The Famous Dropouts

If staying longer to learn more is a wholesome trend at U.S. colleges, it is not necessarily the only path to real achievement. Fame and success can also come to the 60% of all U.S. collegians who quit the campus where they started. Case in point: Scott Carpenter.

Astronaut Carpenter twice flunked out of the University of Colorado. Yet last week, when Colorado gracefully gave him his B.S. in aeronautical engineering, President Quigg Newton aptly explained: "For years to come, his example of courage and character, and of what a man can make of his life if he wills to do so, will serve as an inspiration to thousands of young people in this university."

Carpenter's fellow astronaut John Glenn failed to finish at Ohio's Muskingum College. In the same flight pattern was Charles Lindbergh, who quit the University of Wisconsin after two years to learn flying. In fact, a list of famous dropouts could well begin with John F. Kennedy, who dropped out of Princeton in 1935 before he crashed through at Harvard (cum laude) in 1940--along with Jacqueline Kennedy, who deserted Vassar before eventually graduating from George Washington University.

Woodrow Wilson dropped out of North Carolina's Davidson College, later went on to Princeton. Robert Frost quit Dartmouth and William Faulkner the University of Mississippi. Architect Edward D. Stone dropped out of the University of Arkansas. Henry Ford II left Yale; his fellow auto tycoon, George Romney, spent only a year at the University of Utah. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger quit Kansas' Washburn College after two years; California's Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike left the University of Santa Clara after his sophomore year. Oil Billionaire J. Paul Getty failed to finish at U.S.C., Berkeley or Oxford--and went on to become "the richest man in the world."

College psychiatrists by no means disapprove of all dropouts. If dropouts lack "motivation," it may be a healthy reaction against too many rules and goals that--for them--are momentarily false. Adolescence is by definition a struggle to create a self. Sometimes an intelligent retreat is the best way to win. Says Stanford Psychologist Nevitt Sanford: "Leaving college may leave a student with a sense of unfinished business that will, in some cases, provide motivation for learning for the rest of his life."

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