He makes a good point about the value of business experience... ...and then advocates waiting a few years before seeking such experience.
Why swim to learn how to swim when you can sit and study swimming?
Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#22Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!
It does rather depends where you are - there is a fair amount of outrage in the UK because Oxford and Cambridge have said that they may increase their fees to £9000 a year. [Edit: £9000 is the fee for EU citizens, probably a good bit more for anyone else]
> It does rather depends where you are
Indeed. If you make decent high school grades in the states, then it's possible to attend a state university on scholarship and owe less (perhaps much less) than $20K in school loans after graduation.
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#23Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!
Amen. Whereas graduate studies in certain disciplines can help advance your career, the basic undergraduate curriculum has become increasingly useless. Work experience is what counts for more than anything. Ideally you would attend a reasonably priced institution with good teachers and be given enough time to explore independent projects - business ideas or artistic pursuits depending on what your interests in life a…
"basic undergraduate curriculum has become increasingly useless"
Why do you think that has happened? From my perspective (I graduated over 20 years ago) things like CS degrees seem to have been tried to become far more directly useful by becoming rather more like vocational training than pure academic subjects.
[NB I'm largely interested because I have a son who is starting to think about what he might do at University].
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#24One commonality between many successful dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates is that they dropped out to do something specific, not because they were too lazy or undisciplined to finish. Had the right opportunity not come along, I suspect many celebrity dropouts would have cruised to graduation.
I like to think of it as they went out and made the opportunity happen for themselves instead of waiting for the opportunity to present itself.
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does rather depends where you are - there is a fair amount of outrage in the UK because Oxford and Cambridge have said that they may increase their fees to £9000 a year. [Edit: £9000 is the fee for EU citizens, probably a good bit more for anyone else]
> It does rather depends where you are Indeed. If you make decent high school grades in the states, then it's possible to attend a state university on scholarship and owe less (perhaps much less) than $20K in school loans after graduation.
If you are Scottish and attending a University here in Scotland then you pay zero fees.
[NB I actually don't think this is very fair]
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#26One commonality between many successful dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates is that they dropped out to do something specific, not because they were too lazy or undisciplined to finish. Had the right opportunity not come along, I suspect many celebrity dropouts would have cruised to graduation.
In fact, I'd imagine Zuckerberg would be better off both personally and professionally had he finished his undergraduate education.
Moreover, I think it's interesting to think if Facebook would be different had it been founded by post-graduation Zuckerberg. Better? Worse? I bet the Facebook experience would be richer had Zuckerberg been more mature when he crafted the initial vision.
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#27Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!
The thing is, you are mediocre.
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#28Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!
Those that can do, those that can't, teach, and those that can't teach get tenure. If this guy was an econ professor at least he would know he was just talking his book. You don't need a symposium on entrepreneurship you need to sell stuff at a higher price than you bought it to paying customers. Thats it, it's a sentence not a 2 year degree program.
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Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#29One commonality between many successful dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates is that they dropped out to do something specific, not because they were too lazy or undisciplined to finish. Had the right opportunity not come along, I suspect many celebrity dropouts would have cruised to graduation.
I like to think of it as they went out and made the opportunity happen for themselves instead of waiting for the opportunity to present itself.
But they didn't drop out to find the opportunity, is his point.
The uber-point is really, people who are bright enough to found $1B businesses are also bright enough to realize that you don't leave college until you have the idea moving along a good path.
To put it another way, are there any $1B SW companies started by people who either didn't go to college or dropped out of college before they had started creating product for what would be this company? I honestly can't think of any (but that doesn't mean there aren't any -- and it should be easy to enumerate since there's probably only 20 or so billion dollar SW companies).
Re: Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
#30One commonality between many successful dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates is that they dropped out to do something specific, not because they were too lazy or undisciplined to finish. Had the right opportunity not come along, I suspect many celebrity dropouts would have cruised to graduation.
why did steve jobs drop out?