Dominance

US global computer dominance came from men without college degrees: Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft - no college degrees. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple - no college degrees. (After Wozniak was already a mega-billionaire, he took a degree to give himself eligibility to teach elementary school in California, I've been told. But that college made Wozniak is clearly untrue.) Michael Dell is another un-degreed immortal of the computer game; as is Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Ted Turner, founder of CNN, dropped out of college in his freshman year; William Faulker's high school grades were too horrible to get him into the University of Mississippi, but after service as an officer in WWI, he was given a waiver and enrolled. In Faulkner's first (and last) term, he received a"D" in English and dropped out in disgust, never to return. Warren Avis, the man who pioneered auto rentals at airports, decided college was a waste of time and never even applied. Edward Hamilton, the nation's largest independent mailorder book dealer, wrote me that the advantage he had over his competition at the beginning was that he hadn't wasted his capital or time on college. Paul Orfalea, the highly intelligent, soft-spoken founder of Kinko's, was not regarded as very bright by his high school, as he tells in his memoir Copy This. Shawn Fanning, whose invention of Napster at age 18 almost ruined the commercial music industry, was hired by that industry in 2007 for millions of dollars, to design a plan to save it. Shawn had no college degree, and currently has no plans to get one.

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 47, 48