not, anyone know where Jobs went for computer school?

[Chico Man]

28. Dropped out of Virginia Tech after 1.5 years...

With a .2 GPA. Actually, I guess you could say I was kicked out.

Im now making excellent money as a Senior Software Engineer. Still no degree.

I'l looking to go back to learn the finer details of finance. I figure if I'm going to spend the cash, I better learn how to make it grow.

[Casper]

29. Where'd he learn to wear turtlenecks? n/t

[Zech Marquis]

30. in his case

i think Jobs was already involved with Atari (or shortly after leaving college), and at the very least but he and Woz were already making those "blue boxes" that let people make free long distance phone calls (from the TNT movie) So while I wouldn't just drop out of college after one semester like he di, it's also true that some of the best thinkers and creators such as Steve Jobs don't have college diplomas.

[youspeakmylanguage]

34. It's my understanding that Woz was the "thinker and creator"...

...and Jobs was the marketer and CEO. I'm not sure how technically proficient Jobs has ever been.

[youspeakmylanguage]

33. It's easy to drop out and become a bazillionaire...

...simply find a partner who is developing a complex electronic invention that will change the world as we know it. Then help him market that product and take a 50% stake in the company.

The magic formula is that simple.