Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference

It seems like a number of people on that list are authors and artists. Those are fields where university education has never really been of any significance. It would be more interesting to see a list with those and similar professions removed.<p>Secondly a couple of them are very dubious,for example Chuck Yeager didn't attend college, but calling him self educated is a bit of a stretch as it ignores all the training and education he got in the military.

A lot of the people on that list at least went to college. It was a lot easier to get away with this back then, whereas today no one will even look at you unless you have a diploma of some kind (in most fields, at least). I am far more impressed with the ones who never even started, or who never even finished the equivalent of high school.<p>A good number of people on the list are entrepreneurs, too. Even today, you can get away with having far less formal education if you strike out on your own.

I have a degree in theology from an unaccredited school, and I tell people that my "degree" is unaccredited any time I am interviewed, so as to avoid any possibility of being accused of fraud.<p>I make almost all my money in IT, for which I have had no formal training of any kind. I've done free-lance programming, unix administration, network installations, etc. Some was freelance contract work. At one point, I was an employee of one of the largest mortgage securitization companies (at the time), in charge of application packaging and distribution, laptop certification and 3rd tier hardware support of the same. I am now a CTO of a smaller company. I doubt my lack of an accredited degree would prevent me from getting a job almost anywhere in the field where I was qualified.<p>But I never trash someone who got a traditional degree. For most people, it is necessary to get past the gatekeepers.

For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.

And the master himself says :<p>Terry Pratchett: "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did"

The issue is not the instruction you get at an university, but the environment. If obesity is contagious, education is so much more so.

This misses one of the more important roles of a degree. The degree isn't to show <i>you</i> that you know what you're doing, it's to show <i>everyone else</i> that you know what you're doing.<p>Whether or not that ends up being true is something else, but I tend to believe that you get out of a good university what you put into it.

Keep in mind that I say this as a person who's mostly self-educated. There <i>is</i> an alternative point of view: <a href="http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-work-for-bigco.html" rel="nofollow">http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-w...</a><p>In this blog post, the argument is that bigger companies hire people with college degrees <i>precisely because</i> it's a pointless hazing ritual. Granted, that isn't applicable to startups, but there <i>is</i> a reason for a lot of companies to only hire people with college degrees.

Related:<p>CEO's without college education <a href="http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/766831.html" rel="nofollow">http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/766831.html</a><p>Wanted: CEO, no Ivy required <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x....</a><p>...seems like a bachelor's degree is a requirement for big company management.

There isn't much to learn from reading a list like this. Skip the list. Go make a difference.

NOTE: Most of the people in the list are before 1900. So that is old school :)

Excellent list, I was wondering if someone bothered to make it.

I've done a little reading over the years and thought about this some. I think this argument occurs in some form in every age. But when new fields are born, there is no place to go to get educated in it. You just have to make it up. And it is in the birth of those new things that people are more likely to be seen as "making a difference". Entrepreneurship also involves making it up as you go. I've read some things that indicate that finishing your education can be an impediment to making it as an entrepreneur. The two examples I usually refer to: Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs.<p>If you want to become a doctor, yes, you need all the credentials that society requires. But if you just want to help people get healthier, there are many paths to such a goal. I considered becoming a physical therapist when I was a teen. But I did an informational interview and concluded they didn't really do what I was imagining. A lot of people have fantasies about some career or other only to find it doesn't really do what they had imagined. Tragically, for many people this realization comes after investing a lot of time, money and effort into getting the requisite education, experience and credentials. At that point, a lot of people feel stuck: They have student loans to pay off and can't make enough money doing something else to pay them.<p>I was interested in this question (concerning credentials and success) in part because I homeschooled my kids. I always told them that they would have no king's stamp to make the gold good, therefore they actually had to be gold -- ie they have to be able to Bring It. They are fine with that.