Just Another Dropout

One thing I'm sick of is these damned kids dropping out of school. First, it was guys like Shaquille O'Neal, who dropped out of LSU after his junior year. And now, our very own U. of I. has it's latest dropout saga, in the form of Jawed Karim. All I know is that it's sad how these kids drop out of school.

But more to the point of this post is that I think that it's interesting how much of what you can achieve is the environment around you, and how you choose to embrace it. Some places just constantly get it right - Stanford, Cal, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. These folks just manage to consistently do amazing things.

I have a hypothesis. They have smarter people than we do at Illinois. I'm not saying that we don't have individuals who are of the same caliber of those that are out at the elite institutions. And I'm not saying that out at Yale, you don't get douchebags. Unfortunately, we carry quite a bit of chaff, so that I would venture to say that the general populace out here is closer to what you would get at Western Illinois, than say out at MIT. And oddly enough, even Yale's douchebags seem to have some over-the-top appeal to them.

You look at student publications, and you just see the difference. Here at the U. of I., we claim that we're a top public university. And maybe we are. But when you look at things like the Daily Illini, The Orange and Blue Observer, and The Booze News, you just wonder how it compares to what you may get, say, out at Yale. And don't get me wrong, I think that it's quaint that the Observer raffled off an AK-47 a couple spring ago. But things like the Rumpus only happen when you get a bunch of talented people working together seamlessly. Things like The Booze News happen when you get monkeys, safety scissors, and crayons working together seamlessly with GemClear.

I don't know. I think that I get depressed when I see how much potential is squandered becaue of the environment. And then I get really depressed when I realize that I'm surrounded by people who are ostensibly in the 90th percentile, or higher, of the world at large. Is it bad that much of my immediate world makes me visibly cringe?

So what about the rest of the world? The rest of the world that is happy to attend some community college classes? The rest of the world that never has an education past the 9th grade? Or 4th grade? Or at all? I don't claim to know. But I will say that it's interesting that Jawed Karim didn't make his fortune until after he left for northern Cali.

-Chairman