Steve Jobs's high school GPA = 2.65

Parents Forum
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<p>When you look at statistics like that, make certain to notice that they are limited to students whose schools report class rank, and at Princeton that is only about half the class. (I think. Maybe I had better check.) Look at it a different way: At Dalton and St. Ann’s half the class is going to Ivy League colleges or the equivalent. They’re not all in the top 10%.</p>

<p>EDIT: I was sensationally wrong to guess that half the students accepted at Princeton reported class rank. This is from a report written last fall:

Hampton Roads Educational Consulting LLC, 4 College Planning Minutes no. 2, October 24, 2011.</p>

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<p>You know, Bill Gates dropped out of college too. Clearly, a university education is detrimental to the ability of people becoming successful tech billionaires. Oh yeah, LSD clearly improves creativity too. Let’s encourage kids to try that too…</p>

<p>But seriously, it doesn’t matter what Steve Jobs GPA was. He had the innate skill to become what he was. You either have it or you don’t. All this shows that getting a 2.65 GPA isn’t automatically the end of the world.</p>

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<p>From what I’ve read, it is generally accepted that Jobs had “issues,” very possibly directly related to the circumstances of his young life.</p>

<p>A 2.65 doesn’t surprise me in the least.</p>

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<p>What that shows is that grades in school and what people do in life are not necessarily related. Studies have shown for example that hiring 4.0 gpas in entry level jobs may not be the best bet (these were studies I read in grad management school BTW, harvard business school reports) that kids with stellar gpas showed a slight negative correlation to job performance. There are reasons for that, and some of these I can directly confirm being a hiring manager:</p>

<p>-many of the 4.0 GPA students come out with attitudes like that makes them a superstar, kind of like the kids who graduated from harvard, yale and Princeton expecting that 100k investment banking job and so forth, who found out they weren’t entitled to anything. The less then 4.0’s, meanwhile, often have the "avis’ mentality, were #2 so we have to try harder. </p>

<p>-You also have to ask yourself how the 4.0 types got to be there, were they genuinely interested people, curious about what they were learning, actively interested in the world, or was their whole life geared around a 4.0 in high school, 2200+ SAT, get into the right college , and then in college got the great grades…but does that prepare them for a world where everything isn’t studying for tests, giving the professor what they wanted to hear and otherwise everything was GPA? What happens when that structure falls away? (btw, as a hiring manager, I would never use GPA as a discriminant by itself, I also look for work experience and things where the kid has had actually to use their brains,I specifically ask them to give me examples of where they had to come up with unique solutions to a problem in their life, and if they start talking abut their GPA or how they did all these ec’s in high school, it says a lot). </p>

<p>Put it this way, IBM in my day used to hire only 4.0’s and the computer revolution in many ways that passed them bye was done by people who couldn’t work at IBM. The guys at MIT in the 60’s who revolutionized things were too busy innovating to go to class, and many of the silicon valley guys were bored in school, while IBM was known for corporate stodginess and conservatism. </p>

<p>-It is a well known fact that people who are truly gifted, who have unique ideas on doing things, don’t fit the mold of standard education. Among other things, if it comes too easy they don’t learn the work study habits they may need later, or it is so easy they get bored and zoned out and most schools don’t care about these kids, the ones to the right of the bell curve. Mensa is full of people who have iq’s in the stratosphere but never achieved, and hearing the stories it is obvious why, they went through much of their schooling not challenged, and many of these people are next to brilliant otherwise. Grinding through the rote drills in school, the teaching to the LCD that is the hallmark of most schools, leaves them out of it (and yeah, I was one of those…my school career by late high school wouldn’t make a harvard admissions person wake up, and my college grades were nothing to write home about, but I also achieved a lot in the work world in ways most people would recognize)…so that <4 gpa or less then 3 gpa may represent someone who will be a 4.0+ in life…</p>

<p>The simple answer is grades in school indicate someone who has done well in school, and that may or may not represent their future. It is kind of like college football, #1 draft picks can go bust, many college quarterbacks fizzle in the NFL after being hotshots in college, and an undrafted player from some small college turns out to be the star, in part because college football and the NFL are very, very different. Someone who didn’t do that great in college ball can and often does do well in the pros. Tom Brady of the Patriots was drafted low in the draft, because according to the experts, he ‘lacked the numbers in college’, and look what happened with him. Grades in school are one dimensional, and can show a bright, talented person or a person who has learned to game the system, grind their way through chasing the GPA, and be mediocre as a worker, not to mention as a creator or innovator.</p>

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<p>Steve Jobs may have presented what some call the “Classic Reed” application, evidence of a lively, perhaps brilliant mind, yet indications of undisciplined application to school work. It seems that Reed takes a few risks on that type over the safer choice to admit the plugger with a high rank and good grades but little evidence of passion for ideas or eagerness to engage in independent thought.</p>

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<p>"But seriously, it doesn’t matter what Steve Jobs GPA was. He had the innate skill to become what he was. You either have it or you don’t. All this shows that getting a 2.65 GPA isn’t automatically the end of the world. "</p>

<p>While I agree about the GPA, the innate skill thing is problematic. One thing I am pretty certain of is (and Gladwell and others back this up) is that success like Jobs had are always a combination of factors. I think Jobs was prob bright if not brilliant, but a lot of what happens to a person is also a combination of factors (which also tends to blow the 4.0 GPA=success formula right out the window). Jobs was probably a combination of factors, he obviously had curiousity and a mind that could put things together, but he also had parents that taught him things, and living in silicon valley put him at the epicenter of a lot of brilliant, talented people to act as mentors, everyone from people at HP, people at Stanford he met through the homebrew computer club, his friendship with Wozniak (another classic example of the school underachiever , dropped out of college, created the first apple computers), that helped frame him as well. He was in the right time and place, and I wonder if Steve Jobs had lived in, let’s say upstate NY, if the same thing would have happened, would he have become the ‘genius’ who did what he did at Apple? Not knocking the man, far from it, just saying that inate talent plays a role but isn’t the whole picture. It is like the 4.0 gpa student, is that the whole picture? </p>

<p>Among other things, Jobs learned about the need for hard work from his parents, one of the problems with the 4.0 gpa crowd is that many of them come from families well off enough that they in effect never learned truly hard work, they had the best of everything so getting that 4.0 was having the right toolbox from mom and dad, rather then having to really sweat to get it, a kid from a working class background has a lot harder time getting into that HYP school then a kid whose family background is such that everyone is well educated, they are sent to prep schools that train them to get into HYP, and so forth. Grit and determination are often the hallmarks of those who succeed, and Jobs showed that, he was thrown out of Apple computer in a power play, had a failed company (NEXT), founded Pixar (major success), then came back to turn Apple into a giant with new, innovative ideas…someone who had a lot handed to them may not have that.</p>

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<p>The biography also shows how the Steves were incredibly lucky, time after time, were in the right place at the right time, AND had the requisite skills that few others had to make it happen.</p>

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<p>Sure being in the right place at the right time has alot to do with everything in life, but I’ve seen people in the right place at the right time who were totally oblivious to the opportunities. A creative, intelligent mind will “see” the opportunities. Those types of people truly do see the world through different eyes. They are visionary. That is not able to be measured with GPA or “learned”…it can be nurtured in the right environment.</p>

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<p>Post #47, I also read part of his biography but I disagree that he was in the right place at the right time. There were thousands of kids from Silicon Valley at the same time but there was only one Steve Jobs. His parents did nothing unusual than other parents othen they truly loved him enough to let him be himself.</p>

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<p>^ :slight_smile: Read the part after “AND” …</p>

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<p>And these two quotes show WHY colleges take a holistic approach to admissions and not just line kids up by scores and GPA’s and take the top 400. Reed gets much more (prestige, money, name recognition, whatever) from their association with Steve Jobs than from most of their graduates. Harvard gets more from Bill Gates than from all the slews of Wall Street grunts. Top schools want to be known as the place where great minds that will change the world are nurtured, not just places that produce ranks of highly qualified, but not inspirational,scientists and corporate types. Those guys may pay the bills today, but it is the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who create the myth of greatness that these places crave.</p>

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<p>Toe the line. </p>

<p>Meaning don’t put one’s toe over the hypothetical line in the sand.</p>

<p>Where I come from, “tow the line” refers to hauling lobster traps. Just sayin.</p>

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<p>Yes…toe the line…someone who does not stray past the boundary…someone who does what is expected… But I like the vision of hauling the lobster traps, too!</p>

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<p>I’ve got to confess that this thread is fairly atypical for CC. Which posters here have kids with HS GPAs in the range of 2.65? And if you do, are you satisfied with that, because the kid is “quirky and brilliant”?</p>

<p>I had a kid with that sort of GPA (although he’s graduated and doing better now) but I didn’t think I had a lot of company on here. I always thought he could have done better in HS.</p>

<p>And when I say he’s doing better I still don’t expect the next Steve Jobs, although that would be nice.</p>

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<p>I bet Wozniak had a high GPA.</p>

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<p>I do too. I know Woz had perfect or near perfect science and math achievement tests because he wrote about it.</p>

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<p>What amazed me about the story of Steve Jobs and Reed is that he convinced the dean to let him stay and attend classes for a year without paying tuition. Reed is a business, I’m surprised they would let anyone just hang out and take classes tuition free. That shows how much charisma and promise Steve Jobs exuded. It also goes to show that any business has room to make exceptions to what ultimately makes them profitable. It’s a great story.</p>

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<p>I have a kid who could easily have fallen into that category. But <em>I</em> suffered from being the classic gifted kid who never learned to work in elementary school, and ended up as the kid with the highest verbal SAT in my class, NMF when it was a separate test, and grades that barely scraped into the top 20% after weighting (all honors, AP, or accelerated), and I didn’t want that to happen to my S. So I did my best to let him know that if he didn’t get the grades, his future choices would be limited, no matter how smart he was. S ended up with Presidential Scholar-level SATs and an A- unweighted average…he got into great schools, but not H & Y, unlike his friends with lesser SATs but better GPAs, even though he actually took a more rigorous schedule than either of them.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, gatekeepers at colleges and companies are all too often CYA drones. When I hired technical writers, I looked for excellent writing and intellectual ability/curiosity: people who would be able to quickly learn new software, and who would naturally WANT to. When your typical HR drone screens for tech writers, they look for people who happen to know whatever software package the company is currently using for word processing/page makeup. My feeling is that if the person is too dumb to learn a new word processing package, they sure as hell are too stupid to learn the company’s software. Not to mention lacking the ability to command the respect of the programming staff and communicate with them and the users.</p>

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<p>As someone in the same line of business as Steve Jobs and his little company, let me say that in my humble opinion the reason Steve & Co. got ‘lucky’ was simple. It was not luck, and it was not being at the right time at the right place, and it was not having the better product.</p>

<p>The original Mac, in my humble opinion, was not a very good computer. Not compared with the relatively powerful stuff coming out of IBM and Microsoft at the time. The 2e and earlier stuff was decent… LISA, well, sorry… No wonder the company plodded along for over a decade, Steve or not, and had to be ‘rescued’ by Microsoft… The only ‘amazing’ computer that came from that era was, naturally, the NeXT… Had a few at work, awesome machine. Absolutely awesome.</p>

<p>Steve’s success, once again in my humble opinion, was due to the fact that (a) he was a visionary (b) he had an astonishing ‘nose’ for what will sell (c) could play the marketing game (cult etc) and (d) figured out that the market and money was with stuff people replace every year out of discretionary income, not stuff bought for real work/school use.</p>

<p>His only ‘luck’ was that he helped bring a lot of such stuff to the market at a time where our ‘lost decade’ (2000-2010), availability of disposable cash, and technology advances all converged. He could have pulled it off with the original Mac in '84 but other factors, greed among them, did Apple in.</p>

<p>Note - the above is my take based on being on the same line of business as Apple and being familiar with how they do stuff. I’m not pro- or anti- anything… In my industry Steve Jobs will always be remembered for raising the bar for the rest of us by yards, not inches…</p>

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<p>bovertine, my kid IS like that. He’s bright, but I worry about him. He keeps saying he wants to be a chemical engineer, and it’s hard for me not to laugh! I think he COULD do the work, but he doesn’t. He is in honors math and English, but he doesn’t put in the study time he needs to. I look at his grades online and get very discouraged.</p>