Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and grew up in Falls Church and Blacksburg, Virginia. He is one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master's degree in psychology, and Wilson Emerson Schmidt, a professor of international economics at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration. Schmidt spent part of his childhood in Italy as a result of his father's work and has stated that it had changed his outlook.

Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running. He attended Princeton University, starting as an architecture major and switching to electrical engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1976.

From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt resided at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle.

In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. There, he also earned a PhD degree in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.
Extract all the academic degrees from the text
Master's Degree in Psychology
Bachelor of Science in Engineering
Master's of Science
PhD in EECS