Top 3 Successful College Drop-outs

 

Henry Ford is the first successful college dropout with a net worth of $188 billion. At the age of 16 he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist. Ford always had a passion for mechanical devices. One of his first jobs was being a watch repair man, which he self-taught himself. Ford’s engineering career didn’t begin until he was 28 when he became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. Within three years he was promoted to Chief Engineer which gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. Within another three years of his experiments Ford completed his first self-propelled vehicle, the Quadricycle. After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The company only produced a few cars a day, but in 1908 Ford introduced the Model T, which initiated a new era in personal transportation. What Ford did next revolutionized automobile production and made him the face of American automobiles. In 1913 Ford invented the continuous moving assembly line. The concept of manufacturing cars on an assembly line made Henry Ford one of the most successful Americans of all time.

Bill Gates is the second successful college dropout with a net worth of $59 billion. Gates first fell in love with computers and computer programming at the age of 13 when he was first introduced to the ASR-33 teletype terminal General Electric computer. At the age of 13 Gates also wrote his first computer program, which was a tic-tac-toe implementation that allowed users to play games against the computer. Later Gates was introduced to the system, PDP-10 belonging to the company Computer Center Corporation (CCC), who ended up banning Gates and three other students from their system because of them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time. At the end of the four year ban, CCC hired the four students to help find bugs in their software in exchange for computer time. While Gates spent his time at CCC he studied source code for various programs, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. Eventually CCC went out of business and Gates moved on to another company where he wrote one of his first large programs. As an employee at Information Sciences Inc. Gates wrote a program to schedule students’ classes for his high school, which first started to demonstrate his ability as a computer programmer. At age 17, Gates formed a venture with one of his friends Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In 1973 Gates graduated from Lakeside School with an SAT score of 1590. He then enrolled into Harvard with no definite study plan. In 1974 he dropped out of Harvard to pursue his computer software company, by 1975 him and Allen formed Microsoft. The rest is history.

Larry Ellison is the third successful college drop out with a net worth of $27 billion. Ellison had a rough childhood; he was born to an unwed mother, who gave him to Ellison’s aunt and uncle to raise. At nine months old, Ellison was officially adopted by his aunt and uncle. He did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48 years old and still to this day he does not know the identity of his father. In 1959, Ellison and his family moved to South Shore, Chicago, where he finished up his high school education. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he eventually dropped out after his second semester because of his mother’s death. The next year he attended the University of Chicago for one term where he was introduced to computer design. At the age of 20 he moved to northern California and eventually started to work for Ampex Corporation, where his first project was a database for the CIA, which he named “Oracle”. Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems. In 1977 Ellison founded Oracle, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratoires. In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc. and then finally renamed to its present name Oracle.

The above three men all defied the cliché of attending college to become a successful individual. Ford falling in love with mechanics at the age of 16, Gates falling in love with programming at the of 13, and Ellison falling in love with computer design and database relationships at the age of 20, they all found their passion at a different age, yet they all were determined to make their passions a success story, without a college education. Although college is a vital step in individuals’ development towards success and is supported with data, there are some special cases where talent and determination takes precedents in success