Zuckerberg’s Harvard Degree: Fast Facts About Mark’s Honorary Degree

Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard Degree has come 12 years after he dropped out of Harvard College to start Facebook. As the saying goes, ‘It’s better late than never’.

Mark Zuckerberg, one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts this week returned to the Ivy League school to pick up his degree – albeit only an honorary one.

Zuckerberg, who is one of the richest people in the world, also gave an address to this year’s graduating class, praising the students for accomplishing something he never could.

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“If I get through this speech, it’ll be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard,” he said.

Mr. Zuckerberg went further to empower the students on the importance of believing in themselves, he told the crowd of graduates:

‘Change starts local. Even global changes start small – with people like us.’

‘Every generation expands the circle of people we consider ‘one of us.’ And in our generation, that now includes the whole world. …But we live in an unstable time.

‘There are people left behind by globalization across the whole world. And it’s tough to care about people in other places when we don’t first feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.’

Zuckerberg’s Harvard Degree made him reflect back on how he launched Facebook from his dormitory room on February 2004, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The social network was initially limited to Harvard students only. It later expanded to other Ivy League universities, before being rolled out globally.

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Zuckerberg is the youngest commencement speaker in the history of Harvard College. Bill Gates, currently the world’s richest man, dropped out of Harvard in 1975, which was the same year he co-founded Microsoft. Mr. Gates received his own honorary degree from Harvard back in 2007 (after 32 years).

Earlier this week, Forbes magazine named Facebook the world’s fourth most valuable brand with Zuckerberg ranked as the fifth-richest person with an approximate fortune of $64.2bn.

In 2010, Time magazine named Mr. Zuckerberg Person of the Year and Vanity Fair magazine listed him among its “top 100 most influential people of the information age”.

Like other tech entrepreneurs before him, Mr. Zuckerberg has also become known as a philanthropist, pledging to direct tens of billions of dollars to a range of causes. He was studying computer science at Harvard before he moved to Palo Alto, in California, to run Facebook.

Dame Judi Dench and composer John Williams were among the 10 other recipients of honorary degrees from Harvard this week.