The Good, the Bad, and the Dropouts

By Peter Lloyd

Much is made of the fact that great contemporary creative leaders such as Steve Jobs did not finish college. But then neither did Charles Manson or Starpoint Central High School’s “most promising computer programmer,” Timothy McVeigh. And if you think about the people you know, chances are those you would consider successful probably hold degrees. For every dropout success story, I’m sure you can find many more dropouts limited by their unfinished education.

Heralding the exceptions certainly should not be construed as a recommendation to drop out of school. If there’s a correlation to note, it’s that as many as 70 percent of all inmates in US prisons and 94 percent of young murder victims failed to graduate from high school. So then what is the point of pointing out that a few people who make a lot of money did not graduate from college?

It’s fair to ask why some dropouts like Walt Disney, Duke Ellington, Will Rogers, and Thomas Edison did so well without the benefits of higher education. Fair as well to ask why institutions of higher learning fail to retain creative greats.

It would be easy to blame higher education for boring creative giants or to blame secondary education for cramping the creativity of high schoolers to the point where they want no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks. Exceptionally creative and intelligent people certainly find the rigors of the classroom tedious, but creative people tend to go through whatever it takes to follow their passions. And there it is—when their envisioned path to success precludes further education, nothing can stop a creative giant from taking that path.

More than a million students drop out of US high schools every year to find jobs and help their families, because of an unexpected pregnancy or illness, or to escape bullying or boredom. Most dropouts suffer economic hardship and social stigma. They are more likely to end up unemployed, incarcerated, or homeless. Only one out of three high school graduates found full-time employment between 2006 and 2011.

In Will Dropouts Save America? Michael Ellsberg argues that dropouts do what our rank-and-file college graduates, as a rule, do not do. They break new ground, leave the pack and blaze new trails for the rest of us to follow. It’s no surprise that they don’t do so by leaving the traditional academic path.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

Where would we be if Bill Gates had stuck it out and finished school? Maybe another fit-to-be-tied innovator would have taken his places. Or maybe I’d be using a typewriter right now. What if Wilbur and Orville Wright had graduated from hight school, gone on to get MBAs and decided to focus on building Wright Bike franchises?

Suppose Allan Stewart Konigsberg (left) had gone academic, teaching film instead of flunking out of City College of New York and making them? What would art school have done to Vincent van Gogh?

Imagine Mrs. James Dougherty (right) sticking with spraying airplane parts and inspecting parachutes at the Radioplane Munitions Factory! What sort of R-E-S-P-E-C-T would we have for Aretha Franklin had she decided to do anything else?

Geniuses drop out of school with a dream, a plan, and the passion to see it through in spite of any obstacle. Without all of these ingredients, dropping out is a hard way to go.

See also:

The World’s Most Successful Drop Outs Business Insider
High school grads face grim job prospects CBS News
Dropping Out Wikipedia

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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