Two Different College Situations

                 It is so strange to think that one of the most famous and successful businessmen in the world didn't go to college; at least not officially. According to an interesting Forbes article by Dave Surchuk, Steve Jobs didn't fully apply himself in high school, even though it is obvious he could have done well. He was accepted to Reed College, but after attending for a short while, he dropped out. Yet he was a drop-out on paper, as Jobs stayed to audit classes even after he was no longer a student. He took a liking to a calligraphy class and although he had no direct use for the knowledge at the time, he later applied what he learned about fonts to the first Macintosh computer.

It is very peculiar that by sitting in on a few calligraphy classes, Jobs was able to help revolutionize the way a person interacted with a computer. This makes me wonder if Jobs’ success was just based on luck and chance or if he truly made the right choices. Either way, it worked for him and I am not going to question his ability to make a product look appealing. In the video below, Jobs addresses the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford and shares the story of how he got to be CEO of Apple.

Steve Jobs talks about his success in a commencement speech at Stanford (2005).

On the other side, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard for a completely different set of reasons. Gates got two-and-a-half years of college in before he left to work on starting Microsoft. He was convinced that the time was right, and his education at the university was not essential to his foreseeable success with his company, so Gates made the call to bow out for the time being with every intent on returning to finish his schooling. Microsoft was hugely successful and according to an article on The Economic Times’ website, Gates has been touring universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT giving motivational speeches as his own way of “returning to college.”

Though Gates has been so successful even without a degree, he is very adamant that dropping out of college “is not a good idea.” He truly believes that college education is vital, and his success only came because of a unique set of circumstances and ideas. I can’t help but wonder how he knew that his idea would be so successful.

Both Jobs and Gates were successful for different reasons and after some thought, I have more questions about the two of them. For instance, what were their respective companies like in the early stages of business, and were they still sold on the choices they had made?