
Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People - xwowsersx
http://levinotik.com/why-college-is-a-poor-choice-for-a-lot-of-people/
======
whiddershins
Most people don't know what they want to do with their lives at age 18,
whether or not they think they do.

The strongest argument against college is an unmanageable amount of debt,
which can haunt you for decades, and I have many friends who suffer from this.

The strongest argument for college is the connections you can make which will
be with you for life. I know countless people who can trace their career
opportunities back to people they met in college, whether or not they even
graduated.

Both factors _can_ be overcome. You can pay off your debt diligently, or
attend a school that is so cheap this is a non-issue. You can make connections
other ways. But you will pay a price one way or another.

In my opinion those two things are the fundamental factors that determine
whether or not going to college is a good idea, and should be the main
considerations that help you decide whether or not to go. Every other aspect
of this discussion seems like a giant red herring.

~~~
VLM
"people they met in college"

For those of us who went to school, think back on the people you hang out
with... did you sit next to them in class or meet them in clubs / parties /
internships? The people I met outside classrooms ended up being more important
than the people I met inside classrooms.

There might be a pretty strong argument for skipping school and doing a 4-year
internship, getting a job, or simply living in an apartment in the student
area of a big school. I'm claiming that unless the school is in a horrifically
high crime area, nobody checks for school IDs at the LISP club meeting or the
guest speaker lecture or the frat party or the language conference or the
local 2600 meeting or classroom lectures. When I moved to a new area for work
I checked out the local schools, couldn't get a tour to fit my schedule,
crashed a history lecture, just walked in one day and sat down, pretty awesome
experience, so I signed up. This might sound too extroverted for some people
but I assure you it was less terrifying than public speaking.

Also there's go to school full time vs my strategy of Saturday morning part
time. I met just as many people, if not more, and taking one class at a time
is pretty cheap compared to going "all in". Or you can audit either for free
or nearly free.

~~~
1337biz
You are right about that, but you also have to make a conscious decision to
become more extroverted. This is a subject that takes effort and is really
hard for some people.

When I was at that age wasn't even aware what I was missing out. College just
pushed me into an environment without me having to put much effort into
becoming more social.

------
roc
Somewhat of an aside, but:

If you're a self-directed learner passionate about a subject _nothing about a
classroom holds you back_. [1] It sets a minimum pace for acquiring new
information, it sets a minimum domain of concepts and to some degree it will
influence the order of the first few concepts you'll have to tackle, if you
concede to only tackle the subject when the class begins.

I'm endlessly bemused by the repeated assertions of self-identified
"passionate", "self-directed" learners that an organized class is some sort of
jail cell from which their (self-identified) considerable curiosity and
talents cannot break free.

If you are _actually_ passionate, if you are _actually_ self-directed, it may
put a crimp in your process for about a week or two until you're so far ahead
of the syllabus that keeping up with the topics as-covered in class is no more
an obstacle than setting your learning aside to cook or do laundry.

Sure, it can still be an annoying distraction. But it's not a particularly
notable one. It's certainly not a pen or a leash.

[1] Slower learners can certainly be harmed by classroom schedules. But one
would expect the self-directed and passionate ones would have recognized their
predicament long before they entered college and thus realized they need to
tackle subjects _before_ they sign up for credit-hours.

~~~
stephancoral
Indeed, a classroom also gives you access to a very valuable resource:
proximity to an expert in the field. Of course, this depends on what sort of
school you attend but in my experience if you show dedication and passion in a
subject, it is pretty easy to get to know a professor and open a lot of doors
that way.

------
wil421
Try listing Kahn Academy or free open online classes/certificates on a resume.

The only reason I went to college was so I could be taken seriously and
offered a job in my career. Before graduating I had 0 calls backs, after I
started listing a completed degree I had many many call backs.

College may be a poor choice for some, but if you dont want to get stuck
waiting tables or making coffee then its a sure bet with the right major.

~~~
humanrebar
I think you're probably right from the perspective of a prospective employee.

That being said, having these sorts of discussion may sway _employers_ to have
a more open mind to non-traditional ways to become qualified for employment.
And if that starts to happen, a B.S. or B.A. will stop being a litmus test and
start being one path towards qualification for a job or a career.

This is actually a serious problem. If change in technology and the job market
continues to accelerate (will there be long-haul truck drivers in 15 years?),
we need to be able to retrain people without demanding four years of full-time
education and massive student loans.

~~~
VLM
"we need to be able to retrain people without demanding four years of full-
time education and massive student loans."

The destruction of the middle class is a different, although related, issue
and note that its always downward class migration not upward. Very few lower
class jobs require a degree, so no need for schooling when the jobs go away
and the former employees permanently class migrate downward. A more realistic
life skill would be learning how to be happy "making coffee" than getting a
degree for a job that doesn't exist and never will again.

Cultural engineering to convince people that you're more than your job, or
that you should work to live instead of live to work, will eliminate more
revolutionary strife than any drone or spy program.

------
VLM
Need to come up with a long term strategy for dealing with credentialism. One
obvious example comes from the military a couple centuries ago, buy and sell
military officer commissions. I think this could work. If the primary purpose
of credentialism is stealth enforcement of demographics, making it starkly
monetary instead of stealth monetary isn't going to offend those people.

Another interesting aspect is spending your late teens/early 20s in school
was, centuries ago, kind of a day care for young adults old enough to get into
trouble and young enough to be utterly unable to run the family business
(being nobility, owning a factory, stuff like that). So you need a new day
care for kids who aren't old enough to play in the big leagues but too old to
sit around and get in trouble all day. I propose mandatory national service.
There's always .mil or peace corps, other alternatives could be envisioned.
Some kind of 1930s CCC organization, perhaps. Something has to be done...
there's not enough jobs to employ 22-67 right now, so increasing working years
to 18-70 in the future will just doom us. Maybe lowering retirement age would
help, what with natural ageism anyway, working years from 18-59 might be the
ticket. You can either lower the upper limit formally and cheaply, or
informally via ageism and welfare expensively, so may as well minimize costs.
Besides, old people vote, and dropping to 59 will probably sell pretty well,
so from a practical political view this is required.

If anyone has a better anti-credentialism strategy than buying/selling
degrees, or a better baby sitting idea than national service, please reply.

------
vinceguidry
> “There’s no reason not to…” is not a positive argument for anything.

It not be a positive argument, but it does set a floor for considering
alternatives. Whatever you do end up choosing to do with your post-high school
years, if it's not college, has to beat what college offers you.

There's a lot to consider. Are you good at motivating yourself to do stuff?
Can you think usefully at a high level? Can you chart your own course, using
only resources that you, yourself can acquire and integrate, and get somewhere
in the four years you'd be giving up by going to college?

Then there's there's this: Are the questions you're asking yourself regarding
the decision going to remain relevant after the new reality sets in? Can you
trust your 17-19 year old self to make decisions?

I chose not to go to school, and that decision threw me into a purgatory that
lasted until the end of my twenties. I lost my goals and ambitions and had to
find them later. Now I've found personal traction and am working on personal
product-market fit.

I don't know how my life would have been different if I'd have gone to school.
I like my life now but I can't use that to say that the college decision I
made was good or bad. Maybe it would have been better. Maybe I'd have found
the traction I enjoy now earlier had I gone to school. Maybe I would have
never found it.

Maybe it's a wash. In that case, it would have been better to go to school,
because at least I would have had better jobs and situations while sorting
through all my personal stuff to find traction.

School is a good default decision to make in a world where there are very few
good default decisions available to make. Think long and hard before you
decide to not take advantage of that.

~~~
unculturedswine
Shouldn't the previous decade of schooling before college taught you how to
make education decisions?

~~~
vinceguidry
No. The problem domain is more complicated than can be understood and modeled
by an 18-year old.

~~~
Kitesage
I agree with this. Granted this is anecdotal evidence, but I recently
graduated from college with a degree in computer science. In high school, I
had no classes on computer science. I wouldn't even know where to start nor
would I be able to model myself an educational framework to understand
computer science as well as college taught me. Now even though high school
taught me the framework required to learn a new skill, I just feel that my
total unfamiliarity and lack of peers or educators would have made the task
especially daunting.

~~~
vinceguidry
I had the ability to pick up new skills myself when I was that age. I taught
myself how to program at 10. I was making websites at 15-16. I didn't need
school to teach me how to learn. But that's not all school offers. Without a
degree, you either have to figure out how to demonstrate your worth as an
employee to someone by yourself bypassing all the usual social signalling, or
you have to figure out how to be an entrepreneur, again without the benefit of
the institutions we already have that evolved to fix this very problem.

Evolution doesn't create perfect solutions to problems, college is by no means
perfect, but they do create effective ones, whereas designed solutions often
aren't effective because they didn't take into advantage some important
premise or edge case. Take this into account when you design the path you're
going to take through your early twenties.

------
jayvanguard
I agree with this from a CS perspective but I don't think the argument extends
to other fields necessarily.

Part of what college gets you and a la cart self-learning doesn't as easily is
the confidence that you know what you don't know. That is also why employers
prefer a degree. It tells them you have a complete base of knowledge that was
well thought out.

The reason this doesn't work in CS is because practice is so far ahead of the
academy in most areas. In other fields, such as physics and history this is
not the case.

------
hackuser
The article is written from the perspective of someone who has not enjoyed the
benefits of a college education: The premise is that at ~17 years old (or any
age), people know what to learn and how to learn it.

Good college educations require a diversity of classes so students can learn
from and about the incredible diversity of _valuable_ ideas and knowledge. The
belief that you already know what you want and can dismiss the rest is
ignorant and arrogant (usually one follows the other). If you believe that,
you most need a college education -- open-mindedness, an intellectual
humility, and the desire to seek challenges to your ideas are hallmarks of the
well-educated and are major benefit of good college educations; the more I
learn the more humble I become! As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle
is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

College has requirements regarding what and how you learn because they know
more about it than you do, and would be shortchanging you if they did
otherwise. Does a good developer let clients design their own solutions or let
them choose bad ones? The educators are experts in their fields and in
education; they have experience with thousands (at large universities, even
millions) of people getting educations, research on learning, and much more.
What do you know about it? I'm not saying that their ideas are all correct,
correct for you, or shouldn't be challenged, but it's foolish to discard them
wholesale.

The DIY hacker myth is exciting -- people will do it all themselves -- it's
the old American rugged individualism. People who follow it limit themselves
to their own imaginations, rather than the combined imaginations of a
university full of smart people (including fellow students). You can't even
imagine what you don't know; if you are dismissing whole fields then you are
not even looking.

College is not for everyone, but that's a meaningless truism used as an
excuse. The more intellectually able and curious you are, the more an
institution full of very smart highly-educated people, experts in their
fields, willing to spend months teaching you, waiting for you to walk into
their offices and ask them questions, should appeal to you.

------
evanpw
There's a good case to be made that learning job skills is not the main
benefit of going to college: [http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/10/10/bryan-
caplan/murray-n...](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/10/10/bryan-
caplan/murray-needs-model-how-about-mine)

------
lordnacho
Well, naturally everything you learn in college is well-known and available
very cheaply. The question is how are you going to know what there is out
there? I was pretty set on Engineering, and I knew it had something to do with
math and something to do with technology, but there's plenty of things that I
hadn't seen until I started: Control Theory, Materials, etc.

It's also not easy to know which things are considered important, and which
are considered marginal. What should a course in economics contain? If I were
to look at the things I've read on the internet, it would be half Austrian
Economics, and barely any micro.

There's also a cost issue. Let's start with time. When I look back, everything
academic in college could have been squeezed into 2 years. (Three terms of 8
weeks for 4 years.) Now I wouldn't say I'd have a better idea of what to do at
age 20 rather than age 22, but looking back I'd rather have the 2 years. I've
found numerous ways to do the other stuff you do in college. It's much easier
to socialize when you are making a bit of money. And much easier to get a good
mix of people when you're not constrained to people roughly your own age,
doing something very similar. (Of course you aren't forced to hang out with
people at your institution. You just assume you should.)

Then there's money. When I went, the UK system was cheap. Now it's 9K GBP,
which is a lot for many people. The US system is quite pricey. There are
plenty of stories about people who owe $100K, which really ties your hands
when it comes to what to do after. You can't even declare bankruptcy, so you'd
better not take too big risks.

~~~
uniformlyrandom
> which things are considered important, and which are considered marginal.
> What should a course in economics contain?

Most online education sites have 'tracks' now - sort of packages of courses,
so that you learn not just some particular skill, but the whole related area.

> There are plenty of stories about people who owe $100K

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit from a guy owning 1mil in student
loans. 100k is not bad at all by today standards. Get ready for the bubble to
blow.

------
nickysielicki
I want so badly to leave college.

It's very difficult to stomach the $20k it's costing my parents. I'm not
having fun. I'm not making many connections. I'm not learning much in the
classroom at all. I feel unchallenged, I feel bored, but the worst of it is I
know I could be working harder somewhere else, and learning more in the
process.

I should have had the foresight to know the interest I had in highschool for
programming was not going to be shared by all of my classmates. I should have
taken a year off and grown a bit. I should have tried to take a chance and get
an apprenticeship for some startup and see where that took me first. But
really, I (like many HN readers, I'm sure) come from a conservative upper
middle class town. College for the most part WASN'T a decision. It was a step.
And I wish I had the sense to realize that it didn't have to be.

I WANT to be working my ass off. I'm 20 years old. If I'm not working as hard
as I can now, what will I really be able to produce at the age of 40? I have
one youth. I look around at everyone and their pacifiying drug use. And truly,
I was looking forward to partying coming into college, but I grew bored of it
in a single semester. It wasn't any different than highschool, just drinking
and smoking with kids I barely know and didn't really care for. Reminds me of
the underlying feeling in the Great Gatsby; you can be lonely together at many
of these parties. I want to be like Nick at the end of it, I want to damn it
all to hell, and go move far away to focus on myself and my career.

I'm only in my third semester and I consider it a mistake. I can't imagine it
getting much better, I've taken most all of my CS classes and now I'll just be
taking random classes completely unrelated to my major to get a piece of
paper. I'm discontent with the slow flow of learning that college creates. I
feel constrained, and that bugs the hell out of me.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
The first thing to realize is that the constraints you are feeling are mere
social convention, and you don't have to follow most of them. Just because
your peers are smoking up and chilling out doesn't mean that you have to do
the same thing. It's your life, and your choices. Other people do play into
it: you're still gonna want your friends and family to be happy with you, but
you don't have to be the same as everyone else for them to be happy. They
would probably be happier seeing you be your best self.

The second thing to realize is that there is no shortage of work to be done in
this world, merely a shortage of money and motivation to aim towards that
work. If you can't find something to aim towards, you aren't exposing yourself
enough yet to the real problems that need solving. College can be good for
that - wait for the moments in class when a prof says "and no one knows how
this works yet" or "someday someone will figure out how to do this and make a
million". Then go deep on that problem. You may not solve it, but you'll
develop real skills like you want to.

Thirdly, work and school are not a mutually exclusive choice. Yes, your
parents will be unhappy if they think you are failing out, and may put up
resistance to the idea of a job interfering with your schooling. But it sounds
like you are in need of more challenge, not less, and you should be able to
spin an internship, job, or project as a good career move to your parents.

You do only have one youth. You should enjoy it. But good work can leave you
with just as many good memories as partying it up. Don't be a slave, but don't
be a zombie either. Find someone with a similar mindset and go do something
cool.

BTW, I started my first startup when I was your age, while in college. My
partner dropped out of school to work on it, but I stayed in while working. It
was hard. My profs would get mad at me for getting Cs when they knew I was
capable of As. But I learned so much more. The Cs didn't really affect my
career. Finishing my degree did, and the learning definitely did.

------
frenchman_in_ny
"this old-style, formal education that we find in college and graduate
programs will become an increasingly niche endeavor reserved for the few for
whom it makes sense for one reason or another."

Some academics have gotten this & are trying to change the system; Jose Bowen
from Goucher College comes to mind --
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/a-convers...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/a-conversation-
with-gouchers-new-president.html)

------
ben211
I did not go to college and I flunked 2nd and 3rd grade. My parents pulled me
out of school and tried to teach me at home which had better success than the
school system but not much. I dropped out of school at 15 and started working
in kitchens washing dishes. A friend of mine worked in an IT department and he
started teaching me computer network, hardware and things like that, because I
kept asking him to. I fell in love with IT and taught myself over a dozen
programming languages and have not had issues with finding a job. Sure I can't
spell well, english sentence structure and all that is something I still can't
figure out, but I don't let it hold me back. I am in the top 2% of income
earners in the U.S. and for my age bracket better than that, I report to the
CTO and have had a successful career so far.

My view is you need to find your gift in life and go with it. If it's your
dream then you will have the fire and motivation that others will want, if you
try to live someone else's dream you will be a miserable person and never at
the top of your game or income potential.

The real issue is not college or not college, if you need college to live your
dream then do it. Don't expect a college degree on it's own will bring you
success and happiness.

------
wolframhempel
I fundamentally agree, but there are a few angles it omits:

\- Knowing what to learn. Being interested in something is great, but it
usually means you learn a lot about a rather narrow field, rather than being
exposed to the breadth of things. A college with its variety of courses and
its availability of professors that have spent their entire life on a subject
might help to provide a good overview as a preliminary step.

\- Humane disciplines What the article describes is very much applicable to
technology and science subjects, but less so if you’re going for an arts
degree. There the academy plays a way more integral role and a lot of research
happens for the sake of being published in scientific / academic publications.

\- Academic prestige / salary. This is probably more in favour of the article.
Following up on the previous comment the role of the academy is very different
in different fields of study. In liberal arts the academy is the central part
of the system and a lot of people working in the field are researchers or
otherwise contributing to it. Thus the prestige of teaching at the academy is
high – and so is a professors salary when compared to what a lot of the other
people in the field make. In technology however this is very different.
There’s a lot of money to be made in the field and the most prestigious places
to work at are intelligent startups or ground breaking companies like Google.
Being a professor in the same field yields comparatively lower rewards and –
pardon the generalisation – comes with lesser prestige. Especially since even
in classically academic fields like research and innovation the tech companies
have long ago taken the lead.

------
dbond
This is the choice I made (UK based) and 5 years later I can say I'm doing
fine and have no regrets. But what does concern me is the way college[1] staff
reacted to this decision, from warnings in one to one chats down to outright
scaremongering that I was throwing my life away even though I had explained
that I could not find a course that I felt would be of value or advance my
knowledge in what I __WANTED __to do. This is the same situation my younger
sister is currently facing, she would much rather pursue the apprenticeship
route to gain practical experience (she is wanting to pursue events
management) but her college keeps pushing her back to the university route
offering little to no support for her choice and the provided tools for
finding apprenticeships or opportunities are next to useless.

Thankfully my family has a history of self-employment so for us convincing
family that it is the right path is not difficult, but with colleges acting as
very persistent recruiters for universities this will be a very hard decision
to make for a lot of people as the advisors parents listen to are saying it is
not a viable option.

[1] For those unfamiliar with the UK system college is attended separately
before university.

------
navait
The assumption that college is a four year commitment is absurd. AP classes
mean you can get credit in high school, or the CLEP test allows adults to
quickly get credit for classes. Community Colleges allow you to transfer
credits. You can take extra classes, often at no extra cost.

It's only 4 years if you go in taking the absolute minimum amount of full-time
credits to get the degree.

~~~
cm2012
Very few people, % wise, finish in under 4 years. The average is much closer
to 6 years
([http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/aug/11/r...](http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/aug/11/ron-
johnson/average-college-degree-takes-six-years-us-sen-ron-/)). You may be in a
bubble of extreme high achievers that makes it hard to see the reality of most
people. And that's data from all tiers combined, not just low tier schools
(does that mean non-ivy?).

~~~
navait
But the article is about people who are high achievers.

~~~
genwin
There are two types of those: learners and thinkers. The latter have
difficulty doing busy work at any speed.

------
musesum
An associate at USVP asked me about my lack of degree. Me: "I'm following the
Bill Gates model." He: "What, you have a Mother that is a Lawyer and you
dropped out of Harvard?" I laughed. They put in a few million. This was a
while ago; mileage may vary.

~~~
genwin
Good story! No one asks about my lack of degree. I don't have an education
section on my resume. If they did ask, I'd ask in return how exactly it would
matter to getting the work done. I'd expect silence.

------
sremani
The point is many people go to college and end up at "Enterprise Rent A Car"
or T-mobile Store. Is it even justifiable for a person to have take student
loans and end up those kinds of jobs. There is true problem here, you do not
need college if you are "learning for learning sake" and your college degree
does not give bang for a buck if you are going to college to end up in a
general job. There are exceptions. I agree with the author.

------
unculturedswine
I'm glad this discussion is happening more and more. What I think it really
comes down to is education doesn't automatically equal school.

------
skittles
There aren't very many schools that make your resume stand out. If you aren't
going to one of them (Harvard, MIT, etc.), then any cheap, accredited school
will do. The degree on the resume gets you past the filtering process, and
nobody cares that it is from a no-name school.

------
untilHellbanned
Like the NBA, all college should be "one-and-done".

[https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/all-college-should-be-
one-a...](https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/all-college-should-be-one-and-done-
like-the-nba-690555668255)

~~~
aet
You want one and done? Get an associates degree.

------
mirekrusin
skipping college is probably controversial because you can't make a
distinction between doing it because of laziness or because of passion. at the
bottom of your heart you know which one it is.

the problem with doing something else is that you will, still, take yourself
with you. if high school was crap, now college is crap - it's likely that
other thing is going to be crap too.

why don't you do something on the side instead of "smoking and drinking" with
people you don't care?

------
cerrelio
You can ride around on a motorcycle without a helmet and wager no harm will
come to you; it's a safer bet with a helmet.

~~~
genwin
In this case the analogy is: You can ride around on a motorcycle with a helmet
that has a "certified" sticker, or no sticker. Same helmet.

------
bruceb
site down, cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bbQiznH...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bbQiznHebDUJ:levinotik.com/why-
college-is-a-poor-choice-for-a-lot-of-
people/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

------
cbp
If you want to get into the US, as a foreigner. A year of college is worth
more than a year of work experience.

------
espitia
I recently stopped going to college (a few months ago). I've been thinking
about the decision for around two years now and it was the best decision I've
ever made. I have never been as productive and generally happy as I have after
leaving classes.

What I agree most with the article is that college is not the correct decision
for those who already know what they want to do or have a specific goal in
mind. Attending classes for me felt like a waste of time simply because they
did not push me towards my goal. It felt like I was lying to myself every day
by going to class just to let society know that "I am going to college, I am
doing the right thing". Once I completely (and I mean 1000%) stop giving a
s#!t about what anyone else thought or said (including my family), I found
myself to be happier, more confident, more motivated, more everything.

Now, everyone still tries to convince me that I should go back. That I never
know what the future holds. Honestly, most of my friends who go their degree
have jobs that require little of what they actually learned. Not only are they
getting paid borderline a minimum wage but they are being routined to death.
I'd say 80% are not happy in their day to day which is crazy. I really feel
like if things were to get bad, I am perfectly employable without a degree. My
projects and experience have taught me 1000x more than I ever learned in a
classroom. Actually, I can say that 90%+ of what I know is through my own
reading, my own project, my own initiative, my own everything.

My conclusion on the whole debate of college is that if you know what you
want, go out there and get it. Just like there is a cost opportunity of not
going to college, there is also cost opportunity to GOING. Think about it
deeply and do as your intuition dictates.

Notes:

\- I was majoring in business (marketing). I believe, at least in my case,
this and many of the liberal arts majors are best learned by doing. If you
really have a passion for it, grab some books and practice it. Whatever it may
be. As for other studies like medicine, biology etc (the sciences) I've seen
it is best to go and study it. My brother is doing medicine and I really don't
see how it would be possible for him to not go to college and be able to do
brain surgery.

\- I love this phrase from the article and to me it is an issue I feel
strongly about. Times have changed, we should too.

"The idea of college education is deeply ingrained in our culture. People seem
to go down the college route almost impulsively and the correctness of this
path is, for most, unquestionable."

People who have accepted the fact that I dropped out, that see why the
decision for me was correct, that are proud of the work and value I am
producing, will still try to convince me to go back. I don't blame anyone for
this, I think we were all brought up since babies to believe that college is
the way to go. I just feel we need to question this belief a lot more. \-
Great article!

~~~
afontaine
Thanks for sharing this here. I'd love to hear your thoughts on my situation.

I started programming in freshman year (2006) of high school and fell in love
with it. I've been coding since, but also started getting excited about
startups. A year after graduating from high school, I started one with a
couple of friends from college. It's the best decision I've made.. I have
learned so much in a few years. I am convinced I wouldn't have learned as much
by focusing in school.

I've been in school for about 4 years now getting a CS degree. I started
taking less classes per semester last year because I was doing bad in them. I
had a lack of interest and also spent a lot more time involved in the startup.
That hasn't changed. I have 5 classes left to graduate, but my GPA needs to go
up by a lot in order to do so.

There is a lot of pressure from my parents to finish school since I'm almost
done, but I'm really struggling to do well in my classes since I'm just not
into them. It really feels like I'm wasting my time.. getting stressed about
my grades.. and I'm not sure what to do.

The obvious solution is to keep going and finish... but it's a constant battle
every week to convince myself that this is the best path and to keep going.

~~~
espitia
The lack of interest kills, I've been there. College will always be there,
opportunities won't. Take the semester off, you never know how much your life
will change in a few months. Plus, if you have a good amount of projects under
your belt, it's likely that you can find a job doing what you like and be able
to pay your bills. Remember though, if you do, make a conscious decision to
work your ass off. Not necessarily because this is now your 'job' but look at
it as a purpose/mission. You must hit X by Y. Really puts the pressure on (the
good kind).

More than anything though, ask yourself what you want to do. Analyse all the
scenarios and where you would feel happiest. Do you really believe in your
work? in your startup? Have your feet grounded and boom, chase your dream like
it's do or die.

------
pitt1980
t

------
waps
The author's linkedin page :
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinotik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinotik)

Education Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University

I wonder if he chose his field himself, or if his parents picked for him, and
now he rolled into software development by himself, resenting his parents'
choice.

Quick creative application of the legal principle called "Cui bono".

~~~
hackuser
It's interesting how many people who advise against college are so well
educated themselves. I've seen Michael Bloomberg and Rick Santorum
discouraging college or playing down its value, but I bet their kids go to
college and probably graduate school.

When people say 'college isn't for everyone', they mean it's for them but not
for you. You can see this play out as college becomes more expensive and the
province of the wealthy.

AFAIK, the U.S. used to lead in the number receiving college educations; we've
stagnated and other countries have passed us. Consider which of those
countries will attract more skilled jobs.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Isn't that sort of obsolete thinking? We don't have any skilled jobs for our
current crop of college graduates. Why train more, just so they can drive
busses?

~~~
hackuser
> Isn't that sort of obsolete thinking? We don't have any skilled jobs for our
> current crop of college graduates. Why train more, just so they can drive
> busses?

A few thoughts on that argument:

Unemployment now is moderate and dropping, especially for college graduates.
The lifetime income of college graduates is significantly higher than others.

Also, your argument (which I realize is widespread) look only at graduates'
initial jobs. College education is not initial job training; it benefits
people in many ways, as individuals, as citizens, as community members, as
family members, and as workers; it benefits them over a lifetime. To evaluate
it based only on one part of life (work), and only on a short period that also
is the least significant (their first job) doesn't make sense.

Also, looking at careers: Note that most of the world is run by people with
college educations. Future jobs will become more and more intellectually
demanding. What is our message to 18 year olds: Abandon your dreams, just give
up and drive a bus? From people like Santorum, the message is: Your kids
should give up and drive a bus while mine go to college.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
How many people 'dream' of spending 4 more years studying abstract/obtuse
subjects? You can do lots of things; most things in fact, without studying art
history.

The money angle is probably valid; the 'dreams' angle is just the opposite of
that - folks like to make cabinets, or trek mountains, or write. They don't
really want to study math to become an actuarial.

