Entrepreneur Profile–Mark Zuckerberg

Now, I’m sure you all know who he is, and if not, im sure you all use the social networking site called facebook, well, he and his buddies created that website.

Let’s look at 5 things you should know about mark

Mark is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, he is also the CEO of Facebook.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004.

On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, evaluating facebbok at $15 billion at the time of the sale.

In 2008, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg as the 321st richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He is the youngest person ever to appear on the Forbes 400.

Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008.

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Entrepreneur profile–J. K. Rowling

Someone that shows you how a single idea can develop into something great, a simple story from her train journey developed into a multi-millionaire empire.

1). She is a British author,the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series
2). She is the twelfth richest woman in Britain, the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007.
3). Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom.
4). She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children’s High Level Group.
5). Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books,
the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world.

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Entrepreneur Profile–Michael Dell

The last name gives this one away right?
Yes, Michael Dell

The Five things you should know about michael dell.

1). He is the Founder and CEO of Dell, Inc.
2). As of 2009, Forbes estimates Dell’s net worth at $12.3 billion
3). He is the 25th richest man in the world
4). Dell dropped out of University of Texas at Austin, at the age of 19 to run PC’s Limited, which later became Dell Computer Corporation, then ultimately Dell, Inc.
5). On May 15, 2006, The University of Texas at Austin announced a $50 million grant from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation to “bring excellence in children’s health and education to Austin”.

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Entrepreneur profile–Larry Ellison

On Today’s entrepreneur profile, we look at Larry Ellison

1). An American entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation
2). He is currently listed on Forbes list of billionaires as the #4 richest person in the world as of March 11, 2009.
3). Ellison is the 3rd richest American
4). He is worth an estimated networth of $22.5 billion.
5). He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died and then he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer designing.

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The Great College Hoax

Just finished reading this on the Forbes website, I thought it might benefit anyone who have issues with student loans, it touches other aspects aswell.
Let me know your thoughts on this.

As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history.

Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn’t swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.

Kellum’s law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. “Two people with this much debt just shouldn’t be together,” Kellum says.

The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that’s just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.

College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers.

Like many good cons, this one contains a kernel of truth. Census figures show that college grads earn an average of $57,500 a year, which is 82% more than the $31,600 high school alumni make. Multiply the $25,900 difference by the 40 years the average person works and, sure enough, it comes to a tad over $1 million.

But anybody who has gotten a passing grade in statistics knows what’s wrong with this line of argument. A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn’t have increased his income.

All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.

Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one–even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don’t pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn’t include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.

“I call it the million-dollar misunderstanding,” says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, of the prevailing propaganda.

Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt.

“There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud,” Sander says. “There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path.”

Warped as the numbers are, they don’t begin to account for the hidden cost of higher education: financing it. Borrowing has doubled over the past decade, to roughly $85 billion in new student loans in the 2007–08 academic year, bringing total student debt owed to well over half a trillion dollars. The average borrower went $19,200 into debt for a diploma in 2004, a 58% increase after inflation since 1993, according to the Project on Student Debt.

For more:go to
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0202/060_print.html

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