Gone are the icons of my youth. When I was growing up, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Mr. T, Isaiah Thomas, William "The Refrigerator" Perry, and Joe Montana were the celebrities that my friends and I talked about. Today’s celebrities are different though, and while we still have our Paris Hiltons' and Lindsay Lohans', there’s a new crop of celebrities - Web entrepreneurs - that may be giving mixed messages about the value of a college education.
Official Web Entrepreneur Celebrity Quiz
So how connected are you into "next generation" celebrities? Are you following the latest drama surrounding Paris Hilton’s jail extravaganza or are you following the frenzy about Kevin Rose’s rumored venture into an instant messenger to end all instant messengers? If you’re in college or high school, you’re most likely following the latter. See how many other celebrity Web entrepreneurs you know. What company did each of these entrepreneurs found:
- Tom Anderson?
- James Hong?
- Mark Zuckerberg?
- Matt Mullenweg?
- Kristopher Tate?
- Kevin Rose?
- Chad Hurley?
The Good and the Bad of Web Entrepreneurs
Each of those individuals has risen - in some degree - to celebrity, iconic status through a Web 2.0 start up company. Tom Anderson, co-founder of MySpace, boasts over 100 million "friends" alone. While most youth would struggle to tell you the name’s of CEOs of General Electric or General Motors, many would be able to tell you that James Hong co-founded Hot or Not, Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook, Mullenweg founded Wordpress, Tate is the founder of Zooomr, and Hurley is a co-founder of YouTube.
As education professionals we can take solace in knowing that these new celebrities are idolized for their ideas, abilities, and accomplishments, as opposed to their looks or how bizarrely they behave in public. The bad news is that many of these iconic celebrities dropped out of college to chase their dreams, and to the chagrin of many in academia, it could be sending the wrong message to tomorrow’s prospective college students.
Take Mark Zuckerberg for example, founder and CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg was enrolled as a student in the 2006 class of Harvard. Zuckerberg, with a few roommates began a site where he posted images of Harvard students as sort of a visual, online directory. The school forced him to take it down but within a year Zuckerberg began Facebook. That same year Zuckerberg took a leave of absence from Harvard and eventually withdrew without graduating.
Then there’s the "rock star" of Web entrepreneurs, Kevin Rose, who attended college for just a few years before jumping ship to take part in the 1990s tech boom. Rose went on to start Digg.com - one of the leading social networking news sites - and become the leader of a new generation of Brat Pack young Web entrepreneurs, many who dropped out of college or skipped it altogether.
The problem, of course, is that for every Kevin Rose or Mark Zuckerberg, there are millions of people without college degrees barely scraping by.
More Evidence of the Strong Relationship between Education and Income
A recent report from the Education Research Center, Diplomas Count: Ready for What? Preparing for College, Careers, and Life After High School, provides another confirmation that the strongest predictor of income level and earning potential is level of education. The report, which examines education levels by income zones, shows a strong, positive correlation between earning power and education level. The study found that among jobholders in zone 3, where the median income is a little over $35,000, 40 percent had some college education. In contrast, zone 1, where the majority of jobholders have a high school diploma or less, the median annual income is $13,000.
Still, the majority of college graduates are likely to end up zone 5 or 6 where the median incomes are around $50,000 to $60,000.
So while many of the new Web entrepreneurs have excelled beyond zone 6 jobs with little to no college educations, statistically it may give false hope to students who would be better off going to college than pursuing an entrepreneurial dream.
But can’t the pursuit of college peacefully coexist with entrepreneurial dreams?
Entrepreneurship and College Are Not Mutually Exclusive
These Web entrepreneur celebrities are different than other celebrities because in many ways they are good role models of how good ideas, industry, innovation, and skill can take someone to the top.
Still, how does one foster a college-going attitude without diminishing someone’s entrepreneurial dream? Pointing to the statistics can help.
According to a recent UCLA study, American Freshmen: Forty-Year Trends 1966-2006, the top three reasons freshman enroll in college are:
- To learn about things that interest them
- To get a better job
- To make more money
According to the UCLA report, even though making more money came in third, almost 70 percent of freshman felt that increasing one’s earning power was a "chief benefit of a college education."
Instead of making it an "if, or" choice, it would be better to make it a "this, and" choice. That is, encourage entrepreneurial ideas and growth in prospective college students, but at the same time appeal to their desire to learn new things that interest them in a college setting. In the end, even if their entrepreneurial ideas fizzle out, statistics show that they will be better off financially for having gone to college rather than skipping it altogether.
Some Things Never Change
The odds of making it big as a celebrity size, Web entrepreneur seem about as likely as becoming a professional athlete, actor, or singer. The key then, is to encourage students’ dreams, but not at the cost of their college education.
That message has been driven home by high school athletic coaches for years, but perhaps none as famously as Coach Ken Carter. Carter took drastic action when it was clear his Richmond High School team’s lackluster academic performance would keep them from getting into college. In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported,
"In the face of criticism from both parents and school officials, he benched his entire 45-player roster on the varsity, junior varsity and freshman squads. He forfeited the next two league games and made the school gym off-limits even for practice. And play didn't resume until scofflaw students raised their grades with the help of tutors and encouragement from teammates. But Carter isn't through yet. His goal is to see every graduating senior go directly to a four-year school."
While the circumstances may be different, the lesson is the same: higher education is not an obstacle, it’s a path.
This was articulated perfectly by another Web entrepreneur who finally picked up his own degree at Harvard University last week.
Bill Gates told over 15,000 recent graduates, "It will be nice to finally have a college degree on my résumé."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Gates said that he had dropped out well educated in economics, politics, and the sciences but still with "one big regret."
"I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequalities in the world - the appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of poverty, disease and despair," he said
Statistically, the message to the next generation of Web entrepreneurs seems simple: the best way to ensure future income is to go to college. But according to Gates, a college education can give students something else: a sense of place in the world that will add higher meaning to their personal and professional lives.
By Justin Draeger
NASFAA Assistant Director for Communications
Posted 06/25/07 to www.NASFAA.org. Redistribution to non-NASFAA institutions is prohibited. Please submit Web Site questions or comments to Web@NASFAA.org.
