Hmm... you think one more month would have really done that much for Bill? Seems like a stretch.
Steve Jobs likes to claim that audting a caligraphy class (after he had officially dropped out of Reed college) is what gave him the "insanely great" idea of "real" fonts for the Mac (multiple typefaces, proportional spacing, etc.). Seems a bit aprocraphyl to me... but who knows?
I don't think he actually *had* that many classes where he wasn't getting his desired A or B by six weeks -- probably could count them on one hand?
His undergraduate degree was in entymology, I think. AFAIK he never finished his master's degree -- he started writing for the school newspaper and was having so much "fun" he quit going to classes and dropped out. He did, however, eventually get a paying job for a real newspaper, so perhaps that wasn't all bad... in later life he went back to get a CPA and became an accountant.
I think he's not that atypical of a lot of people back in the '60s... he had enough talent that he could drift around from field to field, and the culture at the time was that this was perfectly OK. With the stupid notion we have today that "everyone must have a college degree," it's a lot harder for people to do this (and I say this as someone who took longer than expected to finish his degrees, but always did so none the less). E.g., I very much doubt that Steve Jobs today could have found a comparable job to that of being a tech at Atari given his background of having dropped out of college.
---Joel