We all believe that college provides the road to success, but is that really the case? For many, this wasn’t true at all. Here is a list of some famous college dropouts who left school without their undergrad degrees but with plenty of ambitions and talents to make wondrous things happen.
Bill Gates
You all are familiar with this name. Bill Gates, the future philanthropist left Harvard after the end of his sophomore year. He dropped out of his school after his junior year. Bill Gates exited school twice only to focus on the company he co-founded in 1975, Microsoft.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook dropped out of an Ivy league school back in 2005 to focus on his then young but social media platform Facebook. According to the book” The Facebook Effect,” it took him about just five minutes to make the decision and to quit college.
Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison is known as a software billionaire and a founder of Oracle. When he was a kid, his adoptive parents dreamed of him being a doctor, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago. He struggled with his medical courses and decided to drop out. Now, he is worth over $55 billion.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs might be one of the most famous college dropouts in history. He is the co-founder of Apple. Steve Jobs left Reed College when he was only 19 because it was too much of a financial burden on his family.
Michael Dell
Michael Dell dropped out of University of Texas at Austin in his freshmen year only at the age of 19. He later went on finding Dell Technologies and now he is worth over $20.9 billion.
Oprah
Oprah who is also known as the Toughest Woman in America, had a full scholarship to Tennessee State to study Communications. She only had one credit left to graduate but things took a wild turn when Oprah left to pursue her career in media. Oprah took a Chicago morning talk show which ranked the lowest to first ranking show in just a couple of months, which is quite impressive.
Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford in her sophomore year. When Holmes founded her healthcare-technology company Theranos, she decided to drop out of college to solely focus on her company. Today, she is America’s youngest female billionaire with a net worth of $4.6 billion.
Evan Williams
Evan Williams grew up in Clarks, Nebraska. He attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for almost three semesters before he decided to drop out. Evan Williams was a freelance software programmer for Intel before landing a gig at Google. Later onwards, he quit his job at Google to build Twitter and now he is a billionaire.
Arash Ferdowsi
Arash Ferdowsi dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2007 after three years at school. He left to later co-found Drobox, which in no time grew from a small start-up to a service which is used by millions of people. He is now a millionaire.
Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick studied computer engineering at UCLA. However, he decided to quit college just months before graduating to later become the CEO and founder of Uber.