Do You Really Have to Go to College?

The problem with these articles and the types of comments on sites such as HN is that people neglect the fact that college is an experience, and a highly subjective one at that. Too often do technocrats forget that college isn't simply an investment, but for many, it is also a consumption good, and THAT IS OK.

Sure, college isn't necessarily going to make you the best programmer in the world. But, if one looks past the facade of a pure investment brought upon by our economy and media, there lies a rich experience in diversity and the exposure to the liberty of choice (at least in America).

Seibel: And you very briefly went to CMU after you finished high school.

Zawinski: Yeah. What happened was, I hated high school. It was the worst time of my life. And when I was about to graduate I asked Fahlman if he’d hire me full-time and he said, “No, but I’ve got these friends who’ve got a startup; go talk to them.” Which was Expert Technologies—ETI. I guess he was on their board. They were making this expert system to automatically paginate the yellow pages. They were using Lisp and I knew a couple of the people already who had been in Fahlman’s group. They hired me and that was all going fine, and then about a year later I panicked: Oh my god, I completely lucked into both of these jobs; this is never going to happen again. Once I no longer work here I’m going to be flipping burgers if I don’t have a college degree, so what I ought to do is go get one of those.

The plan was that I’d be working part-time at ETI and then I’d be going to school part time. That turned into working full-time and going to school full-time and that lasted, I think, six weeks. Maybe it was nine weeks. I know it lasted long enough that I’d missed the add/drop period, so I didn’t get any of my money back. But not long enough that I actually got any grades. So it’s questionable whether I actually went. It was just awful. When you’re in high school, everyone tells you, “There’s a lot of repetitive bullshit and standardized tests; it’ll all be better once you’re in college.” And then you get to your first year of college and they’re like, “Oh, no—it gets better when you’re in grad school.” So it’s just same shit, different day—I couldn’t take it. Getting up at eight in the morning, memorizing things. They wouldn’t let me opt out of this class called Introduction to Facilities where they teach you how to use a mouse. I was like, “I’ve been working at this university for a year and a half—I know how to use a mouse.” No way out of it—“It’s policy.” All kinds of stuff like that. I couldn’t take it. So I dropped out. And I’m glad I did.

Then I worked at ETI for four years or so until the company started evaporating. We were using TI Explorer Lisp machines at ETI so I spent a lot of my time, besides actually working on the expert system, just sort of messing around with user-interface stuff and learning how those machines worked from the bottom up. I loved them—I loved digging around in the operating system and just figuring out how it all fit together. I’d written a bunch of code and there was some newsgroup where I posted that I was looking for a job and, oh, by the way, here’s a bunch of code. Peter Norvig saw it and scheduled an interview. My girlfriend at the time had moved out here to go to UC Berkeley, so I followed her out.

> Furthermore, some recent college graduates are not faring too well in the job market.

This is not true in my experience for coders. Go to silicon valley and therell be many startups vying to get your attention.

> If you’d like to learn how to code, you don’t need a $150,000 piece of paper to tell you that you can.

That isnt what the paper signifies. It signifies that you have reached at least a certain level of education in the field. More importantly, it signifies this to other people who dont know you at all. Even pg wants to know what school you went to on the yc application. (you might argue that people who drop out still get in, yes, but if they had had that credential, their likelyhood would probably have increased, otherwise, why would yc ask?)

Here's the facts: if you have no work experience and no college education, you're not even going to get a phone interview with any software company. You're just not. None of the companies I've worked for (from tiny startups to 1000+ person software companies) would look twice at your resume. They wouldn't even get so far as printing it out so they could throw it away.

You are not Mark Zuckerberg. You are not Bill Gates. Don't try to pretend you are. If you're incredibly lucky, you'll get a job as an unpaid intern at a medical device company writing Delphi for their internal systems. You may be able to work your way up from there... but it'll suck.

College was FUN. I learned a lot there. I wouldn't skip it for the world. Hell, for much of my 20's I wished I could go back to college to do it some more.

I went to a private, expensive technical school, and graduated with, yes, $30,000 in debt. If you're as smart as you think you are, you can get grants and scholarships to reduce the cost of college. And then you can pay it off a few hundred dollars a month like everyone else does... and you'll laugh, because a few hundred dollars a month isn't that bad when you're getting paid $70k+

I promise you, you'll learn a lot in college. You'll have fun. Don't listen to all the statistics about not being able to get a job or pay off loans... those are general statistics for all graduates that include all the philosophy and English and history of music majors.

You'll be graduating with SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE that can be directly applied to the JOB that you get because you are QUALIFIED, and because software companies troll job fairs at technical colleges looking for bright stars like you that will work their butts off for half the price of the old neckbeards with kids that want to go home at 5pm.

GO TO COLLEGE. IT'S AWESOME.

I'd like to see some case studies on someone who walks into Wall Street without a degree. That'd be interesting.

Obviously, Colleges didn't take notice because enrollment is still high and people still bet on their degrees.

What I think colleges should do, is not reduce their tuition, but improve their brand. It's not the degree that matters, it's the college that you graduated from. If the quality of graduates of a certain college drops significantly, this will affect the whole college graduates credibility.

If you are looking for a JOB (at a company), go and get a DEGREE. That's it. The typical path. There is no creativity in this path. If you are looking to become an ENTREPRENEUR and start businesses and stuff, I'd say give college a shot (maybe a year or two) and then drop (if you don't like it).

There are many other ways to network beside college. But I'd say, give it a shot.

Now, lest anyone get the wrong idea I do not mean to imply that one path leads to the other. But also, please let's not pretend that Gates and Zuckerberg are "typical" college dropouts either. Maybe, the restaurant kids are more common than Gates type people, eh?

-- Anyway, seriously, if you are a recent HS grad and choose not to go to college and instead decide to give Devbootcamp $12,200 for an RoR course ... I'm sure they have a nice product ... But I will also like to contact you regarding the small matter of a bridge I would like to sell.