Subject: Re: Qualities for success
The challenge is that the top 5% of any arbitrary group does not require spoon-feeding. Want to learn about art history? Read a book. Want to learn calculus, well it's probably helpful to have a teacher tutor you to get over the rough bits, but from then on - read a book. (Frankly it would have been helpful if the appropriate terms were used when they were teaching slopes and areas in elementary school).

When I hired people, I paid little attention to their educational background. What we were doing was novel and not generally taught in school anyway and I felt that all a diploma proved was that you had enough time and concentration to get through four years of college. I ended up with people with doctorates, college dropouts, graduates of technical community colleges and a few who neglected to list their educational credentials. One of the dropouts became the highest earning employee for multiple decades. I'm not sure of the formal education of my final administrative assistant as I "stole" her when the company she worked for closed their NYC office (admittedly, I had been interfacing with her for years which provided me with far more information than any resume).

The final "two" (turned out to be three) years of my engineering degree were taken at night (4.5 hours per night, four nights a week). When it came time to graduate, the advisor discovered that (for reasons frankly I don't remember) that I had dropped Electrical Engineering 101 which was the prerequisite for all the other EE courses I had taken. He told me I would have to take it before I graduated. Fortunately, I was able to negotiate taking a post-grad level course instead.

I guess, if you are Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg (or other independent successful business owner - or applying for a job with me) an actual diploma is not too important, but for the rest applying for a job in the STEM field, it is. For those who are interested, you can take every course given by MIT for free on-line. After four years, presumably, you have taken everything you would need for one of their degrees. For some reason, it won't help you much if the job you are applying for demands a college degree. There is no particular correlation between education and intelligence.

"Just for fun", I took an MBA in night school after being in business for a number of years.

Because my undergrad degree was not in "business" I had to take all the standard prerequisites before being allowed to take an MBA. To be honest, I forget whether I crammed them all into one or maybe it was two, terms. I then scratched my head and wondered why they made business students spend four years leaning what they were clearly able to cram into far less time.

As I had an engineering degree, the math taught during the MBA program (which was a struggle for many) was trivial. My most important take-away from the degree was an understanding of the one-dimensional decision-making methodology taught, and followed, by most MBAs(based on what was taught at Harvard and Stanford - which had a case study approach). Engineering is basically a problem-solving discipline based on the initial "proper" definition of the problem. Since my businesses were largely based on competitive bidding against people with MBAs, my problem definition was strongly biased by solving for the solution they were most likely to use and then adjusting my bid accordingly. That knowledge, acquired by sitting through multiple courses which taught "the best way to whatever" was well worth the time and effort as it taught me where "the others" would stick their pin.

In general, I didn't enjoy taking my undergraduate degree and ended up (in the real world) using the elective courses I took far more than the "core" (which I almost never needed). The MBA was enjoyable as it felt like playing most of the time, but frankly, while that short cram session of the business pre-requisites taught most of the skills, the rest of the time was spend hammering in the "thinking" part, which in reality was the ossification of the thought process which I was able to take advantage of.

I guess school is what you make of it - unless someone else coopts its importance.

Jeff