Does Bill Gates college dropout example present any hopes, dreams or lessons for anyone who is feeling like dropping out of college this year?  What are the statistics of college dropout success?

In a study carried out on over 11,000 US leaders, it was found that 94% of them attended college while a remarkable 50% of them attended elite schools.

There are approximately 325 million people living in the US of these over 214 million are working adults.  I am curious as to how many of the remaining 213,988,260 consider themselves unsuccessful.

I know that scientifically speaking the 11,000 people that were surveyed represents a good quadrant of the population but is it sufficient to prove that college dropouts are generally not successful?

When you compare it to the other 213 million working adults the number of 11,000 does not seem to represent a fair average in the grand scheme of things.

Should success be measured against one person's accomplishments?  Should we use the "Bill Gates college dropout" example as the ultimate pinnacle from which everyone else should be measured?

Bill Gates College Dropout

Let's spend some time looking at the story of Bill Gates as a college dropout.  He entered Harvard in 1973 and two years later he dropped out of college to set up Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen.

He went on to say that staying in school is a good thing.  The only reason why he dropped out of college is that he did not want to miss the personal computer revolution.

In an article in 2017, Bill Gates said that the 45.2% dropout rate is tragic and "Without more graduates, our country will face a shortage of skilled workers and fewer low-income families will get the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty,"

He is not the only successful person who is a school or college dropout.  Here are 10 other well-known entrepreneurs who are college dropouts that continue to defy the odds.

As you can see the founders of Apple, Uber, Whole Foods, Dell and Twitter are all college dropouts.  So maybe let's look at another example of someone else who is a college dropout.

Steve Jobs College Dropout

Steve Jobs dropped out of college at the tender age of 19.  He went on in 1976 to build his first commercial product in his parent's garage together with his co-founder Steve Wozniak.  The product that they built was called the Apple 1.

He did take a calligraphy course in college which he credited as the inspiration for beautiful typography on the Mac.  As I am sat here writing this article on a Mac all I can say is thanks to the both Steve's.

In a speech at a Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs advised the graduands to "do what you love. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become....