Quite a lot of people drop out of Oxford because it's an intense high-pressure environment. It may not have been out of choice, even if he's portraying it that way
In elite schools [edit: that are as elite as] Oxford, the drop out rate would be close to Oxford's. The US numbers are pretty skewed by the massive drop out rate in 2-year community colleges, which both admit huge numbers of people and have very high dropout rates. Also, a huge percentage of dropouts are in the first year, when people are deciding that college may not work for them or be the right fit.
Actually, the US numbers are already filtered to 4-year institutions.
"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012."
(There is some amount of skew based on this definition for students who transferred to a different institution and then completed on time, but it's hard to find numbers on students who transferred from one four-year institution to another, as opposed to all transfers who predominantly come from 2-year community colleges.)
So that's 1.3% out of "more than 24,000 students at Oxford", i.e. ~310 students per whatever the counting period of that 24k number is. That's not a low number, of a population that's already heavily selected. Plenty of resourceful folks could find themselves in this group.
I'm deeply confused at your response. 310 is still 1.3%, which is both a low number and percentage. Especially when compared with the larger 7.8% of other UK universities as OP stated.
Most UK universities are heavily selected. Indeed, Oxbridge moreso and as such you'd expect the dropout to be lower which it is. Hence OPs response.
It's a low number and percentage in a relative sense. It's a non-insignificant number in an absolute sense.
This whole subthread was in context of the question of how often people drop out from Oxford and for what reasons. My point is that it's 310 people every year or few years (depending on how they count that 24000 number) - it's a number big enough to admit a variety of reasons and characters.
This comment managed to blow my mind. Are we really trying to say the cofounder of DEEPMIND is too stupid / incompetent to have graduated from Oxford and came up with a charity as a front for it?
That’s not at all what I suggested. It seems like you just want an argument.
Let me explain again slower: you implied that him being cofounder conferred some level of competence to him. I’m saying that he’s not really a cofounder in the traditional sense of the word, and so maybe that title doesn’t carry as much weight here.
