To be clear: Zuckerberg wasn’t advising that you drop out of college when he brought up his Harvard side projects. He gave the example to illustrate the importance of being creative “outside of the jobs you’ve done.” So, once again, CNBC’s framing is off, but at the same time, Zuckerberg is perhaps revealing how he thought of college: It was his first job. He stuck it out long enough to learn what he needed to learn, but when it turned stale and a new opportunity came along, he hopped firms. Anyone who’s watched people switch jobs in tech, especially in Silicon Valley, has seen this habit in action: there is a genuine fear among young and talented tech workers in Silicon Valley of staying too long at a company whose luster has dimmed, whose tech no longer gets anyone excited. There’s the panic in people’s eyes as they admit to being at the same startup that still, even after two or three years, no one has heard of and no one cares about.
Elizabeth Holmes arrived at Stanford in September 2002; she dropped out in the winter quarter of 2004. I should be clear that I did not view her transcripts; doing that would have been creepy and probably illegal. But I have advised enough students at Stanford to surmise what her brief brush with the university would have looked like. She would have been required to take what was then known as the Introduction to the Humanities program, a general education requirement intended to “build an intellectual foundation in the study of human thought, values, beliefs, creativity, and culture.” In the fall of 2002, this would have meant taking a big-picture class like Visions of Mortality, or Citizenship, or Thinking with Nature—there were eight different ones on offer that quarter—and a sequence of two more specific courses in the winter and spring quarters of 2003. In practice, the fall courses were structured around five great books spanning much of recorded history (start with Gilgamesh, end with a comic book); the winter and spring courses were designed around a set of ten great books drawn from a narrower orbit.
Holmes would also have taken a course in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR, pronounced “power”), a two-quarter sequence unless she’d gotten a 4 or 5 on her English AP, in which case an accelerated one-quarter version was available. There was a language requirement, though it’s possible the Mandarin-immersion classes she took in high school allowed her to place out of it. In her first quarter at Stanford, the journalist John Carreyrou reports, she took an introductory seminar, most likely one called Drug Delivery in the 21st Century, with Channing Robertson, who would eventually go on to help Theranos get initial funding. She also seems to have taken Robertson’s Introduction to Chemical Engineering in the spring quarter—and then, it seems, she was gone.
The reason I’m dwelling on this Stanford inside baseball is to point out that the kind of preparation conjured up by the phrase “a Stanford dropout” is in fact the exact opposite of what her preparation looked like. In a 2009 interview, Holmes said—and the irony should take your breath away in hindsight—that she decided that “another few classes in chemical engineering was not necessary” for what she had in mind. In another interview she said, “I was trained as an engineer.” When she said these things, back before her massive fraud became apparent, it must have been easy to nod along and think, Yes, it’s true, one can probably learn a lot during one magical, pressurized year of intensive study in a place brimming with like-minded, motivated young people. Perhaps in such a setting it is possible to pick up all the skills one needs. But the fact is, that’s not the education Holmes received. It’s the education she would have received—after working on her Writing and Rhetoric, getting her general education requirements out of the way, brushing up on her Mandarin, and exploring some Visions of Mortality or something along those lines.
A lot of professors worry about dropouts because they see them as part of an assault on “liberal education”: the dropout, they think, treats the university as a vocational school and totally ignores its attempts to shape well-rounded individuals and good citizens. And maybe that indeed is what a dropout does. But ironically, it turns out that in nearly all U.S. institutions, the dropout gets only the general stuff. Does that affect the way someone thinks? If so, it might not mean that dropouts leave as narrow thinkers. Holmes would have (probably) read her way through twenty-five books of the Western canon, which is sort of respectable, while her preparation for running a biotech startup consisted of—and I’m quoting from the course description here—“guest scientists and engineers describ[ing] products on the market and in the pipeline,” as well as “field trips.”
Dropouts risk leaving as thinkers for whom there are perfectly true but relatively shallow generalities on the one hand, and myopic problems on the other. The vast gulf between the two is what the later years of their college experience would have filled in. That’s when these big-picture questions come to bear on rather fiddly issues unique to a certain field. At Stanford, unfortunately, the later years are also when most engineers take their ethics requirement. Who knows where Elizabeth Holmes would
