This guy appears to be a self-styled liberal activist operating in the business world. According to this fawning Business Insider piece (did his PR agent write it?), he has tried his hand at fixing climate change, inequality, health care, AI ethics, and so on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mustafa-suleyman-the-lefty-a...
He dropped out of his degree at Oxford and then founded a telephone helpline for Muslim youths. Then got a job with Ken Livingstone, the politician.
This early history seems strange to me. Who drops out of Oxford unless it’s to start a business? You’d almost think he was an intelligence asset of something.
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.
Interesting article, thanks for finding it. He's described as a successful and "well-rounded" leader who genuinely cares about the welfare of everyone on the planet, who had a falling out with others at Google due to his insistence on requiring an AI-ethics oversight board to be set up re: Google and DeepMind's AI efforts. That's certainly an intriguing perspective, and it seems to jive with claims by others that AI ethics and bias are not being given the attention they require, either at Google or elsewhere.
If I was the British intelligence services, this is exactly what I’d do. Recruit bright, middle class students from Oxford, fast track their career through the NGO sector (where results don’t matter), build up their public profile with press coverage, then deploy them to the private sector and hope that they will end up inside one of the multinationals that are more powerful and influential than most countries. I mean I’m just idly musing here but something definitely seems off about his bio.
So these kids are bright but don’t realize that if they got the degree, the world would be their oyster. Smart enough to be spies, dumb enough to actually be spies.
They need to choose: graduation + great career prospects, or guaranteed career but loss of alternative prospects. It’s not a case of the students being smart or dumb, it’s a case of the agencies realising that making the offer post-graduation gives them less leverage. Hypothetically.
Like I said, for the placement of your agents/assets in important places. Having insiders working in places like Google would seem to me to be of great strategic importance.
Yes it’s a lot of work. What do you think all the billions spent by intelligence agencies goes towards? The people who work in the three letter agencies are some of the hardest working people on the planet.
He dropped out of his degree at Oxford and then founded a telephone helpline for Muslim youths. Then got a job with Ken Livingstone, the politician.
This early history seems strange to me. Who drops out of Oxford unless it’s to start a business? You’d almost think he was an intelligence asset of something.