The myth of Silicon Valley dropout deceives the world. They make you believe that universities are useless, but they are crazy about famous universities.

"What's the use of going to college?"

"Bill Gates didn't graduate, Zuckerberg didn't graduate, Jobs didn't finish college, so he didn't change the world?"

The most successful set of education narratives in Silicon Valley over the past decade has been to portray the university as an optional path.

Therefore, in the current wave of science and technology, many college students and high school students have given up reading and plunged into Silicon Valley to start a business.

Is this myth of dropping out of school for decades the truth, or is it a carefully packaged narrative of success?

In the world of entrepreneurship and wealth, the myth of dropout in Silicon Valley has been circulating for a long time, but few people will really sort out these data to see what the facts are.

Professor Ilya Strebraev Ilya of Stanford Business School Strebulaev team conducted in-depth tracking of 1110 unicorn companies and a total of 4975 founders in the United States over the past 20 years.

The result is unexpected. The higher the degree, the greater the probability of becoming a unicorn founder, and the success of dropout students is only a fraction.

The data shows that compared to the U.S. population over the age of 25,The probability of unicorn founders having a doctorate is about 6 times that of ordinary people, the probability of having a master's degree is about 3 times, and even the proportion of undergraduate graduates is twice that of ordinary people.

Source: stanford

In other words, the higher the education background, the greater the advantage of this group of people. At least from the data, Senior high school did not finish their studies and did not graduate from university. Direct All in entrepreneurship is not the mainstream path of entrepreneurship.

However, there are only 56 of the 530 unicorn samples in the early stage. Although the number is not small, it is only rare in the whole statistics.

Source: stanford

In addition, some founders did not drop out of school as we thought, Senior high school or went out before finishing college.

For example, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who "dropped out" of Stanford computer doctors, not only got this master's degree before leaving school, but also developed Google's core technical papers.

Dropping out may be successful, but that's a special case, not a replicable sample.

In fact, most successful entrepreneurs are graduates of top universities with high academic qualifications. For example, Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan is a PhD in biochemical engineering from MIT, while Lyra Health co-founder Dena Bravata has an MD from Columbia University.

Jeff Bezos, a Princeton graduate majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, founded Amazon.

Source: Google

If we jump out of the entrepreneurial circle, we can also see that the wealth accumulation of the top rich is also closely related to the background of high education and prestigious schools.

According to EssayHumanizer's latest analysis of the world's 3184 billionaires based on Forbes data, there is a striking concentration effect on the distribution of wealth.

The world's 3184 billionaires have a fortune of $13.58 trillion billion, of which 1445 graduated from the top 100 universities in the world, accounting for 45.38 per cent, but their wealth accounts for 80.78 per cent of the total wealth of the sample.

According to the report, the top 10 universities have trained nearly 36% of the rich alumni, which is equivalent to one in three billionaires from these 10 top universities.

Source: Forbes

If it is said that prestigious schools and high academic qualifications are the guarantee to success, then why are the stories of dropout students flying all over the sky? What can we see from their experiences?

The Silicon Valley dropout myth has been able to take the world by storm, in fact, is the useSurvivorship biasA few cases are regarded as a universal law.

But if we look at the background of these legends, we can see that dropping out of school is not a causal factor for their success, it's just a coincidence.

Many people only saw Bill Gates drop out of Harvard University, but few people noticed that his father was already a top lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was a well-known bank director and IBM executive.

His younger brother Zuckerberg also dropped out of Harvard University, but he Senior high school went to Phillips Exeter Academy Phillips Exeter College, one of the top private Senior high school in the United States, with strong family support.

图源：Phillips Exeter Academy

For these elite descendants, dropping out of school is not a wreck, but a game with a high fault tolerance rate. Even if the business is screwed up, they can still return to a prestigious school or make a comeback with family support.

And these dropouts are not as unlearned and unloving as we think. In fact, they are the craziest learners in the world.

Bill Gates has been obsessed with computers since he was a child. When he was 13 years old, he often slipped through the window of his bedroom to study the code called "C cube.

When he was still in high school, Bill Gates began to contract commercial programming projects and wrote a complex automatic course scheduling system for the school. At the age of 17, he set up a Traf-O-Data company with Paul Allen and made his first pot of gold.

Even if Jobs dropped out of school and started his own business, he would still go back to school to take calligraphy classes. Later, he applied these calligraphy aesthetics to product design and technology.

While at Harvard, Zuckerberg not only majored in computer science, but also minored in psychology. He also applies the study of human social motivation and psychological needs to product development, which is to open the Facebook of the social media era.

According to his college roommate, in the early days of the development Facebook, Zuckerberg almost entered a crazy geek state, often typing code for dozens of hours without eating, drinking or resting.

Source: Business Insider

For them, it is only the traditional university curriculum that is abandoned, not the knowledge itself.

But in the past reports, we only saw them drop out of school and then succeed, but we can't see that they have been learning and iterating by themselves.

Their success is also inseparable from the dividends of the times. In the early consumer Internet era, as long as they knew some programming and had good business ideas, young people might be able to make explosions in the garage.

But today, the track has changed from a blue sea to a red sea, which can be seen from the AI elites that have emerged in the past two years.

Dario Amodai, the founder and CEO of the AI model unicorn Anthropic, not only has a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University, but also completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Yang Zhilin, the founder of the dark face of the most high-profile AI enterprise in China, also graduated from the computer science department of Tsinghua University and later studied for a doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

In fact, the so-called Silicon Valley dropout narrative is just a brand public relations.

Because Silicon Valley has always liked to shape a kind of values, the traditional rules are left to ordinary people, the real genius should break the rules.

This narrative has some brand value for startups, investors, business incubators, and tech giants. It can package entrepreneurship as a radical, anti-traditional, risk-taking culture.

And this is the media's favorite element: rebellion, youth, counterattack, breaking the rules, wealth and freedom.

Over time, if you see more successful cases like this, you will have an illusion that dropping out of school and starting a business is a common feature of successful people.

图源：the conversation

But really, it's just outward propaganda. Silicon Valley elites have always been double-labeled in education, while publicizing the uselessness of academic qualifications, happy education and free exploration.

Inside, however, there was an arms race for education, with children from elite families ranging from kindergartens for gifted children and top private Senior high school all the way to rattan schools and then to top laboratories.

The existence of information gap will make many families believe that the university is useless, thus giving up this cross-class channel.

The elite, on the other hand, has completely monopolized core high-value industries such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and semiconductors through high-threshold academic credentials.

With the advent of the AI age, the class solidification brought about by this kind of knowledge barrier will be more serious.

In the past, ordinary people could still rely on simple basic skills such as software development, financial accounting, and marketing to get a share of the technological wave.

When AI can automatically generate basic code, automatically design web pages, and automatically write marketing copy, these low-end positions will be eliminated.

Those who remain will either master the underlying core algorithms, have cutting-edge academic innovation capabilities, and be able to define technical standards, and they will also have 20% of the social wealth and voice.

The remaining 80% will become ordinary labor using AI tools, which is not only highly substitutable, but also depreciated.

Source: unsplash

Today's scientific and technological competition is a new contest of hard power.

From the breakthrough of the algorithm at the bottom of the big model, to the physical limit of quantum chip, to the technical attack of gene editing, all need decades of systematic academic training and profound theoretical accumulation.

For ordinary students, especially those talented and motivated young people who want to enter high-value industries and join the top class, elite universities are still a very important channel.

It provides not only a diploma, but also top professors, research platform, alumni network, internship opportunities and industry resources.

More importantly, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and other prestigious schools themselves are a strong endorsement of ability to help young people enter high-threshold industries and circles earlier.

Superstitious Silicon Valley's dropout myth may be a product of the last era.