
Drop out. Or don't. - dabent
http://areallybadidea.com/drop-out-or-dont
======
snprbob86
This matches my experience reasonably well.

Some other random tips:

1) If you do go to college, _live on campus_! Commuters tend to fall into two
categories. Those who miss out on lots of fun stuff and those who live at home
and never grow out of their high school friends.

2) Schoolwork comes second. This does mean get failing grades or drink all day
long (but one semester of that might not hurt). It means that you should take
advantage of your ample spare time to do something fun or interesting. It's OK
to miss a class here or there to get the most out of the overall experience.
And if you don't have ample spare time, take fewer/easier classes.

3) Figure out a way to learn something real. Do research, take courses in
areas you don't know much about, get a non-trivial part time job, do contract
work, something, _anything_. Because if you're good at something, why coast
through classes and do busy work? Why not get better at something you suck at?
Got a bunch of assignments that are too easy, but time consuming? Tell your
professor, then negotiate with them to do less, but more valuable work.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
The dorms filled up before I got a room, so I spent my first year off-campus
(but not at home); as a consequence, I missed out on getting to know people
until, well, even now in my 4th year. Being an active participant of a club
helped counteract this tremendously.

On the positive side, I spent less money, had more room, and had unfiltered
internet.

------
wh-uws
As I get closer to completing my college education (its my last semester) I
think what alot of posts like these miss is most institutions focus less on
teaching you how to do something and more how to learn how to do something on
your own.

\- Its not about that ridiculous project you had to do that the professor
didn't lecture on and is due Monday even through he only assigned it last
Wednesday.

 _Its how you deal with that._

\- Its not about the fact that you can drink yourself under a table and party
every day and night

 _Its about how you deal with that._ You could do it and fail out of many
schools ,mine is one of those, or you could still do well. But either way you
have to learn to balance it

College is the final playground. The last buffer between you and the real
world. Its up to you to make it something that is worthwhile or figure out
that it is not for you.

Also some of the best people I've met, the closet friends and strongest
connections I most likely keep for life were made in college.

It wasn't perfect and there were things I would do differently given the
chance but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything short of figuring out
I had something of the caliber of what Bill Gate or Mark Zuckerburg found they
had on their hands.

------
danenania
People always point out the social and networking benefits, which can
certainly be great, but college can also be a very limiting social environment
in a lot of ways. It often extends the cliques and general self-conscious
stupidity of high school years and makes it easy to get completely stuck in
that mind-and-soul numbing bourgeois bubble of social status and judgment, and
if you aren't careful you can get pushed along on the conveyor belt into a job
that's just a further extension, and you'll never get to have your own life.

You can actually learn a lot more about life and relationships by putting
yourself in difficult, unfamiliar situations rather than cushy curated ones.
Backpacking solo around the world or starting fresh in a big city doesn't get
you into the Yale Entrepreneur's Club, but the things you learn and the
contacts you get can be more unique and diverse, and I'd venture that a
capable person will tend to end up with a better education and more adaptable
people skills this way, but I don't want to downplay that it can be very very
difficult to swim against the current, especially if you don't have great
social confidence to begin with. It's still worth it though. The real world is
tougher, but it's a lot easier to find meaning there versus being stuck on the
good grades-good salary-right friends-high valuation-Achieve Success Treadmill
Of Doom (tm).

~~~
krn
>> You can actually learn a lot more about life and relationships by putting
yourself in difficult, unfamiliar situations rather than cushy curated ones.

I could not agree more.

Last summer, at the age of 20, I picked a random country of Europe, in which I
hadn't been before, booked a cheap flight and went there on my own just with a
backpack. I didn't have any plans, I didn't know any people or places there,
and I even didn't understand the local language.

I wanted to challenge myself, so I chose to have a flight back from the other
airport, which was 600 km away from the place I had landed - that's to make
sure that I will not spend all the time in one city - I must travel in order
to get out of the country. Also, I decided, that in 2 weeks I must never pay
for a bed - meet strangers, go to the places where noone goes, or sleep
wherever and whenever I can - but prove to myself that it's possible.

Those 14 days, I spent traveling through the entire Portugal, was the most
amazing time in my life so far. Every day I was meeting someone new and every
day it was different experience. I was surprisingly lucky to be hosted by 10
strangers in 10 cities I visited, even though I often didn't know where I will
be after a day - everywhere I went people were just saying to me: "You must
see <that> place, it's really worth and it's so close!".

I still remember the conversions I had - every evening they were totally
different, depending on the people I was drinking local beer on wine with:
from a photographer of Porto sports magazine, and 40 years old famous
Portuguese actor, who lived in the heart of Lisbon, was singing in French and
preparing for the performance after a few days in Paris, to 60 years old
Portuguese woman coffee shop owner, and exchange students from Turkey and
Russia with their own culture and traditions.

However, I spent three nights sleeping on wild Atlantic beaches alone, which I
had never done before. I also had a few days without seeing any people at all.

When I was back, I felt like I had learned more about life than in my whole
academic year at university. I learned how to deal with myself during the
permanent moments of uncertainty. I realised how often the problems are really
not such huge as we tend to imagine. When you throw yourself into the world,
in which you don't know anyone and noone knows you, you become responsible for
every decision you make, - you always have to think forward, you can't be
nervous or scared. Now I am no longer afraid of being with myself for a few
days in the nature without any communication devices (including a computer -
not so easy for a programmer) and without other people. Also, I started to
love meeting strangers and learning about things I never imagined existing
before.

That's a kind of experience, which nobody will teach you at university. There
are no classes on that. It's something, what you have to take from the life by
yourself.

~~~
danenania
Awesome story :)

------
zdw
My take on this:

\- Go to a college on the cheap, and don't break the bank. This often means an
in-state, public school - frankly, where your diploma is from matters little
from a recruitment standpoint after you've proven yourself in a job or two.
You probably have a choice of a few of them - pick the one that has the best
program in what you're interested in.

\- Also, basic english and math will likely transfer from a community college,
and you'll pay a small fraction of what you'd pay to take similar courses at
the big name school. This frees you up to take stuff you're more interested
in, and saves money.

\- Avoid getting in debt if you can. If you must, try to take as little as
possible, and rid yourself of it quickly.

\- Explore. Take weird classes you might be interested in, you never know how
it'll be useful - the example used most often is Steve Jobs taking a
calligraphy course => modern fonts in classic Mac OS => desktop publishing
revolution.

\- Look for mentorship opportunities, and feel out your career path. Do
internships, etc. You want to get a feel for how businesses work, and what
being an employee entails, so you know what you like/what to avoid/how to be a
better employee/boss in the future.

\- Take advantage of "student only" opportunities. Many companies and
organizations will give you hardware/software/conference/professional
membership discounts. It makes sense to take advantage of these.

\- Have social life. Meet interesting people. College is different that high
school - you have more freedom, and consequences. If you're not living with
the parents, then get used to managing the rest of your life.

------
liuliu
I learned a lot in college!

After my high school, I spent two years on a startup idea and ultimately, left
my partner behind and went to college in the United States. Contrary to common
belief, I learned a lot in my college. I am already a veteran in
C/Javascript/PHP/C# before my college day, but the valuable thing about
college is not learning "programming". So, here is what I've learned:

1). I learned how to work with supercomputer, no, it is not Hadoop with
thousands nodes (though I've worked on that too!). It is Ranger, one of the
computer on TOP500. And I can spend thousands of computing hours freely to
just explore MPI and how to efficiently program on this puppy (one lesson I
learned, async communication does not always save you time);

2). I learned what Buddhism is and how it transformed during years, how to do
anthropology study and what the war is like in chimpanzees world and human
tribes, how that interact, and what it implies;

3). I learned what evolutionary theory really is, how it developed, and the
influence to American pragmatism;

4). I learned computer graphics! It is an amazing experience to write your own
ray tracer with all the knowledge you actually knew (not just glue some random
code together);

5). I even learned how MRI works in one of my biomedical class!

I am appreciated so much to the college experience and despite what people say
about it, I learned a lot.

------
fecklessyouth
I don't care if you go to Yale. When "getting in is the hardest part about
attending an Ivy League school," I have to ask, if the problem the system, or
the problem the school?

He later writes: "Most of the foundation in communication, writing, and
quantitative reasoning I developed in middle school and high school, and not
in college."

That's plain screwed up. If you developed no communication, writing, or
quantitative reasoning skills in college, then your college education was a
waste of time. But it's because you made an (apparently) crappy decision to go
to that college, not college in general.

Here in this thread, and many similar on Reddit, it is often advised to go to
a state school or community college, get a technical degree, etc...But we're
joking ourselves if we think a technical degree can lead to better reading,
writing, or reasoning skills. Of course, if you can develop those on your own,
sure, go for the technical degree. But, in this liberal arts student's
opinion, the problem with college is that, instead of either studying a pure
technical degree, or immersing yourself in the true liberal arts, people go to
large state schools and attempt to do both, but end up doing neither.

/rant

~~~
aik
From my knowledge no one really says that a technical degree leads to better
reading/writing/reasoning skills. Then again not very many say what a
technical degree really teaches you either. Funny system.

Pure liberal arts programs are interesting structures on their own. Can you
name a high school student who thinks, "you know, I want to improve my
reading, writing, and reasoning skills and for this reason I will spend 4
years in a Liberal Arts program taking a mostly random stream and number of
unrelated courses."

------
Breefield
This article sits well with me, as I've hashed this out a lot in my own head
in the past year. I would be a freshman this year had I decided to attend a
college. However, I didn't want to get burdened down with any unnecessary
loans, and as previously stated by others, the industry is quite navigable
without a degree. Instead I've moved myself from Boise Idaho to NYC, and I'm
loving it, meeting other people in the industry I wouldn't otherwise be
meeting, and learning new things constantly.

I think one main point that the article leaves out is that if you decide not
to attend college, or decide to drop out, you'll really need some self
discipline. I spent a ton of time in high school sitting in my room being an
autodidact. Learning how things work, and then learning to apply techniques
and such. Then trying to find any scraps of work I could so as to build a
portfolio/resume. Had I been doing what the rest of my peers were doing I
certainly wouldn't have been in a place to not attend college.

Hopefully that doesn't come off as pretentious. I just think the whole aspect
of having a skill v.s. not having a skill, or a passion for that matter, are
left out of many of these "is college worth it right now" articles. Assuming
the goal is to acquire a skill in college, and not to make friends/go through
that rite of passage. Speaking of rites of passage, anyone else going to
Burning Man this year? It's going to be my first, and I'm oh so excited.

~~~
bugsy
Great post. Burning Man is a much more valuable life experience than college.
Many of the engineering projects people bring there are completely amazing and
trump even the wildest accomplishments of CalTech students. What people are
learning in mechanical and electrical engineering in the whole Maker Community
for example is way beyond what is going on at the university level.

------
j_baker
Dropping out of college is hands-down the best decision I ever made. I think
it's useful for some people, but saying that everyone _has_ to go is dumb.

~~~
rimantas
I see people claiming that and upvoted all the time, but: how do you know? It
may very well be the worst decision ever made.

~~~
teej
I appreciate your skepticism. There really -isn't- any way to know for sure.
For me, the best I can do is compare what would have been to what actually
happened.

If I had stayed in college, I would have finished with a masters in CS and
Mathematics.

I dropped out instead. By the time I would have graduated, I managed to:

\- Co-found a startup

\- Build a million-user product by myself

\- Speak at half a dozen conferences, including GDC and RailsConf

\- Help kickstart a multi-billion dollar new industry

\- Get married

That seems like a damn good decision if you ask me.

------
bengebre
I'm always amazed by how many people claim to have learned so little in
college. It's not that I don't believe them; I just had the complete opposite
experience. Perhaps I'm just slower than most here, but I studied science and
engineering in school and it was HARD. It took so much effort, but I learned a
ton. I'm a programmer these days, but most of my analysis skills come from the
education I got in college and grad school. I've learned a lot since then of
course (especially about how to design code), but I attribute most of my
(modest) successes to my education.

------
tlrobinson
BS in CECS and MS in CS, with no regrets on either. On top of learning quite a
lot (I had no prior programming experience, aside from a tiny bit of TI BASIC
and C++) I met my co-founders and mentors in school, which is invaluable. But
who knows, maybe I would have learned even more on my own or met even more
awesome co-founders and mentors elsewhere.

I will say I've learned a hell of a lot more about _programming_ in the 3
years doing a startup after college than in the 4.5 years doing the BS and MS.
CS degrees aren't really about programming, but I do think they lay the
foundation for being better programmers.

------
liedra
What's often not said in these discussions is that college/university time is
a great time to work out what you want to do for a bit. I certainly had no
idea what I wanted to do coming out of high school. I wanted to be a
veterinarian, but didn't get the marks to get into that degree programme, so I
ended up doing bioinformatics, and then eventually wound up doing a computer
science degree double major with history and philosophy of science. And I love
my job now, working as an academic in technology ethics. But if you'd asked
the straight-outta-highschool me about what I'd be doing in 10 years time, she
would have had no idea I'd be where I am now. Going to university helped me to
work out which path I wanted to take. Granted, I didn't go to an American
university, and it somewhat depresses me to hear about how university is
pointless etc. because I had some amazingly good courses and learned a lot at
my university. But that was back when it was still well funded by the
Australian government and less of the corporate entity it's become. So who
knows, really?

Anyway my point is that university is not just about coming out with a piece
of paper, it's about exploring possibilities and different paths. And if you
go to a good university that focuses on actually teaching interesting stuff
rather than churning out pieces of paper, then you'll actually get something
worthwhile.

------
hansy
Depends really.

Going pre-med, college is a massive waste of time. The organic chemistry and
physics is something you will never use as a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, etc.

For business, it can be pretty good depending on where you land up. I was
fortunate to go to a school that offered one hell of a BBA program and a
majority of what I learned was applicable to investment banking, consulting,
and other corporate jobs. But for entrepreneurship? Eh...I dunno yet.

Oh and it's a lot easier to become a pretty good programmer by taking classes
than learning on your own. Feedback from good professors and peers about code
optimization is priceless.

All in all, if I had to do everything over again, I would either apply to the
best BBA or computer science program, or pick the cheapest university option
available to me.

Of course I assume that one already knows what he or she wants do right out of
college, which is rarely the case.

So, actually college is really a place for exploration. It sucked having to go
through trial and error to find my niche, but when I finally did it was
liberating. I stand by my earlier position, though, if high schools went
through more effort to bring the exploratory experience to its students.

~~~
danneu
Pretty much.

I go to a high-rated public undergrad business school because I was
entrepreneurially-spirited when I was applying for schools and though college
would cultivate that.

Instead, I found out that BBA programs are more focused on funneling you into
a mid-level management position where you make dataflow diagrams and Gantt
charts.

------
X-Istence
I agree with the author, college didn't teach me anything that I needed later
on in life, I did meet some absolutely fantastic professors and peers who
pushed me, who challenged me to do more and become better at what I was doing.
That I think is an important part that is overlooked. Sure you can go straight
to working out of high school, but generally the atmosphere is not the same.

In college you can screw up, big time, and all it will cost you is time, in
the real world it can mean your job, and lively hood. Academia provides a
comfort zone in which you can experiment.

Had it not been for a few select professors and my peers I would have never
experimented with electronics and made it a hobby of mine, I would have never
loved programming and network security as much as I do now. Those experiences
cannot be overstated. Overall I think the time I spent in college was spent
well, but I can honestly say that the time spent in classes was a waste.

------
thisrod
I studied physics at a great university, got paid for it, and graduated as
first author on a PRL. I've used everything I learnt, and things from courses
I failed at the time.

If you're doing the right course for the right reasons, it's very worthwhile.

------
bugsy
Good article. I agree with the points. After I dropped out of high school I
ended up going to a well regarded west coast university. I was all set for it
to be very challenging and some place where I would learn a lot but I was
surprised to find the engineering classes were all things I already knew how
to do. To challenge myself I shot for all A+s and considered each mere A to be
a failure.

I also started to, as a further challenge, not even attend some of the easiest
classes and managed to get A+ in those as well. I used the extra time to get
involved in student government. I found it interesting observing the politics
and learning how much back scratching and insider deals infect even college
student council politics.

While in school, I joined a music group (unrelated to the school) and we did
some touring during this time and earned money. One time we were even paid to
play at my university. Touring in a music group is a great gig that I
recommend. I met lots of famous and powerful people and made connections doing
the music.

Still in school, I got a job working for a defense contractor. I wrote
software for secret military satellite based space weapons. This was
interesting since I didn't have any sort of clearance or anything and I was
making close to minimum wage. At one point I had to write a paper on my
research for my boss. He published it and took my name off the paper. He also
went to some conference to present it that I had wanted to go to but he said I
wasn't needed. There were also false promises about getting a $1 an hour
raise. I was pretty resentful of this and stopped working on this project.

I do have a small list of things I learned in the program but they are
somewhat trivial small things that I would have learned anyway. The
interesting things had nothing to do with classes. I did make some friends of
course but these "connections" have not really benefited me all that much, but
I wasn't looking for that. It is strange that that is so often cited as a main
reason to go into debt in order to attend university. Overall the main thing
that happened is it delayed the starting of my first business by several
years.

This makes me wonder about the value of school over all. I dropped out of high
school and then found even college was pretty much useless as well. Very
different from the way it is presented as the solution to all of society's
ills. Did I learn anything even in elementary school I have to wonder?

Well, I knew how to read before I started kindergarten. My parents did not
teach me. They tell me that I just started reading signs as we were driving
along. Then I would read books. For a couple years in elementary I didn't even
attend or study as we were doing some travel. When I returned to elementary
school things seemed really slow and backwards. Before college, in primary
school and high school I am not sure what I learned there either. Although I
did have a psychology class in high school, and then a couple in college that
were very interesting, so I learned some things there. But that was from
reading the textbook and studies I'd look up on my own.

Whenever I want to know something I track down the information and just learn
it on my own. It seems to me that school is pointless. I guess it is for dumb
people? Or maybe its purpose is to brainwash people into being consumers.

Most of the founding fathers and enlightenment philosophe's were self taught.
Some of the greatest minds in history are drop outs.

I think school is a rip off, just considering the wasted time and not even
money. It does not benefit the "student", it benefits the system.

There is something to be said for a community of learners though. That is what
a Start Up is. Others interested in the same niche thing you are come
together, and you are now working together to make something new and figure
out new things out every day. You depend on no one but yourselves. It is like
a Salon of revolutionary France, only more practical.

If I had it all to do over again and was able to do so, I would not attend
school at all, not even elementary school. I would simply unschool myself.
This way I would have more time to work on my projects and inventions that I
started working on before I was a teen. It would have given me a tremendous
head start. I did not know it at the time, but what I was doing then was
useful, unique and valuable and I was doing it right. Of course others are
telling you you are wasting your time and should be doing worksheets or
reading some nonsensical textbook instead, but that is because they are
ignorant.

In addition to running my latest business, I read a lot. Now I am becoming
educated. None of the history that was taught in school was accurate in the
least. It was just propaganda to create patriots who will kill the "enemy"
without question. The most ridiculous thing of all this is being forced to
chant a pledge of allegiance to a flag, a piece of cloth. No allegiance to
one's family or friends, the allegiance must be to a cloth. This ritual that
lead each day is a symbol of the insanity of the whole system.

~~~
nostrademons
I thought basically the same thing all through grade school and college, and
for a couple years afterwards, right through doing my startup. And I still do
- as far as you go. But I think you're missing something very important.

School is not about learning _facts_. It really, really sucks at that - go
grab a book or twelve out of your public library and devour them for that. And
it's not even for learning _skills_ \- the best way to do that is to get a
private tutor, mentor, or coach, and then practice your heart out.

School is for learning _culture_. And culture, by definition, can neither be
learned nor taught. It functions on a subconscious level, in terms of the
little behaviors that people can never quite articulate but certainly notice.
You have to be immersed in it to pick it up, and it takes a significant amount
of time, and an open mind.

It's an open question whether all school cultures are worth learning. For me,
elementary school bus culture and middle school culture certainly were not,
and probably set my development as a human being back by a decade. But the
culture at my high school - a public charter school that was just starting up
- was a good portion of the reason I decided to go into startups, and played a
major role in me becoming the person I am today. I wouldn't trade it for
anything. The culture at Amherst, my alma mater, taught me to look at everyone
I meet as a peer and equal, no more and no less, and to feel that I have
nothing to prove, whatever silly hierarchies people dream of. And the culture
at Google, IMHO, is without equal in the software world. You pick up so many
practices and ways of thinking simply by being there.

So yeah, I think you are basically right. It's interesting that you pick out
the pledge of allegiance as the most ridiculous thing in all of schooling.
That's exactly what I mean by culture. And in this case, that particular
ritual was designed to create a culture of subserviency, a form of
indoctrination so that the masses of public schoolchildren would mindlessly
support their power-elite overlords. It's bullshit, as you say.

But by recognizing it as bullshit and then putting up with it long enough to
"win", you open the door to many other communities which are _far_ less fucked
up than the public education system. Google is _nothing_ like middle school,
and it's only similarities to elementary school are the colorful beanbags, the
ballpit, and the massive quantities of Lego. But it's much, much easier to get
into Google if you did well at elementary and middle school.

~~~
vacri
I disagree - school is an excellent place to learn skills, especially if you
do sciencey stuff. It teaches you how to question things fairly and
appropriately, and how to do and dissect research.

When I left tertiary education we were all sitting around doing the trendy
thing and bemoaning how university had been worthless; we couldn't remember
any _facts_. Then it dawned on us that we got insights into industry, learned
how to communicate professionally, learned how to find the truth or the most
truthful path, how to research, how to critique work, learned how to better
collaborate with others, gained a small measure of self-direction (tertiary is
the first level of education where it's up to you to show up), tastes of
politicking and how to survive it, professional ethics, so on and so forth.
Occupational skills were learned in addition to all of those. Part of the
above meshes with culture, but they're all tangible if non-obvious skills. If
you want someone to do a root-cause analysis, you're not going to turn to the
dropout unless he's talented and a passionate self-driven learner. Most folks
are not this.

As always GIGO, but you learn a hell of a lot of skills in tertiary education,
they're just not all in 14-point font on your syllabus.

~~~
nostrademons
University is a whole lot different from K-12 schooling, and _which_
university makes a difference as well. I felt I learned a lot about respect
for data, the scientific method, how to formulate and test hypotheses, etc. in
my physics classes at Amherst. I learned mostly facts at UMass. I'm not sure I
learned anything about what science really was through my K-12 studies.

One of my main beefs with K-12 science education is that it mistakes the
_results_ of science for science itself. So kids are taught evolution, they're
taught plate tectonics, they're taught Newton's Laws, but they're rarely
taught _how_ these were discovered, or the rigorous data-driven
experimentation process that's refined them. The scientific method is covered
as 6 bullet points that get glossed over in a week, and never returned to.

In many cases, if a student actually _does_ science - they question the
recieved wisdom of their teacher, and go off and do the experiments
themselves, and report back objectively on the results - they'll be labeled a
disruptive student and sent to the principal's. Hell, if the science involves
chemistry, they'll probably be reported to the FBI and arrested for making
bombs.

~~~
vacri
Sorry, by 'school' I was meaning tertiary only. High school didn't add much in
the way of critical thinking, I agree.

------
usaar333
> All of the above is highly dependent on where you go.

That's one of the few claims I agree with. I can only speak for engineering
majors, but my college experience was radically different from the author's.
Whether the piece of paper my classmates and I walked out with mattered is
another story, but at least the first three years of education were
invaluable.

> This really applies to tech, where honestly people don't really give two
> shits about your degree if you are a good programmer or have experience on
> hot projects.

Half-true. Even though I had been programming since middle school, my college
experience with EECS taught me a lot technically and socially. It granted a
far broader network faster than any job has. On top of that, it gave vast
access to internship programs, which taught everyone involved a lot about
industry. And that came in handy after graduating; having the knowledge that I
could get a high-paying job almost anywhere at anytime allowed me to take far
greater personal financial risks with my startup than I would have been
comfortable otherwise.

> If you expect to learn skills that will train you for a job, prepare to be
> disappointed going to a four year college. You aren't going to learn
> anything that is directly applicable to any job.

I completely disagree. Granted it all comes down to your major, but if you
take engineering at a top school (which does not include Yale), this is highly
untrue. The knowledge I learned in college was critical to developing my
startup from a technological standpoint; operating systems, programming
languages, artificial intelligence, probability, algorithms, and databases are
just a few of the subjects which have flowed into it. And yes, you can just
"read a book", but that is no substitute for being in the thick of it through
collaborative group-work. Technically, being exposed to vast numbers of
patterns is essential, and college is a prime place for that to happen. I know
virtually no one who possesses the same technical breadth of those that went
through my program (or equivalent).

> It didn't prepare me mentally for startups. College was really an exercise
> in credentialing within a rigidly defined system, and didn't prepare me to
> think outside-the-box, live the consequences of my own actions, or really
> exist on my own in the real world at all.

It's amazing what a difference a major can make. Working on ill-defined team
projects that would last well over 200 hours in a single semester was a great
precursor to the startup world. And college is an excellent training ground to
build essential social skills.

> In my final year I was taking classes two days a week for only two hours a
> day (most of them intros, perversely). Keep in mind that I was a full time
> student without a job at one of the best universities in the country.

If your goal is to just get a degree, sure, you can slack by. If you want to
take the maximum advantage of courses, this will not be true. Especially in
engineering (architecture is another example I've seen), you will work your
ass off and learn a lot.

> For a lot of students, college is a vacation, and it is a bunch of bullshit
> if we pretend otherwise.

The only sustained vacation during my college years was Winter Break. Hell,
the summer internships I had offered way more of a vacation than college did.
Again, if you are going to college, you need to take full advantage of it.

------
digitailor
Best point made in the article: "College is an oversubscribed resource". This
rings factual, and I think it would be useful to discuss the ramifications of
oversubscription. And the extremely high cost despite oversubscription. And
MIT doesn't count because... it's not oversubscribed as you generally _learn
industrially-applicable information there_. Contrast with Yale, Columbia, or
Vassar. This also goes for art schools- you can use those learned skills in
industry.

------
us
Good or not, I think one thing everyone can agree on is to go to college
first. There are two sides to this debate. To go to college at all, and to
drop out after you're in college. I think at the very least going, is
worthwhile for everyone even IF college isn't made for everyone and in many
cases may not help out at all in things you learn in the classroom. Afterall,
there are other aspects of college you can gain from, both on and off campus.

------
jtbigwoo
Seems like the main message of this post is "If you're majoring in Philosophy
and Physics, don't expect college to teach you about business or computers."

------
DavidChouinard
"Dropping out of MIT is like graduating from Yale."

------
tkahn6
> This really applies to tech, where honestly people don't really give two
> shits about your degree if you are a good programmer or have experience on
> hot projects.

In my experience, this is true up until a point. However, I've been coding
since elementary school, and topics like algorithm analysis and graph theory
are not things that one typically encounters making games in Java or web apps
with RoR.

"If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten
years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms
class." - Prof. Erik Demaine (MIT)

~~~
nostrademons
It's not terribly hard to teach yourself algorithm analysis or graph theory if
you have the motivation. Hop on Amazon, buy CLR, and then go through the
algorithms, work through the proofs, and implement each one.

BTW, you can't become a world-class programmer by programming every day for
ten years _or_ by programming every day for two years and taking an algorithms
class. Try programming every day for ten years _and_ taking an algorithms
class. Every world-class programmer I know has done that - they have both the
experience and the formal knowledge.

~~~
tkahn6
> It's not terribly hard to teach yourself algorithm analysis or graph theory
> if you have the motivation.

I agree absolutely. However in my experience, there's something to be said for
a good lecturer, challenging homework/tests, and peers to consult with.

~~~
impeachgod
I think you can only get those if you go to MIT or CMU. The vast majority of
CS programs and lecturers aren't that good, and certainly worse than what you
could teach yourself on your own.

~~~
llgrrl_
I'm attending a public school, with a CS department consisting of 6-or-so
people. They taught me well :-) Definitely not what I could have taught
myself.

------
tastybites
In school (UC system) I met people who are now doctors, CPAs, attorneys,
investment bankers, top engineers, scientists, and various PhD candidates. I
also learned that their parents are a variety of very accomplished and
impressive people. To say that knowing these people is valuable would be an
understatement since I am now a small business person and having professionals
you can truly trust (as good as it's going to get anyway) is incredibly
important. It factors into confidence and decision making in business.

For me, personally, I would not have met these people if I had not gone to
school. I would have been sitting in a cubicle programming computers for the
next 4 years, severely handicapping my social and professional life. I also
probably would not have learned the basics of Econonomics, something that
fascinates me almost as much as technology. I also didn't spend much time
doing schoolwork, but I certainly didn't get A's like some others here. I
actually was on academic probation twice and spend most of my time
socializing.

