First off, I don't have a college degree. I have something like 102 hours, so I'm a year'ish short.
That said, I'm always a bit wary of hiring folks who don't have (at least) a liberal arts education of some kind. I don't really care about the computer science, engineering, physics part of the degree.
I care about the part of college that prepares you to learn. I care about the breadth of experience that literature, writing, philosophy, and the like give you. I've now interviewed far too many folks who have deep computer science knowledge without a degree, but lack the ability to internalize and learn at a deep level. I think that's what college does a tremendous job of preparing people for.
I jump at the chance to hire people who took strong programming skills to college and got a degree in something perpendicular to their programming skill set. One of the best hires I ever made had a degree in hospitality management. Short of that, at least stay in college long enough to complete those required core classes. You'll be a much stronger developer, business person, whatever for it.
I'd be wary of hiring a college drop-out simply because college can be a filter for stick-to-it-ness. Only a very few college drop-outs do so because they can do better elsewhere; the majority do it because they've failed. And they don't believe that can get back on their feet.
I came close to dropping out, but I'm really glad I didn't- because managing to come back showed me that effort really matters and that I have the ability to succeed at things I thought were hard as long as I work at it.
I think the questino of why you dropped out is a huge one.
If you dropped out becuase you wanted to start the next big thing and fail, why didn't you go back? You can go back for the next 7 years and pick up where you left off.
So if you are a college drop out, I am far more inclined to think it was because you couldn't hack it than becuase you tried to go big.
I dropped out after a year, but it wasn't to go "big," merely to go (work) at all.
The reason I never went back is simply that the cost grossly outweighed the benefit.
Strictly from a quantifiable/money perspective, the loss would have been huge. After 7 years, for example, I'd have been giving up around $85k annually in salary and spending $15k or so on tuition and books. I'm ignoring living expenses, since I expect those would have been close enough to comparable. I'd also be trading 3 additional years of industry experience in addition to the $300k for a diploma. Each of those years turned out to be worth $5k-$10k of additional salary in the short term, though it's tough to say what they've been worth in the long term.
As for the intangible benefits, that was an even easier decision, since neither the process nor the "rounding" subjects outside computer science appealed to me. These were all more difficult than high school, but in the wrong ways. That is, the was just as tedious[2], more voluminous, and no more intrinsically rewarding. Writing an essay about literature that parrots the instructor's opinion is something I already knew how to do, but making it appear as if I'm not was a college-level skill I couldn't be bothered to practice, let alone master.
Had I dropped out to do a startup, even having failed, I can't imagine undergraduate academia as being anything but stifling and insulting.
- A stifling engineering program where your employability is excellent ("employment insurance", the article calls it). Every course is a core course, and your load is so heavy that taking anything outside of the precise realm of your degree is academic suicide (not that I didn't try... and almost got me on probation).
- A free-form degree where you have a lot of choice in courses across a diverse number of subjects and interests... none of which have the employability and cachet of the former. In other words, you're paying through the nose for something that will have basically no monetary return on investment.
As a 18 year-old not hailing from a particularly wealthy family, the choice was pretty simple. There was simply no way to justify dropping that much money on something that will have no financial benefit later.
Note: With enough weaseling and planning you can get some breadth in that engineering program, but the extreme academic load meant that you had to limit yourself to bird courses of some intellectual interest. Anything that required "real" work would've ended your shot at an engineering degree pretty quickly.
It's not a terrifically high threshold of intelligence or determination, but it is a threshold. A lot of people drop out of college, for various reasons, and so a college degree does act as a filter.
Yes, and a job where you're hiring mass quantities of commodity labor, having a threshold is great. However, when recruiting for quite a specialized position, having a low and arbitrary 'threshold' seems counter productive.
I learned how to learn long before college. Therefore college is not necessary to do that. Furthermore I'd say if you haven't learned how to learn until/outside college then you probably are mentally impaired. College is useful, but to say you can't learn, or learn how to learn, even in a "deep" way, or that you cannot consume or appreciate literature, philosophy or art unless and until you attend college is provably false. One thing's for certain, though: you can learn much faster and more cheaply on your own than by involving college/university, in general.
First off, I don't have a college degree. I have something like 102 hours, so I'm a year'ish short.
That said, I'm always a bit wary of hiring folks who don't have (at least) a liberal arts education of some kind. I don't really care about the computer science, engineering, physics part of the degree.
I care about the part of college that prepares you to learn. I care about the breadth of experience that literature, writing, philosophy, and the like give you. I've now interviewed far too many folks who have deep computer science knowledge without a degree, but lack the ability to internalize and learn at a deep level. I think that's what college does a tremendous job of preparing people for.
I jump at the chance to hire people who took strong programming skills to college and got a degree in something perpendicular to their programming skill set. One of the best hires I ever made had a degree in hospitality management. Short of that, at least stay in college long enough to complete those required core classes. You'll be a much stronger developer, business person, whatever for it.