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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

I once spoke at a conference for teens, where I was literally the only pro-college speaker. My original talk wasn't even about college; I made up a talk on the spot after hearing how anti-college everyone else was. Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.

Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.

College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.

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Bill Gates is not a good example of a college dropout. In his own words:

"I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2013/01/31/bill-gates...

> Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.

Huh, I hadn't heard that one before.

I do think there's a particular subset of the startup sector, mostly focusing on web, MVPs, and business-model innovation, which has a negative view of academic-anything, whether it's formal education, academic research, even CS as a subject. But it's also worth noting that that isn't the whole of the technology business! Plenty of startup founders not only graduated from college, but even went to grad school (graduating from grad school seems less important than spending a few years there). A number of high-profile startups were formed by grad students or professors as spinoffs of their academic research. A few technologies that were either developed in academia, or are direct derivatives of stuff the founders developed in academia, include PageRank, Mathematica, SPARC, PostgreSQL, Matlab, etc.

To be fair, the drop-out-of-HS talk was from a High Schooler with a "startup", who had dropped out for a well-known (but not YC) incubator. So, he was biased (and unexperienced).

> spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.

It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.

In that case, it's not that college isn't right for you, it's that you're not at the right college.

I live in the Bay Area now and have gone to many meetups, and I have to unequivocally disagree that it's better than college for meeting people.

your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford

I don't know why you think the intellectual tenor would be different at those colleges. My respect for Stanford took a major hit when I saw this: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-for...

There are pockets of intellectualism at any college, but the truth is that American culture is just not very intellectual, and among the business elite there's a pronounced antiintellectualism. You're going to find more philistines than intellectuals at any college in the U.S. and, yes, that includes the top ones. Technology people aren't an exception to this. The old Silicon Valley nerds had at least an interest in history and literature and art. They weren't experts, but they agreed that it was important. The new business-oriented pseudonerds? Narrowly specialized in one technical field ("social graph logistics") and complete ignoramuses about everything else.

Does that mean one shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford? Of course not. It's great for the resume and there are a lot of connections to be made. But if you think that you're going to be discussing high intellectual concepts with most people meet-- or that the people bringing the connections and the people with high intellectual interests will have any overlap whatsoever-- you'll be disappointed.

That's the Stanford marching back, they're basically known for fucking around on stage and being edgy/controversial.

"Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college." I think their paths are so extraordinary that they shouldn't be mentioned in a career conference! it would be very naive to use them as an example for one's own career choices.

And they still went, and they still benefited. If anything, that's just an argument to still go to college, do something amazing while you're there, and drop out when it becomes a huge success, which I don't think anyone would disagree with.

If anything that's a great argument for college. College was so helpful for them and provided such a great environment, that they didn't even need to stay there for the whole 4 years.

Why do people keep on using Zuckerberg as an example? Facebook was a social network for college students. If he hadn't gone to college, why would he, and how could he make a website for college students?

> Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.

Zuckerberg is not an example of why one should go to college. He is an example of the difference between college as-an-experience[0] and the diploma that one gets after graduating. In some fields, a diploma is important if not required, similar to a certification, and in others it isn't. If you want to go to college, it's important to know exactly what you want to get out of it, if the diploma itself has little value in se in your field.

Unfortunately, I think these two points are oftentimes conflated, to the point where some people completely write college off as having no value, when a more appropriate conclusion may be that college has value whether or not you receive a diploma.

[0] both a learning experience and cultural one

The problem is that increasing costs mean that college-as-an-experience on its own, without also picking up a diploma that employers value sufficiently (and which you will quickly put to use to get a better job), is somewhere between "not worth it on balance" and "financial suicide" for an increasing proportion of US students.

Zuckerberg is also an awkward case because he effectively did do a very traditional liberal-arts degree, complete with learning to read and write Greek and Latin, and extensive study of classical poetry. He just did it earlier in life, because he went to a famous private boarding school, the Phillips Exeter Academy, which followed that model of education. He's definitely not the product of some kind of modern technically-focused vocational education: Phillips Exeter is not exactly a "learn-to-code camp" place.

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