Interesting perspective on Steve Jobs.
As a Reed College graduate myself, the story coming down the line was that his family was sorta poor and he realized that the expenses were too much for his family to bear.
Actually, Steve sounds like a lot of people I knew at Reed. The combination of selective engagement with the college with the "freeloading" aspect was very much alive when I was there.
There was definitely the proto-hippie aspect to all of this learning-cum-sharing/freeloading. Almost everyone I tell is genuinely shocked by the existence of scroungers at the Reed cafeteria - i.e. a semi-organized group of students who would eat your leftovers. There was a whole culture to this; as you took your plate back to the return, you would have to declare if your meal was vegetarian/vegan and if you were fighting a cold or a stomach bug. (This was all very pre-COVID...)
It was mostly off campus students who didn't have a meal plan. But there was definitely a social-cultural aspect to this and some slummed it just for the cred.
A bunch of students took leave for a semester or two but continued to float around Portland while still engaging with the school and the community. Some of this was true poverty and they had to work. Reed never had a large endowment and financial aid was limited.
Some of it was stress, mental health or substance abuse. The school placed unusually adult academic pressures on students. Reedies have historically not been super organized Ivy League go-getter types, but rather, smart, curious kids that liked learning for learning's sake. Many professors treated everybody as (near) intellectual equals, as if we were all Ph.D students in advanced seminars. Reed has always had a VERY low 4-year completion rate. Burnout was common and there was no shame in graduating in 5 or 6 years.
Reed is a very traditional even conservative place when it comes to academics. Reed does not (and did not have) graphic design or "applied" anything courses etc. I'm even doubtful that the calligraphy was a formal credit-earning class. Apparently calligraphy was a cultural moment at Reed in the 1970's and was on every flyer and poster on the campus.
The heart of the lifestyle was that you were going to spend your days as a scholar of the humanities, social or "hard" sciences and that if you were cool enough, you'd pick up a skill like underwater basket weaving, build monster bikes, or learn to run the nuclear reactor. What can I say? That idea of being both cool and a geek probably started there.
I think that Jobs recognized that the monkish life of academia where you spend six months on some obscure Greek poet was not for him, and he'd rather engage with the world on his own terms and focus on pursuing his interests.
Is this privilege? Of course. But, it also requires a ton of self-confidence. By this I mean a huge ego.
This *combination* of privilege and ego seems necessary for great success (at least in our shameless, individualistic self-promotional late capitalist society). That's why it's easy for less or moderately successful people to recognize their privilege, while saying "privilege" to the ego-driven top performers cuts to their very being; to their very sense of self-worth.
While this privileged attitude helped Jobs (and Zuckerberg) get out of learning a lot of boring and tedious material, it also probably short circuited the process of learning patience, self-discipline, humbleness and all the other traditional virtues.
In a way, it's ironic that we live in a world shaped by the legacy of these men and have become more like them. Frankly, I don't know how any college students have the patience for any scholarship these days with all the distractions emanating from our many devices, be it social media or just the rabbit hole that is the internet.
As a recovering Reed College graduate, I also have to admit that I am slightly jealous at the Jobs and Zuckerbergs of the world. Ultimately, every job I had, and my career success (or lack thereof) came down to my mostly self-taught interests, skills and hobbies rather than anything I did academically. (Plus, those skills helped me defend myself from the disdain of the various bosses and colleagues from State U who belittled my fancy liberal arts degree over the years...).
To graduate at Reed you have to write a thesis. There is a tower in the library where all the bound theses ever written are displayed and they are circulated like any other books in the library. When I went back there after a couple of years, I climbed up the stairs and saw that in all this time not a single person had checked out this small book that I spent my senior year working on. Sometimes I wonder if I should have tried to get out of it, and spent that year learning to code, writing a screenplay, making new (influential!) friends or just going on hikes while reading beat poetry.
One last comment on this topic: we do a huge disservice to kids, when we do not encourage them to pursue art or music or creative writing or let them spend time developing their individual creative spirits. Just please don't spend all of that time influencing on TikTok--ok guys?
