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Where Did Bill Gates Go to College? Unravelling the Educational Journey of a Tech Titan

In the annals of modern history, few names shine as brightly as Bill Gates’s. The co-founder of Microsoft, Gates, has left an indelible mark on technology, business, and philanthropy. Yet, amidst the aura of his success, many wonder about the humble beginnings of this tech titan, particularly his educational background. In this blog post, we delve into the question: Where did Bill Gates go to college?

Table of Contents

Early Life and Education

Bill Gates, born William Henry Gates III on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, exhibited a precocious intellect from an early age. Raised in a supportive family environment, Gates attended Lakeside School, a private preparatory school known for its rigorous academic curriculum.

During his time at Lakeside, Gates discovered his passion for computing, gaining access to a teletype terminal through a Lakeside Mothers’ Club donation. This pivotal moment ignited Gates’s fascination with programming and laid the foundation for his future endeavours in technology.

Where did Bill Gates go to college?

Despite his early interest in technology, Gates initially enrolled at Harvard University in 1973 , intending to pursue a law degree. However, his insatiable curiosity for computers soon led him down a different path. At Harvard, Gates immersed himself in the burgeoning world of computer science, spending countless hours in the university’s computer lab.

During this time, Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800 microcomputer, marking the genesis of their entrepreneurial journey.

The Birth of Microsoft

In 1975, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft, a company that would revolutionize the personal computing industry. Guided by their vision of a computer on every desk and in every home, Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to focus full-time on building Microsoft.

The decision to leave Harvard was not taken lightly, but Gates recognized the immense potential of the burgeoning software market and seized the opportunity to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

Legacy and Impact

The decision to forego his college education was a defining moment in Gates’s life. Under his leadership, Microsoft flourished, introducing groundbreaking products such as the MS-DOS operating system and the Windows graphical user interface. Gates’s strategic insight and relentless drive propelled Microsoft to unprecedented heights, cementing his status as one of the most influential figures in the tech industry.

Philanthropy and Beyond

In 2008, Gates stepped down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft to focus on philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Committed to addressing global challenges such as poverty, disease, and education, Gates has dedicated his vast wealth and resources to positively impacting the world.

Through initiatives like the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Gates continues to champion innovative solutions to some of humanity’s most pressing issues.

The Impact of Dropping Out: Exploring the Decision to Leave Harvard

Bill Gates’s decision to drop out of Harvard University in his junior year was a pivotal moment that shaped his trajectory as an entrepreneur. Despite the traditional view that a college degree is essential for success, Gates recognized the unique opportunities in the nascent software industry.

By focusing full-time on building Microsoft, Gates demonstrated a willingness to take calculated risks and pursue his passion, ultimately redefining the notion of success beyond the confines of academia.

Lakeside School: Nurturing a Passion for Technology

Lakeside School was crucial in shaping Bill Gates’s early interest in technology. The supportive environment and access to resources, such as the teletype terminal donated by the Lakeside Mothers’ Club, gave Gates the platform to explore his curiosity and delve into programming at a young age. The experience at Lakeside ignited Gates’s passion for technology and laid the groundwork for his future endeavours in the field.

Microsoft’s Evolution: From Garage Startup to Global Powerhouse

Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft began as a small startup operating out of a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Armed with a vision of making computers accessible to the masses, Gates and Allen embarked on a journey to develop software to revolutionize the personal computing industry.

From the introduction of MS-DOS to the widespread adoption of Windows, Microsoft’s evolution into a global powerhouse is a testament to Gates’s visionary leadership and relentless pursuit of innovation.

The Gates Foundation: A New Chapter in Philanthropy

In 2008, Bill Gates stepped down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft to focus on philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Committed to addressing global challenges such as poverty, disease, and education, the Gates Foundation has become one of the world’s largest and most influential philanthropic organizations.

Through initiatives like the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Grand Challenges Explorations, the Gates Foundation continues to drive positive change and improve the lives of millions worldwide.

Gates’s Educational Philosophy: Lessons Learned from a Tech Icon

While Bill Gates’s decision to drop out of college may seem unconventional, it offers valuable insights into his educational philosophy. Gates believes in the power of self-directed learning, hands-on experience, and continuous growth. His journey underscores the importance of passion, perseverance, and adaptability in navigating the complexities of the modern world.

By embracing a lifelong learning mindset, Gates has demonstrated that education extends far beyond the confines of traditional institutions and degrees.

The Future of Education: Insights from Bill Gates’s Journey

As technology continues to reshape the landscape of education, Bill Gates’s journey offers valuable insights into the future of learning. Gates advocates for personalized, technology-driven approaches that empower students to explore their interests, develop critical thinking skills, and pursue meaningful learning experiences.

From online courses to immersive simulations, Gates envisions a future where education is accessible, engaging, and tailored to individual needs, ultimately unlocking the full potential of every learner.

The Global Legacy of Bill Gates: Beyond College and Company

Bill Gates’s legacy extends far and wide beyond his college experience and the founding of Microsoft, transcending borders and industries. Through his philanthropic efforts, Gates has impacted global health, education, and development.

His commitment to tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges inspires future generations of leaders, reminding us that with great success comes the responsibility to give back and make a difference in the world.

So, where did Bill Gates go to college? While Gates briefly attended Harvard University, his journey is defined not by his alma mater but by his relentless pursuit of knowledge, innovation, and impact. From his humble beginnings tinkering with computers at Lakeside School to co-founding one of the world’s most iconic companies, Gates’s story is a testament to the power of passion, perseverance, and purpose.

As we reflect on his remarkable journey, let us draw inspiration from Gates’s example and strive to make our mark on the world, wherever our educational paths may lead us.

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Watch CBS News

Bill Gates Goes Back to College: Live Right Now!

By Shira Lazar

April 19, 2010 / 2:33 PM EDT / CBS News

Shira Lazar is the Host and Executive Producer of CBSNews.com's new weekly live interactive show and 24/7 news hub, "What's Trending".

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“I think, if anything, it’s a more interesting time to be lucky enough to be a student at Harvard,” said Bill Gates (right), who dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to co-found Microsoft. Gates and SEAS Dean Frank Doyle shared the stage at the Science Center.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Gates recalls Harvard past, sees problem-solving future

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Microsoft founder tours campus, visits SEAS labs, chats with students

Microsoft founder Bill Gates stopped by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) campus on Thursday afternoon, where he chatted with some of the same sorts of tech-savvy students that he once was as a Harvard undergrad.

Gates greeted University officials, including President Drew Faust, President-elect Lawrence S. Bacow, and Provost Alan Garber, following a tour of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab and the Harvard Biodesign Lab with SEAS Dean Frank Doyle. There, Gates viewed demonstrations of ongoing cutting-edge research, including robotic bees and soft robots, and met with students, postdocs, and Professors Robert Wood and Conor Walsh, who run those labs, respectively.

“The work here is taking robotics in many dimensions and in different realms,” Gates said later during a relaxed back-and-forth conversation with Doyle and a Q&A session with students at the Science Center. “I saw a variety of robots that are really amazing, and … the collaboration between the various teams was amazing to see.”

Gates also spoke about his storied career building Microsoft after initially spying a home computer ad in the pages of an electronics magazine in his room at Currier House. In addition, he  talked about his more recent work leading a private charitable foundation that focuses on global health and education, and he reminisced about his time at the College.

Gates, 62, famously dropped out of the College in 1975 to co-found Microsoft. He received an honorary law degree from the University in 2007, three decades after his class graduated.

Gates said he initially came to Harvard with a great many interests and a voracious appetite for learning but was not very focused in the early days. He said he had a tendency to sign up for classes and then only show up for the final exams, much like a Freudian recurring dream, because he was busy attending other courses instead. “I took all these courses because it was just so amazing!” he marveled.

Asked if he had any regrets from his student days, Gates said he wished he had been “more sociable” and had mixed with a wider array of classmates instead of focusing so intently on his work and on writing computer code. He recalled how his much more outgoing friend Steve Ballmer, who lived down the hall at Currier House and who would join Microsoft in 1980, liked to push him to cut loose every once in a while.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (right) and SEAS Dean Frank Doyle packed the Science Center. Students asked questions following their discussion.

Gates said he was happy hanging around Currier House, where he could get hamburgers at every meal and where the male to female student ratio was 1:1, which was unusual at the time. “It didn’t help me, but it was an improvement,” he said to laughter. “I was just so into being good at the classes and taking lots of classes. It worked out it the end, but I missed a lot.”

Turning to broader topics, Gates, who has overseen the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since stepping down as Microsoft chairman in 2014, said that the most significant challenge facing the world is malnutrition. In this country, the biggest challenge is the quality of the educational system.

“This is a country that has essentially a credo of equal opportunity more than anything else, and the only way you execute equal opportunity is by having a great education system,” he said.

The Gates Foundation has spent billions on programs around the country to raise the quality of teaching in public education, boost research funding, make curricula more effective, and help students with special needs.

“We’re spending $800 million a year. And [on] our goal, which was to move the average quality of U.S. education up into that top three, we have no noticeable impact after almost 20 years,” he said candidly. “But we’re committed; we’re going to keep doing it.”

Image 1: Graduate student Kate Zhou gave Gates a hands-on demonstration. Image 2: Nathan Phipps, an industrial designer, explained some of the cutting-edge work being done in the Harvard Biodesign Lab at SEAS.

Eliza Grinnell/SEAS Communications

On issues such as climate change and genetically modified organisms, Gates said it is difficult to push meaningful change forward now because so few people —politicians as well as everyday Americans — have basic science literacy. When people don’t see the immediate effect of something, it’s hard to motivate them to do something different, he said, but even that is not the real hurdle.

“It’s the anti-science that’s a problem,” he said. “We need to push back.”

Gates also said that if he were in College now, he’d be focused on artificial intelligence.

“I think, if anything, it’s a more interesting time to be lucky enough to be a student at Harvard. The ability to take innovation and solve problems, including the classic problems I’ll call ‘inequity problems’ ” — such as income or education or health inequality — “these are very tough problems, and they’ve eluded being solved.

“So, whether it’s health costs or climate change or robots that do good things and not bad things, or the policies around those things, this is a fascinating time to be alive.”

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Bill Gates Kicks Off College Tour in Bay Area

Former microsoft ceo wants to urge young people to solve all the world's problems, by jackson west • published april 20, 2010 • updated on april 20, 2010 at 3:00 pm.

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates has come out of his underground lair across the lake from Seattle to go on a three-city speaking swing focused at college students. Monday he kicked off the tour with appearances at the University of California, Berkeley and at Stanford University .

His idea is to inspire bright young people to think about solving the real problems the world is facing, and maybe not go chasing after the wild riches they'll need to pay off their student loans. The focus of the talks were about the work the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing to help make healthcare more equitable between the developed and developing world, especially through access to family planning and inexpensive vaccines. He only showed a single slide to the audience at Cal, which revealed that while the worldwide child mortality rate has decreased significantly since 1960 , nearly nine million still die young every year. He also took some time to talk to reporters while in town, and managed to get a passive-aggressive comment in about Steve Jobs and Apple , calling the iPad "okay" but praising its aesthetic qualities. Gates will be in Chicago Tuesday, followed by Boston on Wednesday. Jackson West will disclose that Microsoft stock options helped his family pay most of his way through college.

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Bill Gates: College Tour 2008

April 29, 2008

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Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft College Tour 2008, University of Washington Seattle, April 25, 2008

MARK EMMERT: Good afternoon. (Applause.) Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to the University of Washington, I’m Mark Emmert, the president of the university, and I’m delighted to not only welcome you here to the campus, for those of you that are guests, but also to welcome you to the last stop on the Bill Gates Unplugged Tour. Bill has now been to five other universities, and spoken to packed houses, none of them as good looking as this crowd, though. (Applause.) None of them as smart as this crowd either, is that right, Ed? (Cheers and applause.) And we’re really pleased that he has saved the last and the best for the University of Washington in his backyard. This is obviously an audience that we don’t have to spend a lot of time introducing Bill to, but it is important to note that here’s an individual who has transformed, of course, information technology and the PC as we know it, and that in and of itself would have been a pretty remarkable accomplishment for anyone, but now he’s in the midst of transforming philanthropy, and global health, and education, and is likely to have that same kind of profound impact on the world yet again. And the man is younger than I am. So he’s just a child. So there’s much, much more to go, and we’ll see what Bill does for his third trick.

But the fact of the matter is, for the UW, there are few families and few individuals that are more important to us than the Gates family, not just Bill, of course, but his mother and his father, and his brothers  brothers?  his sisters. We’ve got with us today Bill Gates, Sr. Bill, will you please wave to the audience. (Applause.) Bill, as you know, is a regent of the university, as was Mary Gates, Mary for 18 years, I think, Bill, and now we have yet another regent that’s a Gates, and that’s Kristi Blake. Kristi, thank you for being with us. (Applause.) And now, without any further ado, it’s my great pleasure to introduce Bill Gates. Bill. (Cheers and applause.)

BILL GATES: Well, good afternoon. It’s fantastic to be here on the finale of my final Microsoft tour, and I mostly want to talk to you about the great things ahead. But first let me talk about the important relationship that I have with this university. As Mark said, it starts with my parents. They were students and met here. My sister was a student here. I was here a lot, but not as a student. I took an algebra course, that was good, but my main benefit from the university was that when computers were very expensive, hard to find, there was no such thing as a personal computer, the university campus was the best place to wander around and find unused computers. And so Paul Allen and I, particularly during a time when we didn’t have any computer work, and nobody was giving us free computer time, we found a number of machines, and were able to develop our skills during high school. The best one was one that was in the Physics Building, and they ran particles analysis runs most of the day, but they always had three or four hours at the end just in case the things ran long, and we would go up there, as soon as it was done, and grab that PDP-10. So we started stealing computer time, and now I’m giving it back from time to time. (Laughter.)

Also, of course, Microsoft has an amazing relationship with the University of Washington, where the commitment to long-term research at Microsoft has a lot in common with the great work going on at the university, particularly the computer science department, but also now that software is being applied in so many domains, and is really the tool for so many of the sciences, a lot of cutting edge software problems are coming out of the other departments, whether it’s genomics, or the environment, or anything related to biology, we need to solve some very, very interesting problems. So it’s fantastic to have the university here, and a lot of people have joint appointments where they’re involved in teaching, and involved in helping Microsoft do its work. So that has been an absolutely fantastic connection.

Also this university has become a very important partner of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has made more grants by a fair margin to this university than any other, and the interesting thing about that isn’t so much the size of those grants, but rather the kind of ambition behind them, work related to the AIDS vaccine, work related to malaria, work related to tracking healthcare approaches, and understanding where those are working, and where those are not, because, after all, a lot of things that seem like they’d work when we get out into these developing countries don’t, and making sure we guide that very well is important. So it’s a wide range of things, and I’m very optimistic that there will be big breakthroughs that come out of that work.

Microsoft, in a typical year, has about 100 people we hire from the University of Washington, which makes it the top place that we’ve gotten talent all the time. Ed Lazowska and I were talking today and saying, hey, we want that to be even more. So hopefully some of these dreams about software and the great impact it can have will make people realize that not only is this an interesting field, but really this next decade, the companies that take a long-term approach, are optimistic, hiring smart people, are really going to come up with some things that will be game changing.

For myself, I’m fairly near a transition point where I’ll move from being full-time at Microsoft, and doing part-time work on the Foundation goals to flipping that around where after the middle of the year I’ll be full-time on Foundation work, and part-time on Microsoft work. And I’ve been writing software as my full-time occupation for ever since I was 17. I had a couple of years where I was back at some other university, but that didn’t slow me down, I was still mostly writing software the whole time then. So it’s going to be an interesting change, you know, not to wake up in the morning and say, okay, let’s primarily focus on software. And some friends of mine were worried about that and thought we’ll maybe they could help me by putting together some thoughts about what my last day is going to be like. So we pulled together a video to help me with the transition. Let’s go ahead and take a look at that.

(Video segment and applause.)

We had a lot of fun making that. Actually, the transition is going great with incredible people like Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie stepping up to do a lot of the things I’ve done, and free up my time for the new Foundation work that I’m thrilled that I’ll get to focus on. And we’ll have some Microsoft projects that I keep working on as I talk through some of the big opportunities, several of them are of particular interest to me, things like making search very different than it is today, and this whole area of natural interface.

So let’s talk about software and where it’s going. It has come a long ways since the advent of the personal computer. After all, software prior to that was used only by a few organizations with big expensive machines, and if anything they were viewed kind of as the enemy of the individual, they were printing out checks, and keeping databases. And so it’s almost a complete shift that computing has become the best tool for creativity and sharing that humans have ever had. What’s emerged around software and the Internet now is the facility that makes the world a smaller place, and it’s a fundamental element of the pace of innovation, and the efficiency that we have in the world today.

In fact, if you think about growing up when I grew up, it was a paper-based encyclopedia you went to for any question, and you got very limited data, it was always kind of out of date, and if you compare that today to any student who has access and the wealth of material that’s available to them from encyclopedias to discussion groups to models that will let them navigate through and try different things out, it’s a completely different world.

Now, at the center of that have been breakthroughs in both hardware and software. The incredible benefit of having exponential improvement at the chip level has allowed us to be more and more ambitious in software. The number of transistors has mapped to higher clock speeds, larger memories, and so-called “Moore’s Law” has really allowed us to build phenomenal machines.

Now, when Paul and I were young and started Microsoft we had in mind this idea that computing would be free, and so we let our minds wander to any type of computer that might be possible in the future. And even then we thought about some things that are not yet achieved, things like visual recognition, speech understanding, deep gathering of data, and machine learning that would relate to that. So in a sense we can say we’re only part way through achieving that original dream of software empowerment.

Another way that we can say we’re only part way there is just look at the population of the globe. Personal computing, mobile phones benefit less than a third of all people. There’s about a billion PCs, each of those gets used by multiple people. There’s about 2 billion mobile phones that are typically used only by one person. So we’re there in about a third, and two-thirds are not getting any direct benefit. But, the original slogan of Microsoft, going back to its earliest days, was a computer on every desk, and in every home, using powerful software.

So there’s a long way to go in terms of making it lower cost, and more relevant and far more practical. In fact, today we have laboratories, including some work here at our headquarters, and a particular group in India, that focus on really thinking about the poorest 2 billion, how can computing and technology make a difference for them. Often the answers are fairly surprising. The direct application isn’t as important as thinking through what it means for their health activities, or agricultural activities, or learning activities. And we need a lot of new ideas there to push these things forward. The impact of software has gotten broader and broader, but many of our common activities are not yet software-driven.

TV is still a broadcast medium. There’s not much software intermediation. There’s not software that’s picking what segment of the news show might be interesting to you, or letting you indicate, give me more about that story, or skip over this sport that I don’t particularly care about. The ads are not being targeted to things that might be of interest and value to you, which is a win-win, in terms of your interest and value to the advertiser. The game show doesn’t let you interact, the educational show doesn’t let you pause and get information about something that was covered too quickly. The sports show doesn’t let you get more information.

So we’re on the verge, in the same way that listening to music, or organizing photos has changed for a lot of people, the way TV is delivered is in the process of changing, but just at the beginning. There’s a million households in the United States today, primarily customers of AT&T, who are getting TV over the Internet. And as you get that scale, which has to get to critical mass, then the content creators are saying to themselves, okay, let’s do the extra work to take that show experience and make it far better, and take it genre by genre, and come up with new ways that the personalization and interactivity can work.

Today the world of video is bifurcated. The tail videos, the ones that are very popular, say, videos about your young kid’s sports activities, you’re not going to find those in the broadcast media. And so you go to your PC screen, navigate on the Internet to find those, and then that’s not part o the TV Guide that’s part of that living room 10-foot experience. But, we will have a complete synthesis of those things, where what you’re interested in will show up on all your devices, whether it’s your cell phone, your PC screen, or in the living room. So the tail video, the course that you wanted to watch and see the lectures that you happened to miss, those things will show up right there along with those mainstream things.

Today we don’t have robotics, it’s kind of a speculative field. Part of what’s missing there is a software revolution, so that the software  so that the robot can gather information about its environment, whether it’s visual or audio, that planning type module, standard so all these different sensors can connect up, and we can experiment with robotics hardware without having to change the software base every time. So that’s an area where Microsoft and lots of startups and universities are investing. And I think that people are really underestimating over the course of a period like a decade how much things can change.

With technology we’ve always got that people tend to overestimate what can change in a year or two, and they underestimate the cumulative effect of change that can take place in a 10 or 15-year period. We’re also subject to cycles of over-optimism and pessimism. Certainly the late ’90s were kind of an insane period, where every startup was going to replace your bank, and your retail store, and people forgot that there are some benefits to experiences working those other ways, and the economic proposition that’s brought there. And in any medium where the barrier to entry is very low, the ability to build up an asset is all the more difficult. So only a few of those companies managed to get to the critical mass and do something interesting.

That was a fantastic thing, there was some crazy investment. It was like the gold rush. Some people did lose money, but that’s what capitalism is good at, taking lots of wild ideas and continuing to back the ones that work. So it was a period of, in the final analysis, quite a bit of innovation.

Then when that bubble burst some people went to the other extreme thinking that these changes were not really valid, that it had all been over-hyped. But, it was only over-hyped in the sense of the time frame. Some of the things were not thought through. Some of the technical foundations were not there yet.

Take something that I’ve been a big believer in, and gotten Microsoft to invest in, and I still totally believe in, things like the Tablet computer, where you can take notes and do your reading off of the screen, that takes a certain level of hardware and software, usability, price, size, battery life, and what that magic threshold is that makes that a mainstream thing, where business people going to meetings take it with them, students going to classes, say, of course, I take notes this way, share things this way, we’re not quite there yet. We’re there in certain verticals, the medical market with doctors, insurance market with claim writers. So that’s getting us down that learning curve, making the software and hardware better all the time.

Now, when that comes to fruition, when it really is at critical mass, it starts to have a big effect on reading, where you’ll be reading things more online. We’re seeing Amazon with the Kindle, Sony with the Ebook, Microsoft with software that runs on the portable machine, doing early stages of that. And even though in the next two years you can’t say it will change, but certainly in this 5 to 10-year period that will be very, very different. And we can think about students working that way.

My daughter goes to a school that all the kids use tablet computers, and it’s fascinating to see how the curriculum has changed, but when you really think, not just about putting the normal curriculum there, but when you think about taking advantage of that tool, how fantastic it is. It also facilitates sharing information. The teacher can mail out the test results to the parents, so you go home at night, and whether your daughter wants you to know or not, you know exactly how she did on those fractions. So you volunteer to help no matter what.

So there are some big, big changes that are about to come about. I think one of the most important ones, and this is an area of a lot of great work going on at Microsoft, and at the University of Washington, is the way we interface with these devices. If you look at this last 30 years or so there have been very few changes. We’ve gone from a keyboard, to a keyboard and a mouse fundamentally, 90 percent of the interaction with the machine is driven that way.

That’s not going to go away, for creating the documents, sitting in a solo basis, and reading things, navigating things, there’s a certain utility and efficiency of that that will probably always be justified. But, for the first time we’re starting to see, whether it’s the Nintendo Wii with the 3D controller, or the iPhone with its touch capability, or the Microsoft Surface, where it sees what’s going on, objects, and any sort of interaction that you want to have take place, or vision-type capabilities in a broader sense, that this idea of the computer knowing what’s going on, knowing more than just how you move the mouse, or hit the keyboard, that that really is bringing computing into new experiences.

It was just a few weeks ago that we rolled out Surface into retail stores. They were actually AT&T phones stores where people could come in, put their current phone down, put a phone they were considering buying, and see a comparison, what things were different, what things were better. They could look at the different plans, and try those things out. They could look on the phone and see the different places they go to, it would show them the different coverage capabilities that they had for those things. And so you’re starting to see what that will be like.

We actually think it’s time to amend our slogan of a computer on every desk, because with this kind of technology we want to put a computer in every desk. We want the desktop, or tabletop, we want the whiteboard to be something that’s completely intelligent. As the price of the hardware comes down, even something like a mirror will change to be essentially a screen with a camera. Sure, some of the time you want to see what you really look like, but some of the time you’d like to see what you’d look like wearing something different, or have it maybe point out something that you missed, or show you extra information. So you can create a very pervasive sense of computing.

Part of this will be having screens anywhere. Even the mobile phone itself will have this ability to project onto a large surface area. So if you want to read lots of information, yes, the mobile phone can connect through Bluetooth, or some other means, to another computing device, but it can also simply have projection capability, these laser displays, and some of these different ways the screen hardware works, it not just going to bring us high resolution, it’s going to bring us screens that are on all the walls, the ceilings, different places. So when a kid thinks about their bedroom it will be customized the way they want it, until the parent walks in, when immediately it will be customized a different way, so that everybody stays happy.

Now, part of the things that drives computer science forward is doing risky things, having a long-term time horizon. And when Microsoft was a small company we benefited form the fact that AT&T and Xerox, and other companies had made investments in research, that they’d reached out and worked with universities on a broad basis. So we felt very lucky that as we got to a certain level of success we could start our own research group, and have that research group be in partnership with top universities all over the world, doing advanced programs, things that range from the work on speech recognition, all the way up to quantum computing. We have a fairly serious program that has a high risk of failure, which makes it fun and interesting, on quantum computing. Even in the best case it’s probably a decade away before that makes a difference, but that’s the kind of thing that when it worked can have incredibly high pay-off.

It’s surprising to me how low the levels of real research investment by businesses are. We’re certainly always trying to get the message out that more businesses should do these things. It’s unfortunate that AT&T did it almost because of their regulated nature, and a lot of it wasn’t directly related to the business. So they’re not, in a certain sense, a role model, it’s kind of a unique thing that happened, and those unique circumstances are gone.

Likewise, Xerox, anyone who has been in the computer industry for a while thinks of that as an interesting example, where they for that period of time had a greater concentration of IQ in one place than anyone did, and came up with ethernet, laser printing, graphics user interface, the early stages of these things that were later refined. But, the basic ideas came together there. Yet, Xerox managed to not get any benefit out of it. In fact, they lost a lot of money.

There’s a lot of people who have tried to analyze that. There’s a book called Fumbling the Future, and Microsoft soon after PARC  the research center that did that work kind of fell apart, we had more Xerox PARC people working for us than Xerox did. So we owe them a particular debt of gratitude, not only in terms of their work, but amazing people from Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, anyway, just an incredible group who not only do amazing work, but also have nurtured the next generation of brilliant people coming in, and taking on very ambitious challenges.

I mentioned that there’s a lot of good collaboration between Microsoft and UW, the Center for Collaboration Technologies is a place we’re very excited about the work, and we’ve been backing that in a number of ways. Analyzing photos, that we call Photosynth, the University of Washington did some key work on that. I think people will be amazed that you will be able to take just simple 2D photos from, say, a cell phone or a camera, and software will be able to figure out where that is, and connect it up with other photos. And so you’ll be able to synthetically, essentially get a sense of all the things going on in the world in different places, and you can even create full 3-D models out of these fairly low-resolution 2-D photos.

I remember five years ago people thought that was absolutely impossible, and yet there’s been breakthroughs in terms of these algorithms involved, to not only make it possible, but to make it practical. The breakthroughs in efficiency, along with brute force computing, are combining in a pretty magic way.

We’re getting immense amounts of data, and one of the projects I think is very cool that Professor Lazowska and someone in his lab, Keith Grochow, are working on is this Trident, which is a lot of marine biology undersea information. We really don’t know what we’re going to learn from that, but it is state of the art, in terms of what sort of visualization, data collection, pattern analysis that needs to get done. And so it’s fun for software people to have things like that, where it’s interesting, practical data, and yet we have to make advances, interaction techniques, and how we look at data in a rich way.

I have one good example of that, that I want to show you. And this is kind of a new thing. I’ve never demoed it before. So we’ll see how this goes. Let’s see. So this  this is the Worldwide Telescope, and this is Curtis Wong at Microsoft Research, along with some people working with him came up with this idea of taking astronomy data and making it widely available.

It actually started with Jim Gray who was in our research lab, who thought that all those databases were not pulled together. And he worked with some astronomers who needed data from different databases to try out different ideas, to test their model of the universe. And so the idea of having a schema, and a taxonomy, and taking things done at different times, different wavelengths, and pulling that together was done for the scientist to advance their work, and what’s been done here is to actually take that data and say, okay, how do we take that and connect it up in a way that can make astronomy interesting for anybody who wants to learn about it, to make it absolutely approachable in a very rich way.

So you start out, you’ve got a vision of the sky here, and this is a pretty neat application. That’s the sky. First let’s go to something that’s familiar for you, just go in and we’ll find Jupiter out in the sky. So there’s Jupiter. We can zoom in, zoom out, and that. You actually see these dots here, those are the moons of Jupiter that when this image was taken, that’s exactly where they were, and what it’s doing is, it’s showing Jupiter as it is in the sky right now. So we can go anywhere in the sky that we want. Let’s pick Cygnus, which will let us illustrate some very interesting things. So this is data that’s been collected from many, many, many different telescopes, the Hubble, the Sky Survey, literally hundreds of different things have been used to pull this together. So here we are at Cygnus. So I can go in and look at that. Okay, so let’s look at this in different ways. To start out with, we’re in the visible wavelength. Now we’re seeing hydrogen alpha, we can see dust map. One that’s particularly interesting is to look at this in the X-ray, because if you look in X-rays you can see where there were supernovas. There’s always an echo left over after that supernova. So we see this big thing down here. We can go in and zoom in on that a little bit, and say, okay, that’s interesting. Well, what does that look like if we just look at it in the visual wavelength. We can see, okay, there’s what the dust cloud looks like from a supernova that this is actually five thousand years ago, but if I go back here, I can say, okay, it shows up in the X-ray, but not quite the same way in that different wavelength. So we can try out different things to see what patterns different types of phenomena are going to create there.

Let’s go do something else. Let’s see. Let’s go over to Crab Nebula. You can see it actually navigates the sky, kind of gives you a sense of where you’re going. You can go straight there, if you want, but I always think it’s interesting to see what the relative positions of these things are. So that’s the Crab Nebula in the visual range. And so, here again it is in the X-ray, there’s in the IR, and these things are registered on top of each other. You see we’re not moving at all because these databases have been correlated in a way that it’s all in that same location.

So far what I’ve shown you is how I’m guiding things around myself. Another thing you can do is go out and look into databases about this information. So I can just right click something, and it will show me all the different things on the Web that might be interesting about that information, anything that I want to point to here. We also have what are called guided tours where instead of going around yourself, somebody can record the things that they’ve done, and they can have voiceovers. We make it very easy for them to build those things. This is one that Alyssa Goodman did. She’s at Harvard.

(Video segment.)

I can pause at any time, and look at the images in different ways, and go back into the tour, or, again, I can go right click and see this is a spiral galaxy, and again go out and get any data that’s out there on the Web. To give you a sense of how easy it is to make these guided tours, let’s go in and see one that was created literally by a six-year-old about the Ring Nebula, where he’s able to share his fascinating to using this Worldwide Telescope, and share that with other students.

Anyway, it gives you a quick glance at this Worldwide Telescope. I think it illustrates a lot of things. We’ve got a lot of data out there, and with the right software we can make it approachable and understandable. And, in fact, in the next month or so, this will go up for free at www.worldwidetelescope.com and just be a piece of software that any teacher or student can use, and we’ll be collecting the really good tours that people create, and have those just show up in the catalogue so that over time people get better at making that a subject that’s fun and approachable using the magic of software and the rich data that’s available.

Now making sure that this innovation is going ahead at full speed, and we want to enable people of all ages, we want students to have access, we want them to have the latest and greatest tools, many of the breakthroughs have been made by people that are very young. Microsoft has a lot of things, one is called DreamSpark, which is where we made all our development tools free to students now where they can try things out. And we’ve also created a lot of online essentially TV channels, but of course very interactive, one we call Channel 8 that has all the information, programming courses, advice, sample code, and really putting a big investment in that to make sure that anyone who can get to the Internet can polish up their skills, see what good code looks like, and really pursue their ideas, whether it’s about software itself or rather they have an idea about another field, one of the sciences, or any idea, and actually you’re using software merely as a tool to understand those things, and encode the algorithm that they have.

Now when we look at this very optimistic view, which I think is a totally valid view, one lens that it is important that we continue to apply to it is to say, okay, with all these advances, the breakthroughs in software, and the tools that make TV more fun, and mobile phones more fun, so you’re talking to them, and you can share with your friends where you are, how do we take these breakthroughs of all the sciences, particularly including medicine, and make them available to everyone?

After all, there’s sort of a natural thing that can prevent that from happening if we’re not careful, which is the interest and needs of the richest have the most powerful voice in the marketplace. And so you’ll see disparities that take place where medical conditions like malaria or an AIDS vaccine receive substantially less focus than something like baldness or erectile dysfunction. In fact, you have a pretty significant ratio in those things, and it’s not that the company’s involved are doing something wrong, it’s that there isn’t a mechanism that outside sends that message that those things are worth working on.

The same thing is true specifically in computing. How should we get computers out to people on a very broad basis? There was a joint project between the Foundation and Microsoft to get computers into libraries. That was done in the United States about 60,000 computers were put into 18,000 libraries. And it was a huge success. It was particularly transformative in rural areas where people didn’t have broadband access, and they weren’t as likely to be able to afford the computer on their own. First the librarians were a little worried, would kids still come and get books, would the machines work well, and there was a lot of learning that took place. But in the end, it was phenomenally successful. In fact, the number of books being checked out went out as more traffic was coming to the library. And kids didn’t just play games, they did things that were interesting and valuable. And a lot of adults came in to learn new skills, to stay in touch with relatives, to understand about health conditions, and it’s been phenomenal to track that. That’s now been taken to a number of countries, Mexico, Chile, Botswana, Lithuania, there’s another six countries that we’re in the process of doing the pilots, and doing the rollouts to take this idea that in the same sense that libraries were deemed to be something everybody should get to, because literacy should be available to all, now this access to computing, and software, and the Internet, and the things it makes available, we should push on for that same type of accessibility.

In fact, we looked across many areas of activity, banking, the ability to have a savings account. The poor need that in particular. The ability to get loans. And it is interesting to think how we could draw in some of the large successful companies into helping out with these things. It’s an area that I’ve used the phrase creative capitalism to describe that and, in fact, if you just took the best practices of the leading companies, and had the average company doing as well, I think that this gap between how quickly and how well we map technologies into the needs of the most needy, of the poorest, would change very, very dramatically. And so that’s certainly a topic that I’ll be putting a lot of time into, and sitting down with companies, talking to them, creating awards, creating positive feedback for the ones that do it, maybe somebody will figure out how to get negative feedback for the ones who don’t do it, and creating hopefully some real momentum behind that.

So, you know, I’m very optimistic about software. I can’t imagine why software is not the most overcrowded field in the world. What could be more interesting than working on these tough problems, and being able to have this kind of impact to build magic new devices? And, in fact, what I and my generation got to do these last 30 years really pales in comparison to what you’ll be able to do in the next 30 years ahead.

Thank you. (Applause.)

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Hannah Ritchie provides tangible action that people, companies, and governments can take to build that better world—one where trade-offs between human well-being and environmental protection, between life today and life tomorrow, no longer have to be made.

The Future of Higher Education

I went to Arizona to learn about a new era of online learning.

I went to Arizona earlier this month to see what the college of the future might look like. What I found taking shape is an exciting new era of higher education that will help more students get a great, personalized education at an affordable price.

This future may not always include the lecture halls, dormitories, football teams and other features of the traditional college experience. Instead, the colleges I visited are experimenting with ways for students to get their degrees online, allowing them to take courses anyplace and at any time.

These “colleges without walls,” as they are sometimes called, are at the forefront of the effort to broaden access to higher education, especially for low-income students juggling their studies with full-time jobs and families. During my visit, I heard inspiring stories of students who are taking advantage of these flexible learning models to pursue degrees that can put them on paths to new careers. 

One of those students is Shawn Lee, a student at Rio Salado College in Tempe. He has a compelling story: After dropping out of college decades ago, he found himself in a series of low-paying, often back-breaking jobs. He recently decided to get his degree—and I’ve found this is a pretty common refrain at community colleges—when he had his first child and wanted to start building a better life.

Tucked away in an industrial park in Tempe, Rio Salado doesn’t look much like a traditional institute of higher education. There were no students running to class. No ivy-covered walls. Just a couple of glass-faced office buildings.

As we walked inside for a tour, there was an even bigger surprise.

The college has just 22 full-time faculty serving 60,000 students, with more than half of them attending their classes online. (The full-time faculty depend on 1,400 part-time teachers who manage individual class sections, review/grade assignments, and consult with students.) Students can start any of the school’s 1,000 courses almost any Monday of the year. Classes cost $84 per credit hour, far less than what other colleges charge.

I also visited the University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution with more than 300,000 students, where teachers and staff are working to make online learning even more flexible. One of the most popular innovations is a mobile app that gives students the freedom to study virtually anywhere. With the app they can keep track of their grades and assignments, participate in class discussions, and receive alerts from their teachers about their courses.

If your idea of college is a professor lecturing in front of a classroom full of students, some of these innovations may be surprising, even a little unsettling. But this kind of out-of-the-box thinking is needed to address the challenge facing higher education. College tuition is rising faster than any other cost in the U.S.—pricing many students out of a degree. More than 40 percent of college students drop out, depriving them of the chance to earn more money and leaving the U.S. without the highly-trained workers we need for economic growth. The fact is, we face a real dilemma. We need to educate people in a better way without increasing cost.

Most mornings I listen to online courses while walking on my treadmill. In my experience, what separates the great courses from the mediocre ones is the quality of the professors, whose passion and expertise bring their subjects to life, as much online as in-person.  That’s why it’s critical that during this time of transition we keep our focus on the instructors. They are the ones who inspire and guide students. The best online learning technologies expand the reach of the most inspiring professors by allowing more students to be part of their classes.

The risk of this mass approach to education, of course, is that students might get lost in such an impersonal setting. That’s why Rio Salado and other institutions are researching new approaches to student advising.  Using the growing body of data available about online students’ learning habits—for example, are they completing assignments and logging onto their courses regularly?—the institution can intervene to help students at risk of falling behind or dropping out. “Students don’t get lost because no one can just sit in the back corner. Everyone is in the front row,” a Rio Salado faculty member told me.

Several students I met during my visit said they liked learning online better than in a classroom. “I’ve taken college classes in a big auditorium with herds of people. There was no personal connection,” one University of Phoenix student said. “Now I can reach my teacher with the click of a mouse.”

Other students said they liked the fact that they can learn at their own pace and fit school into their busy schedules. What still needed improvement, however, was a connection with other students. They said they struggled to complete team assignments online because it was too difficult to coordinate schedules. Lab work for science classes and other hands-on learning can also be problematic, although Rio Salado is addressing this issue by giving chemistry students a lab kit to use at home. Marine biology students get a frozen squid to dissect.

The biggest challenge facing all higher education institutions is how to ensure more students stay in college or university and complete their degrees. They are looking everywhere for solutions. Arizona State University, for instance, discovered that the college catalogue overwhelmed students with too many class choices and gave them too little guidance. So the university redesigned the entire experience. The new, personalized online catalogue features “major maps,” which outline a major’s key requirements, optimal course sequence, and career options to help keep students on the path to graduation. 

I left Arizona feeling quite optimistic about what the future holds for higher education. It also reminded me how much work still needs to be done. What’s most exciting is that the institutions I visited are not standing still. They are taking risks and using their creative and intellectual powers to reinvent themselves for the future. In doing so, they will give many more students the opportunity to do the same with their own lives.

The 2024 Washington State Teacher of the Year believes the answer is yes—and she’s innovating new techniques to support them.

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This year signaled the start of a new era. Here’s why I believe next year is an opportunity to shape the world’s next chapter for the better.

This is my personal blog, where I share about the people I meet, the books I'm reading, and what I'm learning. I hope that you'll join the conversation.

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School days for Bill Gates (Q&A)

Following a cross-country collegiate jaunt, Microsoft's chairman speaks with CNET's Ina Fried about the tour, the challenges in global health and education, and nostalgia for the software company he founded.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Bill Gates didn't leave Harvard on Wednesday with a degree, but the Microsoft chairman said he did leave feeling that the top colleges are paying more attention to the needs of the developing world.

"Schools are really doing more," Gates told CNET in an interview, as he headed to the airport following his three-day college tour . "These leading institutions are out in front... Certainly versus when you go back all the way to when I was here, there were no poverty classes."

At MIT, for example, Gates met with students working on projects in developing countries, took part in a round table discussion on how online classes are being used at foreign universities, and learned about the school's D-Lab , which works to create affordable technologies that help address issues of poverty.

As he drove past the place where he and Paul Allen bought the copy of "Popular Electronics" that would change their lives--prompting them to quit school and found Microsoft--Gates also reflected on what it was like to spend less time at the company he started.

"The software revolution continues and, so, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, visual recognition, those are things we put big investments into, and I won't get a chance to be part of Microsoft popularizing those things," Gates said. "The things that haven't happened yet, I'll be sorry not to be part of."

At the same time, Gates said he is learning much in his foundation work on topics ranging from education reform, to vaccine development, to things as mundane as sanitation.

"It's not that savory of a topic," Gates agrees, but notes that there are a lot of intricacies in that area. "There's these people whose lives are thinking about this. Hey, we're spending $135 million a year on water and sanitation so we should know about it and get to know some good people."

For more from Gates, here's an edited transcript of our interview:

Q: So three days, six schools--what are the things that stick with you the most? Gates: Schools are really doing more. These leading institutions are out in front. They are each doing different things. That was more concrete in terms of examples.

Are they leading the way and pulling the students along, or are the students pushing them? I'm sure there's a little bit of both. Certainly versus when you go back all the way to when I was here, there were no poverty classes. Visibility of these issues was very, very low. I was going to say that things have improved, but there are a lot of concrete manifestations of that.

One of the things that struck me that you said is that, due to cost issues, this generation could be the first, as a whole, to have fewer education opportunities than their parents. Is that a pretty real risk? Gates: If it's not more efficient and we don't raise taxes very substantially, then yes. There is hope on it being more efficient, because of technology. So it's not completely bleak. There's two inflations that are higher than general inflation: educational inflation and health inflation, and health ends up trumping everything else and it's actually the fastest growing, whether that's Medicaid at the state level or Medicare at the federal level.

So you just have these increasing costs that just make it more out of reach. What you are seeing is the state school tuitions go up. California being a strong case of that, but that's broadly across the United States with the exception of four or five states. If you go way back into the '60s and '70s, most places had truly free [college education].

It just puts pressure on for innovation. Thank goodness there is a way to get innovation, hopefully in the personnel system, but also in [online education].

If you take K-12, online can have some impact there. There's people like Rocketship , a charter that is trying to mix in online so they can have more efficient teaching. The role of online in K-12, I hope we can prove that out, but there it's the teacher effectiveness that is probably the biggest thing.

If you move up to college level, the online thing can be absolutely phenomenal because students are more mature, motivated, involved in things. Because that piece can be done without any political complexity, I'm a little more sure that we'll drive a lot of efficiency in what college learning morphs into than K-12.

You saw some interesting stuff around math at Foothill [a community college in California]? Gates: These teachers teach as a group and let kids advance according to their mastery. They take pre-algebra and break it down into nine levels. You just keep staying at a level, trying out problems, talking to the teacher until you are done with that level and then you move on.

It sounds pretty obvious, but they've done it. But they are very clever how they do it. The way that budgets work and assignments work they had to really want to do this. But they've done it and they are seeing substantially better outcomes.

This is a remedial math class that if your high school did a really good job, you shouldn't be in at all. But it's the things that really mess up kids going to community college--being assigned to remedial math or remedial reading and writing. Very few people ever emerge from that if they are pushed into it. The variable progress thing allowed them to get some great results. They were using some online. It wasn't easy for them to do this innovation.

You are going to Washington next? Gates: This is a big food announcement with the Secretary of the Treasury and some other countries. It's very concrete, some additional dollars to help out with food aid for the poorest countries. It's a fairly exciting announcement.

When I talked to different people that you met with in the labs on the tour, they were pretty shocked, even knowing you as a pretty smart guy, at how much biology you've picked up. Is it something that comes naturally or something you had to be really interested in? Gates: I enjoyed learning the stuff. Biology is fascinating and the foundation puts a lot of money into health-related issues.

I'm very lucky. I've been able to watch Teach 12 courses , OpenCourseware courses . I can go online. If I'm confused, I can send mail to various people I know either at the foundation or this group Nathan [Myhrvold] has. I'll get a pretty prompt response. When I get confused, I have people who can help straighten me out. It's fun to learn all this stuff. The amount that I've gotten to hang out with scientists, that's one of the funner parts of the work I'm doing.

Take sanitation. It's not that savory of a topic, but what's hard about sanitation? Is it the liquid part? Is it the solid part? What if you take human excrement and you put it on fields, does it create a risk of infection? What's there? How do you sterilize it? Does it ruin the fertilizer-related properties of it? There's these people whose lives are thinking about this--hey, we're spending $135 million a year on water and sanitation so we should know about it and get to know some good people.

When I was down in South Africa I met the guy who runs the Durban water system, Neil MacLeod, who's one of the leading lights in a truly underfunded area of sanitation. These topics are pretty interesting. One of the forcing functions we've used is when I get Nathan's group to bring a bunch of smart physics, chemistry, and computer science people to discuss a topic, we get a briefing book and I use that as the opportunity to really get up to speed. How are vaccines manufactured? We had a session about how it's done today, how it will change, what benefits that brings in terms of costs, speed of dealing with an epidemic. It's actually a very interesting area.

Behind the scenes with Bill Gates at MIT (photos)

I knew you were really involved in all of Nathan's stuff at Intellectual Ventures. I didn't realize that part of the arrangement was that he spends a quarter of his time on not-so-much commercially applicable, but important research. Gates: He calls that Global Good, which is all funded by me. It's gotten some good visibility. He gave his Ted Talk on the photonic fence idea . There was a Newsweek article just recently that included the two people doing this disease modeling. Malaria is the first disease we are doing in-depth.

It seems like you are pretty intellectually stimulated. Is there anything you are missing about your full-time work at Microsoft? Gates: Oh sure. The software revolution continues and, so, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, visual recognition, those are things we put big investments into, and I won't get a chance to be part of Microsoft popularizing those things. I miss great people that I worked with there and particular things, the interactive TV that is about to happen. Digital reading, that is starting to happen. You can go back to a speech I gave in 1988, where I said having an encyclopedia in digital form, what are the pluses and minuses of having that digital versus on paper. This is the first thing that's going to flip. We did Encarta, and Wikipedia of course essentially took that over, but the things that haven't happened yet, I'll be sorry not to be part of.

In terms of digital reading, probably the two best examples I can think of are the Kindle for books, and, it's still early, but in terms of a tablet, the iPad. The tablet--you guys have been working on it forever. Is it hard sometimes to watch that and not be able to have as direct an impact in fighting those battles? Gates: I'd love to be involved. The Kindle, we chose not to do a device that couldn't browse. We thought that screen technology would let you browse and read both. The Kindle is a good contribution, but it is not general-purpose enough that Microsoft feels bad that we didn't do that. We chose very explicitly not to do something like that. There's many form factors that will be coming out based on the advances in screen technology. How much will it be a dedicated device? There's a lot of good thinking at Microsoft in that area. Hopefully, people will be surprised as that stuff rolls out.

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Bill Gates Quotes About College

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I would counsel people to go to college, because it's one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.

With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country.

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'

When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.

My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.

Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.

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