Most billionaires are college dropouts BUT….

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.  

P.S - Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."