Forbes.com

Forbes.com


The tyranny of the diploma
Brigid McMenamin, Forbes Magazine, 12.28.98

NEW YORK - AT 16 XAVIER DELACOUR dropped out of Albany Academy, a private day school. He went to work hawking Egghead software out of a store in Albany, N.Y. for $6 an hour. Explains Delacour: "My head was set more towards getting my career set up." A quick learner, he was soon writing software code for a local car dealer. Delacour was only 17 when he was hired by a Marlborough, Mass.-based startup, Attune, LLC, where he's helping design a gadget that writes original music and plays it on the Internet in CD quality. Attune plans to license the gadgets to Web sites, which will sell them at $90 each.

At an age when most kids enter college, with their earning years still well in the future, Delacour, a soft-spoken teen, has his own apartment and should earn $50,000 next year, plus a 10% share of the company's profits.

Bill Gates did go to college, but for only three years. He dropped out of Harvard to devote himself full time to computer work. The time he saved from college -- and additional years spared from grad school -- gave Gates a head start in building what was to become the world's greatest fortune. It's not inconceivable that had he gone for a Ph.D., someone else today would be the world's richest person.