Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.
Gates dropped out of Harvard.
Jobs' youth was riddled with frustrations over
formal schooling.
All the above facts lead people to post on Facebook:
“Most billionaires are college dropouts.”
BUT… Yeah, there is a BUT, though we will come
back to it a little later.
What do
we do when we get a project at college? Most of us copy paste stuff off the
internet. What do we learn from this, apart from certain word and PowerPoint
formatting features? What is the solution to this? How can we encourage
students to use the internet for gathering facts but then use their own
intellect to form an opinion about these facts?
The
easier solution would be to start rejecting those assignments which are mere
integration of material on Google and Wikipedia. But then “jugaadu” people can
work around that too. The web is full of opinions about the facts too. Various
articles are available on the net which can also be copy pasted. The harder and
the better solution for encouraging innovation would be to glamorize the
innovativeness. There is no other solution. We have reached a point where
academic excellence is no longer the goal of students. Being successful is, and
rightly so. We need to project innovation just like Shah Rukh Khan promotes his
movies. Rewarding innovative students is one way to do it. But the rewards must
be “Cool”. Gone are the days when you studied hard to be the monitor of the
class. Now you need to be popular among your peer group to become the CR.
College
education should in fact encourage innovation. How could that be done? To begin
with, we could have an Innovation Society in every college. It should be
completely open to every student from any department. There could be professors
to guide the students but there should not be any rules which they need to
follow. Innovation thrives “Where the Mind is without Fear and the head is held
high.” Why should we feel that we have to leave college to work on our
innovative ideas? Instead, why not make colleges a platform where we can come
together and use our academic synergy to polish and execute our ideas? For
instance, if a commerce student wants to work on an ecommerce website, he can
work with computer science students to develop the website and with law
students to find out the legal framework within which he has to operate.
So let’s
come back to the BUT…
What we
need to stress on is the fact that,"most billionaires are college dropouts"
BUT
“Most college
dropouts are not billionaires.”
and the
fact that these college dropouts who turned billionaires had great innovative
ideas before dropping out. Innovation is the lesson to be learnt here, not that
dropping out of college or just “going through” college will make you a
billionaire.