American Thinker - Yes, education is important. Among other benefits–cause and/or effect?–is the correlation between education and income; the more of the former, the more of the latter.
But then there are those multi, multi millionaire college drop outs who skew these figures. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. And Steve Jobs, now, sadly, of blessed memory.
Listen and/or read the college drop out’s commencement address to the Stanford University graduating class of June, 2005 giving advice.
My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And so he did. For a few months. But it was expensive and like many youngsters he didn’t know what he wanted to do so he dropped out, hanging around campus, taking courses that interested him, even though they didn’t seem practical, such as calligraphy.But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Jobs was later fired from Apple, the company he co founded in his parent’s garage. More
