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Comment by pulkitsh1234 | Hacker News Reader

The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India.

My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding.

Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you dropped out..That's all I read and see everywhere about America, that you are free to take decisions like this (and often encouraged)

It feels odd to think to that kids in the USA are on a somewhat fixed train track, when there are so many opportunities + freedom + less judgement overall in the society.

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The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success.

This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and comfortable in non-traditional life paths. They’re just not the ones being discussed din this comment.

Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.

What’s your point?

Peter Thiel and the people that did his fellowship don’t represent the majority of career paths people take in SV, but they do make for good (or too close to home) fodder.

The lifetime value of a college degree in the United States is very high.

College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.

While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.

It's a relatively small percentage that want to do something outside the norm, and it does not go very well for a lot of them. There's a lot of survivor's bias in hearing about dropouts.

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