
Will Dropouts Save America? - JJMalina
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html?smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all
======
pg
"I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new
businesses."

Even though this might sound to some like a description of what YC does, in
fact we're reluctant to fund people who are still in school. There's no rush.
Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better
at 22.

~~~
jjmaxwell4
Can't things change quite a bit between these years? When your in school,
you're broke. Its not weird to eat ramen and work all the time.

But by the time your 22, maybe you got an internship at a cool company, and
they're offering you 80k a year. Your getting used to a decent standard of
living. Maybe you get recruited by Wall Street and the dangle 140k under your
nose. You take the job, and get locked in with the "golden handcuffs". Now
your comfortable, and you meet a cute girl, who wants a guy with a steady job,
so you never start the company.

Maybe this guy was never really meant to be an entrepreneur; maybe he wanted
that comfortable life all along. But when he was 19 he was ready to go.

> _There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it
> as well or better at 22._

I think there is a better chance that he won't start the startup at 22, cause
he got a high paying job, and doesn't want to downgrade from his standard of
living.

~~~
Shenglong
I don't think YC really wants to fund people who would give up on a start up,
just because of a 140k/year job. Start ups seem to be a lot of work, and you'd
need to be really dedicated to succeed.

In my opinion, people dropping out of school for YC shouldn't be doing it
because they see an alternative opportunity - they should be doing it for a
variety of other reasons. The mental calculation should not be "I could do a
start up and make money now, or I could do 3 more years of school and make
140k/year comfortably." It should be along the lines of, "I _know_ I'll
succeed, and I can't wait to do it."

~~~
jjmaxwell4
Your right you gotta be dedicated, I just think some of this dedication erodes
as you evolve into your mid-20's. People settle and get a little less hungry.

~~~
carbocation
I didn't downvote you, but I don't agree. Age is not a gating factor. You can
be hungry at any age.

~~~
5hoom
Absolutely agree.

In my 20's I was completely certain that I would be successful without hard
work as I was smart & talented. After a decade of that imagined success not
materialising I am far hungrier, more determined and working harder now than I
have ever been before.

~~~
gaustin
Same here. At 29 I've finally internalized the reality that nothing valuable
comes easily. Dreams and goals don't accomplish themselves.

Right now, I'm working my ass off to do a software craftsmanship
apprenticeship. It has taken time to develop the maturity to be content to
focus on what I need to do today and not worry about when, where, and how the
hard work will pay off.

------
Permit
I sometimes worry that some consider dropping out of college a cause of
success rather than a symptom of success.

Many of the individuals mentioned in this article started companies while
enrolled in college. It was only after they realized the true potential of
these companies that they decided to fully invest themselves in their
projects. You cannot simply drop out of university without some sort of plan
and expect success to find you.

~~~
pg
This is an important point that I don't think many people understand. Gates
and Zuckerberg didn't drop out to start companies: they started companies in
college, whose success drew them out.

~~~
abiekatz
Steve Jobs would be the notable exception to this, he dropped out well before
creating Apple

~~~
wanorris
The exception that proves the rule. I think that nearly anyone who sets out to
follow Steve Jobs's career path is likely to end up pretty disappointed in the
results. Steve was one of a kind.

~~~
abiekatz
What rule, that you should only drop out of college if you are working on a
startup that looks like it could be incredibly successful? I don't think that
is a great rule for everybody. Each individual has to look at the path that is
correct for them.

Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone are other examples of college
dropouts who left not to start startups and then became successful
entrepreneurs. Matt Cohler left college for two years, working for a startup
in China and playing in a band, before finishing up his college degree.

Each individual has to choose the path that is right for them. Every
incredibly successful person is an outlier. You can learn from them but you
can't just copy them

~~~
wanorris
It absolutely isn't a great rule for everybody. But it's a pretty good
baseline rule _if you know that your goal is to found a successful startup._
There are lots of other goals that someone might have, and working in China
and playing in a band sounds like a pretty awesome thing to do. For that
matter, getting a job at a great company and getting paid a great salary can
also be a pretty awesome thing to do. But if what you want most is to start a
successful startup, there do seem to be some paths that are more likely to
result in success than others.

> Every incredibly successful person is an outlier.

This is true. But the whole premise of YC and other startup incubators is that
there are things you can do to significantly increase your odds of being
successful if what you want to do is to found a startup.

Your chance of becoming Larry Page, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg is
incredibly small. But your chance of founding a startup with some degree of
success will be better.

------
hristov
Sigh, there is a lot of misleading stuff in there. First of all, the whole
article relies on conclusion by examples. But if you look at the data the
successful start up entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly college graduates.

Secondly, even if we look at the examples of the successful dropouts we notice
that even most of them get some significant advantage out of school.

Gates is the prime example. Everyone says he is dropped out of college, but he
had the advantage of going to one of the richest high schools in the nation
where he had access to a computer (which was an incredible luxury at the
time). It is the skills he learned there that allowed him to actually create
something useful and to start his company.

Jobs dropped out, but if Jobs was all by himself he would not be Steve Jobs of
Apple Computer, and there would not be an Apple Computer. Jobs is Jobs because
he met Woz, and Woz went to college where he ignited his passion for
electronics and gained the skills which would later enable him to create the
first Apple computers.

Now about Zuck. It is utterly obvious to anyone that followed the rise of
Facebook that there would be no Facebook if Zuckenberg did not go to college.
Sure he dropped out, but being there allowed him to assemble the team that
build the site and be part of the culture that made the site useful and used.
Facebook was a college phenomenon.

So things are not that simple. To be a successful entrepreneur you have to
build something people want. And to do this nowadays you usually need to deal
with machines and computers. And to know how to make computers do what you
need them to do you need education. Now it is not certain whether formal
education does a good job at this or not, but to say that all you need to do a
successful start-up is gumption, can do spirit, "street smarts", sales skills,
etc., is a dangerous lie.

~~~
doomlaser
Woz's passion for electronics started waaaaay before college. More like at age
11. (I'm reading iWoz right now, it's great)

~~~
hristov
You are right there, but I am sure he learned a lot of useful stuff in
college. I studied a lot of hardware and electronics myself and those fields
include a lot of theory and high order math that one usually cannot learn in
high school.

------
potatolicious
One must not mistake education with school. Sometimes they are linked,
sometimes they are not.

It would be foolish to take away from this article that education is
unimportant - all of the people listed are incredibly well educated.

The well educated will save America. How many of these people have gone to
school, that's another matter altogether.

~~~
jdvolz
I would like to echo this sentiment. Further, having read the author's book 3
weeks ago, I'm confident even he wouldn't say the uneducated are going to save
America. His book is about the alternative education that you can give
yourself if you choose to seek it out, particularly around topics that are
business centric (sales, marketing, personal branding, networking, etc.).

The point of the book is that he found common themes in the people who didn't
have college degrees but who did attain business success.

------
ihodes
Maybe I'm just drinking the Kool-Aid, but as a Senior at a pretty damn good
college in the US, I don't think that my years here have been wasted. There
was a time where I wanted to drop out and start a business, but I would have
missed so much if I had.

I do not intend to be an academic, nor a professional. I would like to start a
business someday. College didn't provide me with a set of skills which I can
sell to an employer or employ to sell with. Rather–and this used to sound
absurd to me as well–it improved my ability to teach myself.

I'm speaking from personal experience here, but I do think college has the
same effect on my peers as well. I was a fairly proficient autodidact,
teaching myself how to program in everything from C to Clojure, as well as a
sizable array of other skills (double-entry accounting, for one).

But now I am able to pick up a book on the subject of abstract algebra and
really learn the material. I know how to handle tricky political situations,
where not all information is present and one party wants to get more out of
the other. I have been exposed to people, cultures, and ideas that I would
have been unlikely to come across had I dropped out to hack together a
startup. I know how to talk to people with power. I am better able to see
things from another perspective. I am a better person now, all around. (This
paragraph is uncomfortably self-congratulatory, but I'll leave it in for what
it's trying to convey.)

Sure, college is not for everyone. Some college are better than others, and
some are better for specific purposes. But I have improved myself and my
skills here, and I don't think I could have done the same had I not gone
through college. I'm looking forward to changing the world in a big way.

~~~
josefresco
How much did it cost you?

~~~
ihodes
Well over 200k.

------
blhack
What link-baity nonsense is this?

Yeah, people running/founding companies might drop out of school to do so, the
people that they're directing, however, are engineers with graduate degrees.

Stay in school. The idea that articles like this perpetuate "Lose pounds NOW
and eat whatever you want!" errr... I mean "Commonly accepted fact of life is
incorrect! You're Harry Potter!" is a bad one. Stay in school. Get your
degree.

No, high school dropouts won't "save America", people who figure out an
economic system that can function in a post-industrial economy will.

~~~
andrewflnr
I guess it was taken too far, but the main point is that school doesn't teach
you a lot of really important skills you need to succeed.

I have no intention of dropping of school until I get a degree, but I also
know that I will have to learn a lot of things that school won't teach me.

How many schools are actively teaching how to function in a post-industrial
economy? Not many, I'm guessing.

~~~
bennesvig
My 100k college education didn't teach sales...which is kind of everything. If
you can't sell yourself or your ideas, what good is your education.

------
garethsprice
Article exhibits the common fallacy that because some college dropouts are
wildly successful, dropping out of college is correlated with success.

64% of US business owners have at least a Bachelor's degree (source:
<http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html>).

Unless you have a great and proven business idea that's already taking off,
staying in school and getting a degree seems to have a closer correlation to
success than dropping out.

~~~
wanorris
It's transparently obvious from looking at data that getting a college degree
is correlated with success, assuming success means having more income. The
gulf is significant and growing.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Education_and_gender)

~~~
randomdata
But all that really tells is that there may be some correlation to the
attributes of a person which allows them to make their way through
increasingly challenging levels of education (smarts, drive, luck, etc.), also
allows them success in business. It is more than likely those attributes were
present before entering college. Perhaps even as far back as birth.

------
michaelschade
After Sean Parker tweeted about this op-ed piece, there was conversation on
Twitter about it by Sean, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Anil Dash, and many
others.

I'm sure there are many I'm missing that represent good ideas, but here are at
least the tweets about the piece from the people listed above:
<http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america>

------
benrpeters
I'm optimistic that future students will be more curious about
entrepreneurship. Their disillusioned older brothers and sisters with graduate
degrees will report back to them from the job front. There is an educational
arms race that has caused the bar for degree and GPA requirements to be raised
for many professional jobs. Folks are being squeezed to less rewarding jobs.
And I'm already seeing a shifting mindset about the safety and inevitability
of a good career after grad school.

As schools see their post-grad employment and salary figures drop, they will
come around on what makes good preparation for life in the future job market.

------
brackin
There's a misconception i've noticed to why many go to college, in this area
at least. I see no problem with going or dropping out. Everyone is in a
different situation and at different levels in their career. Many have already
ran or are running companies. In fact most of my friends that are going to
college (those want to run startups) are going because...

They want to bide their time, as PG mentioned people should take their time.
They want to have gone to Stanford, etc for the badge it holds, although this
is becoming more debatable as the more people have degrees the lower value it
holds and seems to be just for vanity. The most important reason is social
pressure and trying to conform with their peers and for contacts they could
make.

Next year i'm not planning to go to college at all, my current startup which
launched about 2.5 months ago is about to pass 30,000 users a lot of which are
buying products so we're nicely profitable.

I don't feel I need connections as I've been able to meet lots of great people
on Twitter, at conferences like disrupt and contacting some before I visited
SF. I've got about 5 months left and now i'm visiting SF, spending time
meeting people and such. I'm decided.

I'm very happy to take the risk of moving to SF from London, this will be next
spring and may be working on something new. I would say it's totally a case by
case basis, it's fine if people want to go to college but I don't like that
many have told me to go as it's what they had to go through. Which makes
little sense.

------
clebio
The article highlights a handful of wild-success examples and thus suffers
from selection bias. The difficultly of tracking failed start-ups has been
discussed, but has anyone studied that failure rate? Seems there's a paucity
of coverage in popular press, even if any actual sources exist. Playing up the
genius, or the under-dog, seems common-- maybe there's a rule similar to "man
bites dog".

The subtext of the article seems to be that US education doesn't give kids all
of the tools needed ("Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort
with failure."). But that doesn't imply we need to discard education whole-
sale. We probably just need to iterate (more often)-- cull obsolete topics and
start testing new subjects.

Perhaps a passionate, motivated person can find and digest useful materials
more effectively on her own than if she is distracted by formal schooling most
of the day. But we won't make progress in the information age without a good
degree of careful thinking. "[B]etting on the engines of future job creation"
may make for a good read, but historically-informed updates to standard
curricula would probably do the job.

------
Eliezer
Dropout? I beg your pardon. I completed 8th grade and then didn't go on to
high school; I never "dropped out" of anything. The term you're looking for is
"autodidact".

------
eding
startups are indeed important job creators, and college isnt for everyone.
however, in a general population, a successful startup entrepreneur is about
as rare as a professional athlete in basketball, baseball, football, hockey
etc. For the rest, a college education is by far still statistically the best
way to a stable career and success. Would you tell all inner city kids to
forget school and instead focus on being a pro-bball player someday? no - not
because you dont believe a handful will make it, but because we know 99% of
the rest wont. hence, this is a message targeted for the rare 1% talents, not
for the 99%.

~~~
dkrich
Well that's just wrong, unless you're definition of success is creating the
next Facebook or YouTube, in which case I would agree.

But I have several friends who run their own businesses on a much smaller
scale, still do quite well for themselves financially, and I don't see people
running up to them for autographs.

------
DanielBMarkham
Reading both pg's comments and the article, I think the point here is that
college is a great vehicle for moving ahead in life. But the vehicle may be
headed to a destination that doesn't work for you.

In other words, use college for your own advancement, not to necessarily
complete a pre-canned course of study. If you're Zuck and you've created
something that's on fire, then it might make sense to leave early. If you want
to become a neurosurgeon, you're probably just getting started. It all depends
on your personal situation. With a lack of goals and traction in life, staying
the course on some 4 or 6-year study program _might_ be the best thing to do.

You can't mix up structured education and learning. Structured education is
great for some things, but at some point you have to switch from structured
education into self-directed education. That point is going to be in a
different spot for everybody. Those that try to tell you that it is one way or
the other -- years and years of college versus just drop out and do it -- are
oversimplifying the situation drastically.

 _Use_ college. Don't let college _use you_. The guys that are $100K in debt
with a degree and no job prospects are just as screwed as the guys who dropped
out and can only get minimum-wage labor (In fact, I'd argue the drop-outs
might be better off, as long as they have a strong culture of self-education,
networking, and ambition -- at least they know their behind the curve and are
going to have to continue to adapt drastically to survive whereas many college
grads do not -- but that's my bias.)

------
terse
no. people like gates or zuckerberg will not save the country.

a long time ago (actually not that long) people who had wealth pursued
education. they gravitated to universities they travelled the world to learn
about culture. they were not becoming educated in order to increase their
monetary wealth.

this was true even as recent as andrew carnegie, once the world's wealthiest
man. according to one biography, the mentor carnegie chose to help him become
more educated preferred the company of carnegie's brother, by comparison a man
of modest accomplishments but who apparently had a more interesting intellect
than andrew.

at the same time we read that gates fancies the khan academy and takes his
children on tours of factories. i'm not even going to mention zuckerberg's
activities.

things have changed i guess.

university has value aside from being a path to higher income. i feel sorry
for the uneducated man, no matter how much wealth he acquires. circumstances
can change and men can lose their fortunes. but education is not something a
man can lose. it is his for life.

------
smashing
Getting Lay'd Off taught me more about entrepreneurship than any school.

------
pallinder
I would think it is mostly about the person.

Some people - like me, are very anti authoritarian and love to do things on
their own and teach themselves how to become better at things. Some people
enjoy a more structured life. I dont think any of the paths are wrong its just
that there are different kinds of people, and different kinds of people take
different kinds of paths to achieve the same thing.

Will dropouts save America, probably not, looking at the stats it seems as if
people fare far better going the education route but a couple will succeed and
because they are in the minority people will rejoice "Hey look, we to can
succeed without getting a degree", what they missed though is the mountain of
work these people put into their projects to succeed. There are no shortcuts.

College is hard work (Im sure), doing it without a degree is also a lot of
hard work. And as I said earlier, it comes down to the person to decide what
is the right path for him/her.

------
d-roo
If you're in school and thinking of dropping out, take a look at the numbers:
<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm>

Despite the state of the economy, college grads have a 4.2% unemployment rate.

~~~
randomdata
On the other hand, if those numbers are the only thing that is keeping you in
school, you might want to consider the quality of the education you are
receiving.

Showing a correlation does not really tell us anything meaningful. Even with a
degree, you still might be missing what it takes and end up being part of the
four percent. At this point, we have no real idea of what it takes for an
individual to be successful in business until after the fact. Two people can
do identical things with completely different results.

------
bennesvig
It's all mentality. The "I'll get a degree, find a job, and move up the
ladder" way of doing things is dying.

If you have the drive, thirst to educate yourself, and hustle to go out and do
it, you probably don't need college (referring to business degree).

College has some good things to offer, but too often it's a false reality. You
don't learn the real world lessons that come from dealing with actual clients,
paying you actual money, to provide actual value.

You can only learn so much with case studies and papers.

I learned more in the first 3 months at an internship at a marketing agency
were I was getting paid $8/hr than the 4 years of college, which cost $100k.

------
vph
There are two types of dropouts: (1) those who can't keep up with the rest,
and (2) those who are and realize they are far above the rest and quit because
school would slow them down.

Those in category (2) like Gate, Job, Zuckerberg are rare. And schooling is
necessary to train those who help make Gate, Job, Zuckerberg who they are.
Without these engineers, managers, etc. there would be no Gate, Job,
Zuckerberg. The dropouts of category (1) ain't going to do it.

------
dkrich
I don't see why there is an inherent assumption that college and
entrepreneurship are mutually exclusive.

Pretending that college prevents people from pursuing a career in
entrepreneurship is ridiculous. What would those students be doing instead?
Working at Starbucks while they build their startups at night? How is that
better? Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out because their startups were already
wildly successful. They didn't drop out to start them.

------
tincholio
The article seems to miss that for the examples it gives, while the founders
might have been college dropouts, the products/companies themselves would not
have made it to where they are now if not by the work of many people who did
finish college and in many cases graduate school.

------
Jerky
The right people will be motivated by the right words. Those who aren't right,
won't hear it. If you read that and wanted to find justifications (references)
on why Ellsberg was wrong, then you are too risk averse.

------
kiba
I wonder if school sucks at teaching so much that we failed to retain most
knowledge we learn in schools and thus that why even people with a high school
degrees are not worth much.

------
happypeter
I actually gave up my MS degree, and saved quit a bit time to learn sth
useful.

3 years after that, I want to say, it was a nice decision. I do not need a
degree anyway.

