Dropouts

My dad is a high school dropout. He left school at age 16 and became a car mechanic. You may therefore be surprised to learn that he also has a PhD, and has worked as a research scientist (in chemistry and workers' health) for over 25 years. There are a lot of smart people that don't find school to be a good match for them.

Nobel-prize winning playwright George Bernard Shaw dropped out of elementary school, saying that he could not learn what did not interest him. Nor did Jack London, Charles Dickens, or William Faulkner complete school. Churchill hated school and was (initially, at least) near the bottom of his class, even while he read advanced books. And then there's the Mark Twain quote at the top of this blog-- clearly he didn't think too highly of formal schooling (nor did he finish school).

According to one article I found:

Of the 400 famous 20th-century people examined in Victor & Mildred Goertzel’s 1962 study "Cradles of Eminence," three out of five despised or did poorly in school. The creative and exceptionally brilliant Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were believed to be mentally disturbed by their schoolteachers; both left school to study on their own.

Also worth quoting, from the same article:

Eight men became President of the United States with little or no schooling (George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland). Benjamin Franklin had no formal education beyond the age of ten. John Major, British Prime Minister from 1990-1997, never finished high school.

A lengthy list of famous dropouts from past and present times can be found here and here. A lot of very rich men dropped out of school: Andrew Carnegie (he didn't even finish grade school), Rockefeller, Kirk Kerkorian (billionaire), Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds), and so on. The IT industry was largely started by Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Paul Allen, all of whom dropped out of college.

It's a fact that a person with more formal education will earn, on the average, more than someone with less education. But some of that is by agreement, so to speak-- corporations pay higher salaries to more educated employees, even if the education doesn't inform their job. I have several friends who do not use their degree in their job, but without that degree they would undoubtedly make less money. Another friend of mine was once told that it was too bad she didn't have an MBA or they'd pay her $20,000 more per year for the same work. (That was right before she quit.)

The site "Education Pays" admits as much when they write: "Even in jobs that do not require college degrees, workers with degrees usually earn more money than their coworkers without them." Or: "Workers with higher levels of education also generally earn more than workers in the same job who have less education." Essentially they are saying that you will get paid more if you have completed more schooling, even if your degree is irrelevant to your work.

This is why people loved to talk about all those young IT workers raking in the big bucks. What was surprising about that was that they did it without formal education in their field, since there was no such thing at that time. You had to pick up manuals and books and learn it yourself, for the most part-- shocking!

I don't mean to imply that I'm against college education, but I worry that a bachelor's degree is becoming necessary for admission into the middle class, even while that education is often unrelated or very loosely related to one's job. The IT boom didn't require colleges or universities. Many college graduates do work which is in no way improved by their degree. The long list of accomplished dropouts proves that other options, other paths are open to a few. And yet for the vast majority of us, without a college degree we are sure to face discrimination. That's what I don't like.