Rush then points out that he never went to college, and look at him now.
The question is, what kind of people can succeed without going to college? Well - those who are great with computers, obviously. I believe Steve Jobs never went to college. He didn't need to! (Although, it's one thing to not need college level classes in computers or what have you, but if you want to form your own business, you need to take classes in accounting, advertising, and running a business! If not from a votech or college, from a few good books!
RUSH: Peter Thiel, one of the cofounders of PayPal, he's also a bigwig in a gay activist group, GOProud, gay Republicans. I have met Peter Thiel. I have met Peter Thiel at the home of Ann Coulter. He is a smart guy. I had a conversation with him one night with Conrad Black and we were discussing China, economics and so forth. That's just who he is, cofounder of PayPal. You might have seen him mentioned if you saw the movie Social Network. He was mentioned in the latter half of the movie when they're setting up Facebook.
This story is from the San Francisco Chronicle: "In a move meant to provoke thought about the value of higher education, Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, is giving 24 students money not to attend college for two years but to develop their ideas instead. The winners were announced today for a new fellowship that has sparked heated debate in academic circles for questioning the value of higher education and suggesting that some entrepreneurial students may be better off leaving college. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will pay each of the 24 winners of his Thiel Fellowship $100,000 not to attend college for two years and to develop business ideas instead.
"The fellows, all 20 years old or younger, will leave institutions including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, to work with a network of more than 100 Silicon Valley mentors and further develop their ideas in areas such as biotechnology, education, and energy. More than 400 people applied for the fellowship, and 45 of them were flown out to San Francisco in late March." I think essentially here a scholarship not to go to the college. (interruption) Oh, you don't like this, Dawn? You're shaking your head in there? I know this is a touchy subject for a lot of people.
As many of you may know and remember, I did not go to college. I came very close to flunking out because I got an F in speech class twice, if you can believe it. I went to every class. I gave every speech. I just didn't outline them according to the instructions that were given, so I got an F for insolence and insubordination. I said, "You should call the class outline 101, not speech 101." And then there was ballroom dance, I've told the story over and over again. But I knew what I wanted to do. I knew when I was eight what I wanted to do. When I started working my first job was shining shoes at the barbershop. I wanted to always work. I started in radio when I was 16 and every day of summer vacation I'm getting up at four or five o'clock in the morning go to work at a radio station. You couldn't keep me out of there. I just loved it. From the time I discovered that and when I first started work at a radio station everything else to me was a problem, everything else was an obstacle. It was not helpful and led to great problems with my father.
My father and mother came from the Great Depression. That was the formative experience in their lives, and given that their belief was, and what they inculcated to me and my brother, who did go to college, as a lawyer and a talent agent and an author and a columnist, they told us you have no prayer of making anything of yourself if you don't go to college. I didn't rebel against my parents in the typical ways that kids rebel. I didn't think they were full of it and try to burn down the house or anything, but I did rebel in telling them that, you know, your values are not mine. I know what I want to do. I was so impatient to get started doing it.
I remember when I got my first job out of town, which is Pittsburgh in 1971, something hit me. I left home and I realized I'm gonna have to be able to demonstrate what I know 'cause I don't have a diploma that says I'm educated, and I'm never gonna have one 'cause I could not stand the classroom. I hated it. It was like prison. But that value of my father's is an American dream value. Go to college or you don't stand a chance. It still hasn't changed much. And as you know, there are anecdotal examples of people that dropped out that are very famous. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, any number of entrepreneurs. The Zuckerberg guy dropped out of Harvard to devote full time to Facebook. And you can't take anecdotes like that, say, "Well, that's good for everybody." But with the cost of a college education these days, I am seeing more and more people asking themselves, is it ultimately worth it? Is there value here in it? In the sense that, okay, you go to junior high, high school, you graduate, and then it's just automatic, next stop, college, gotta go there, gotta park yourself there ....
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In the interests of Order and Method: My Schedule of Regular Posts:
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day
*Monday through Friday througout the day - My posts on anything that I feel like talking about. At least one or two a day, sometimes more.
*Saturday through Sunday morning - An addition to my booklist of political books - covering Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties.
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