Stop getting inspired by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg college dropout stories

With the growing penetration of the internet, the success stories of college dropouts are getting popular worldwide. There is a reason.

These stories are inspiring and typically used to promote entrepreneurship and throw a huge axe at the education system. They are used to encourage budding entrepreneurs who are still in college to focus more on their idea on the eve of getting funded and stop paying heed to education. They are silently fed, their startup idea does not resonate enough with the education they are getting in the college, and to say the least, it’s a pure waste of time.

There is no proudness in quitting college and getting inspired by the achievements of a handful number of lucky individuals, that too from the U.S only. This does not happen to everybody. Realistically speaking, we only have three such stories and God knows how long they’d be talked about. These stories are misleading people.

The era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs was different as they wanted to take the first-mover advantage of introducing an operating system in computers with a graphical interface, something that was unheard of before the late’70s.

Gates focused on Windows OS software while Jobs was busy introducing his typography for fonts in Mac. In the mid-’70s, People did not know anything about computers and these two gentlemen took a lot of pride in working on something that would reshape the world in the years to come. People did not know anything about computers and within a decade, every home was equipped with a computer. This achievement is credited to the vision of Apple and Microsoft CEOs.

Two decades later, in-comes, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of Harvard to focus on the social networking website Facebook. He started with an ambition to connect his college friends before expanding his services to a city and then connecting the whole world within the next few years. His struggle was not as big as Gates and Jobs’s, realistically speaking, he only re-invented the wheel by picking the social networking ideas of MySpace and Orkut.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs were dropouts of Harvard and Reed College respectively. There is a huge difference between these institutes and any college in Asia and unfortunately, these college dropout success stories are bragged about the most in India and Pakistan.

People need to stop feeling proud of these dropout stories, they come from a different era and of course, different circumstances and one country.

Far beyond that, people need to understand, the old school education needs to improve to meet and fit the new challenges. This is an era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s technologies. Skills such as artificial intelligence, genome editing are high in demand in industries all over the world and the list of skills just does not stop here. Education at every grade, starting from school needs to point towards such industrial opportunities. All essential trending skills should be taught to the students so they are prepared for the industry challenges when they step into practical life.

The debate should not be (never was) about school or education being useless. It is and will always be, the world’s current education system needs to change.

Jack Ma, Founder of Ali Baba and Chinese richest man openly speaks about the flaws of the education system. Here is Jack Ma’s analysis of our education system and why we need to change it.

Education in the world needs to improve and teach students the following.

– How to fight fear
– How to learn a skill
– How to make a decision
– How to plan the future
– How to make money
– How to grow in life