Fellow Chronicle bloggers Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently called my attention to a phenomenon that I’ve been thinking about ever since I saw the film The Social Network in 2010. In their February 12 post, guest writers Charles Kurose and Amato Nocera, research assistants from the Spencer Foundation, look back at a New York Times op-ed piece by Michael Ellsberg titled, “Will Dropouts Save America?” The Ellsberg piece is nothing if not dramatic. I’ll quote the first two short paragraphs:
I typed these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Steve Gates and Paul Allen.
And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook—invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
After convincing his audience that the only way to become a billionaire is to drop out of college, Ellsberg goes on to make a more interesting and nuanced case. He argues that if you want to go into one of the “regulated” fields—doctor, lawyer, engineer—then you must go to college, but he goes on to say that the “formal” job market that employs such professionals composes only twenty percent of the workforce. Startup companies that compose an “informal market,” Ellsberg argues, are the real drivers of job creation in the U.S., and they make up eighty percent of the workforce. As his argument unfolds, it gets edgier and more personal. He creates a binary opposition between traditional classroom skills and “street-smart skills and real-world networking,” and concludes by saying “I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses,” and not on “college students cramming for tests and writing papers with properly formatted M.L.A. –style citations in order to bolster their resumes for careers in traditional professions and middle-management jobs in large corporate and government bureaucracies.” Too bad such a potentially interesting idea ends up being reduced to caricatures.
Fortunately, I don’t have to refute Ellsberg’s piece because Kurose and Nocera absolutely demolish it. They first look to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and note that, of the 1,800,000 people working in “computer systems and related services,” 7 percent have only high-school degrees, while 73 percent have bachelor’s degrees or higher. They then move on to look at the executives at Bill Gates’s and Paul Allen’s company, Microsoft. They find that 58 percent of the executives at that company have degrees higher than a B.A., and with the passing of Steve Jobs, fully 100 percent of Apple executives have at least a B.A., and a similar 56 percent have more advanced degrees. And it goes without saying that anyone who wants to work for Microsoft or Apple, still two shining examples of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, had better have college credentials and resumes that prepare them to work in either of those two large corporate bureaucracies. There’s not much left of Ellsberg when Kurose and Nocera are finished
I still think there’s more to the story though, and I’d like to close by introducing a few threads that I will pick up next time. First, Ellsberg’s op-ed piece and hence, by necessity, Kurose and Nocera’s refutation are unduly narrow, focusing exclusively on technology. What can we say about the many college dropouts who don’t go into technology, where all the get-rich-quick fantasies seemingly take place?
Second, what about issues of access? Sure, Ellsberg trots out a dazzling list of college dropouts, but where did they come from and from where did they drop out? Steve Jobs was gifted—he knew how to read before he began his formal schooling—and he attended prestigious Reed College before dropping out. Bill Gates’s father was a prominent lawyer, and his grandfather a bank president; Gates attended Harvard. Paul Allen’s father was an associate director of the University of Washington’s libraries; Allen attended Washington State before dropping out. Jack Dorsey dropped out of NYU. Evan Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska and dropped out of the University of Nebraska after a year and a half. Mark Zuckerberg was the son of a psychiatrist and a dentist, and famously dropped out of Harvard after co-founding Facebook. Dustin Moskovitz, his partner in the early years, also dropped out of Harvard. Sean Parker, a true outlier, was making $80,000 a year working on various projects, including consulting work for the CIA, and convinced his parents to allow him to skip college.
This is an admittedly mixed bag, but it includes a higher than average amount of family wealth, the means to get into schools such as Reed, NYU and, in three cases, Harvard, and draw from them (if not a diploma) an incredible amount of social and intellectual resources. These are not your average college dropouts. My guess is that the average college dropout today is someone who simply cannot juggle the multiple pressures of taking courses, working, borrowing student loans, and possibly raising children. But if we are to be skeptical of Ellsberg’s position that college dropouts will save America, we also need to be skeptical of its opposite number, expressed most prominently in President Obama’s belief that the United States should be first in the world in college graduates—in other words that there is some automatic cause-and-effect connection between college education and national economic prosperity. I would direct everyone to Peter Wood’s recent post on that subject, and will take it into account next time.
