"I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning" - Elon Musk
Elon Musk, ladies and gentlemen ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-college…
"But there is a requirement of 'evidence of exceptional ability.' I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability," Musk said. "In fact, ideally, you dropped out and did something. If you look at like, you know, Gates is a pretty smart guy; he dropped out. Jobs, pretty smart — he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy — he dropped out. Like, obviously not needed. Did Shakespeare even go to college? Probably not."
![https://i.insider.com/5e66b71784159f21c84e0c22?width=1900&format=jpeg&a…]
Clown of the year
All the exceptional ability in the world won't help if you can't do your chores.
Start with a big group of proven chore-doers and interview them to find out who are the ones with exceptional ability.
When did HYP become HPY...
guess we know he went to P
Only good thing musky has ever said
Didn't he go to UPenn....? Whatever you say Elon.
he did drop out of his masters/phd at stanford though
after getting 2 degrees from U Penn
Elon is generally right, but one thing to add on to this is that exceptional ppl always find a way to extract something valuable even from mundane stuff like college. Sure, Jobs dropped out of college because he didn't find enough value in it, but even after dropping out he continued to audit a few classes that he found interesting at Reed, like calligraphy (which played a big part in modern computer typography).
Seems about right to me. The most exceptional geniuses and entrepreneurial masterminds in the world don’t need college, and might even be held back from real-world opportunities that they could be pursuing, but that represents about 0.001% of people.
you might even say these exceptional people are the exception
Ooof.
Whether you learn or not in college, either the topic at hand or how to learn, is a personal choice. If you're only going there to make sure you turn in your assignments on time and learning how to do your own laundry, then you are paying an exorbitant amount of money while choosing not to learn.
Some of things you can choose to learn in college are the survivorship bias, which is the "logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility," or the issue of causation vs. correlation where just because two things happen does not mean one is a direct result of the other. You also are able to learn how to make effective arguments, avoiding the practice of creating a "strawman" argument only to "burn" it down, as well as the importance of critical thinking.
With this framework, you can analyze the argument Musk uses to look at Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison dropping out of college by asking the following questions:
What about all of the people who dropped out of college and now work in minimum wage jobs? With the known median income for college graduates much higher than the median income for non-college graduates, would completing college have helped these individuals?
Is the act of dropping out of college what defined individuals like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison and lead to their success - or did their tremendous intellects, appetites for risk, and drives for entrepreneurialism have more to do with it?
Has anyone ever said that the purpose of college is "evidence of exceptional ability" in the first place, or is that a strawman Elon is using to make his point?
and perhaps most importantly:
Even Bill Gates said that education is underrated and this is coming from someone who dropped out.
Did he? When I've heard him speak he appears to me to be a fairly strong proponent of secondary education. In fact, he's made US education system investment one of the two pillars of his foundation (the other being disease eradication in developing nations). Of course not all education is equal and it needs to be radically improved. But when Gates talks about dropping out he talks about building a company as something he wanted to try, and had a unique opportunity to do, but that if he failed he could still come back to Harvard from leave of absence. Some relevant Gates quotes:
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
He's basically Peter Gregory
Says the guy who has 2 bachelors and once enrolled in a Ph.D. program
So he has on the field experience to call it bullshit. I have a Master's degree, I agree with him. Actually in many cases he's overstating. Colleges don't even teach you the chores. Especially social sciences.
I agree with him partly. I've seen plenty of "EcOn" majors who couldn't tell me what the 4 basic types of markets taught in Microecon 101 are. My data(?) shows that they often miss out on monopolistic competition for some reason. And the humanities... I'm sure you share my thoughts on humanities.
Heck, my own mother was busy partying in college and now heads an entire region for a multi-national corp.
But when someone who studied physics, was briefly enrolled in a physics Ph.D, and actually gets to use some of his physics knowledge in his work says something like this... I don't think it helps the argument. Perhaps I'm biased because I actually rely on what I learned in college to do my work. I just think it's different for each person and there is no right answer.
What was your Master's on btw?
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