I have to admit that this is one of my favorite subjects. I am by no means smarter than the average person out there but I've done fairly well without traditional schooling. It's been part luck and tenacity on my part. I make a decent salary and am confident that I will have my own company in the near future. I'm hopeful that YC will help me with that. I can't tell you how impatient I am to hear back!
I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees. I think it says a lot about their intelligence and their ability to focus. What I can't stand however are companies that won't even look at a candidate if they don't have a degree. They miss out on truly great people. Having a degree means something, yes, but it doesn't preclude the candidate being great.
I have to rely on persistence and connections to get work. In a way, it sucks but it's also a satisfying challenge.
When the day comes that I have to interview and hire people I will not take their degree into consideration. I'll use YC's approach and hire them for who they are, what kind of ideas they have and my instincts about what kind of work they can do.
I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees.
An MBA is barely a college degree. Compare how much you learn in engineering, or the sciences, to what you learn in an MBA. It's all hype except the networking and resume-filtering.
I keep trying to convince my MBA friends to drop out and start something, but it seems to attract non-entrepreneurial people.
"but I did get one particularly desperate/angry note from a validation-seeking student last week."
Don't you wish you could pay ten bucks a month to have read only access to Seth's inbox? That would be so much more fun than Reddit / Digg. Plus it could actually be feasible if you limited it to only messages coming from the mailto link on his blog. :-)
When I was in undergrad, I had a bunch of conversations with my friends about just why we were in college. It all came down to three things:
1. We wanted to show potential employers that we were smart enough to get into an elite private college.
2. We wanted to show potential employers that we were docile and persistent enough to continue attending said elite private college, even though we had accomplished #1.
3. We wanted to get to know lots of other people who were willing to pay $40K/year for the privilege of #1 and #2.
Of course, once you get out in the working world and actually get involved in hiring decisions, you quickly learn that there's not that much difference in the quality of education at various universities. Harvard's classroom instruction is not much better than any other top-tier college, and may actually be worse. MIT's is probably better, but it's nothing that a couple of guys from UVA (ahem, Reddit) can't pick up in their spare time.
Instead, you look at the Education section on a resume because people have already done the hard work for you. Someone at Harvard painstakingly went through 18 years of that candidate's life and decided that they were good enough for Harvard. I've got code to write: I don't have time to spend digging through a candidate's background. If it's good enough for Harvard, it's good enough for me.
So, the business idea I came up with was a simple certification program. We'd look at all your test scores, administer a few additional tests, have you complete a project or two, talk to previous people you've worked with, and generally decide if you're worthy or not. We'd set the bar high enough that the average Harvard or MIT grad would fail. And if you pass, we give you a college degree - all without having to put up with the bullshit aspects, like going to classes or forking over a couple hundred dollars. You're responsible for your own education, we just say whether you've educated yourself.
I wonder if I should've put this down under "other ideas" on my yCombinator app.
Good luck getting that degree accredited.[0] You've entirely elided the fundamental aspect of education: education. A college degree is not supposed to just be a certification that you are competent over a certain domain of facts, but rather an indication that you have spent 3-4 years thinking, applying yourself, and growing intellectually.
While autodidactism is certainly laudable, there is value in a corporate educational setting, namely the value of intellectual interaction. College is not so much about learning a set of data, but learning how to learn. (For the ultimate example, consider the Ph.D., a degree meant only to teach you to do research, and requiring legitimate research to attain it.)
Now, I'll admit, I was educated in a liberal arts[1] high school, and am currently pursuing a couple of liberal arts degrees. That is both why and because I believe education is about thinking, not committing facts to memory. I eschew academic engineering because it is (at my university, at least) primarily a series of courses that certify your knowledge of yet another parcel of facts. That is useless, educationally. As technical training,[2] great, but it's not education.
Your list of "why"s implies that, substantively, you were no different at the end of college than at the beginning, modulo a group of friends, and four years aging. If that is the case, I'm terribly sorry; you managed to miss most of your education.
[0] Mea culpa: this entire comment is a bit hot-headed. You've hit a pet peeve.
[1] Before you jump to conclusions: the liberal arts include the hard sciences.
[2] In all honesty, that's what engineering school is: a vocational education in an incredibly advanced vocation. (That's not a problem, really: I share my time between my liberal arts degrees and a fine arts program, which is also vocational education, in a (imho) advanced vocation.)
"College is not so much about learning a set of data, but learning how to learn."
I've heard that a lot. My high school was basically founded around that premise, and I completely bought into it then. IMNSHO now, it's complete bullshit.
You don't learn how to learn by having someone teach you. You learn how to learn by butting your head up against a problem, reading everything you can about what other people have already done on the problem, trying different approaches until one works, and moving on to the next problem. After you've repeated this a few hundred times, you start figuring out which approaches are likely to work and which aren't.
The Ph.D is a good example. There are plenty of people that are "ABD" (All But Dissertation) - they've gone through all the coursework, been taught all that their instructors can teach them, but nobody considers them "real" Ph.Ds. Why? Because the meat of a Ph.D program is actually going out and doing original research, and someone who hasn't done the research doesn't really know how to do the research.
The point of a certification program is to decouple the act of learning from the act of judging how much has been learned. Right now, universities perform both functions, which in any other industry would be a ludicrous conflict of interest. And so we get grade inflation and colleges refusing to admit poorer students because it'll drop their U.S. News rankings.
If you look up the words education and training you will see that there are differences in definition but that all college programs contain aspects of both education and training. You are creating a false dichotomy. I can only speak of the effect an ABET engineering program had on me: it changed the way my mind works on a fundamental level. Good education of any variety tends to have that effect.
I'm waxing originalistic, but I'll spare you the argument from Latin (the relevant verb is educare), and just skip to the OED. To educate is "3. To train (any person) so as to develop the intellectual and moral powers generally." The distinction I draw is between "develop[ing] the intellectual and moral powers generally" and training a particular skill, without respect to overall intellect.
(Also note, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as an engineering education, only that many engineering programs suck at developing the mind generally. I'd still maintain that there's a fundamental difference between engineering and liberal art/science education, but that is not a discussion for this thread.)
"The paradox, of course, is that the best people aren't prepared to leave their life behind for two years. They're in a hurry."
This paragraph really spoke to me. Does anybody else feel this way? I am a 3rd-yr. undergrad, and I'm itching to finish school and start a company.
I study Computer Science, and I love it, and I would love to continue studying it in graduate school. I could apply for a PhD, but then I would be putting my life off for another 4-7 yrs. I could apply for a Master's in C.S., but then I would be putting my life of for another 2 years.
I feel that school sometimes creates a disillusioned sense of learning among students. I have to constantly remind myself that I could learn anything I've learned in school on my own time, and that I can continue to do so even after I graduate, and even after I retire.
This isn't true of a lot of people. School certainly offers a strong sense of competition, along with access to bright students and accomplished faculty. I feel like each semester is an orgy of learning, if you will, in which I am focused and determined to intensely work and succeed. But during winter and summer breaks, there is not much difference...
I love to learn and would love to continue school, but in a sense, it restricts you to its curriculum. Perhaps my interests are simply more business-oriented. Perhaps I am afraid to face up to the possible rejection of graduate school. Regardless, I don't want to feel like I am putting of my life any longer.
Seth's idea is one that i'm sure a lot of people have thought of recently. I know i have a bunch of ideas written on scrap paper about it. I'm just glad to see someone might be doing something cool to circumvent the current college standard.
As much as i talk about college being a big fat waste of time and money, I generally enjoyed my time spent there. I had an awesome marketing job with one of the greatest companies/brands in the world and made some stellar contacts. It was the job offers halfway through college that showed me that the experience was worth MUCH more than the diploma. Finding out that jobs that "require" college degrees really just require proof that you are capable and determined was a great realization.
If you can demonstrate to a company that you have what it takes, waiting for you to finish your degree could be a waste of time for all parties involved.
So if your goal is to get a good job... it is entirely possible without a degree. Your friends and family may tell you otherwise, and very few people will encourage you to drop out to take a job... but it's your decision. Having a degree hardly dictates your happiness or success as a person.
I ended up leaving school after 3.5 years. Not to take a job, just because it was clearly a waste of my time. I wanted to focus on starting/building my company, and school was just getting in the way of that. Incidentally I found (sorta like Seth) a way that I could get my last semester's worth of credits from my university - so i'll still have that "all mighty piece of paper" in a couple months.
My suggestion to people usually is: Do what you want! Fitting the social norm is easy and will probably work out for you, but it might not be the best choice. If I were to go to college again, I'd study something that interested me as a person. Not something that I felt was a happy medium between interesting and a safe career path.
You should go to college to learn about something you think is cool & enjoy your time spent there. Study art or music, history of physics... something that will make you want to attend early morning class discussions. Get involved on campus, network with people, and use your free-time to read and figure out how you're going to make your mark. If you're just going to school to prepare for a job... rethink why you'd spend your time and money being lectured and quizzed on material from drab books who's curriculum is behind the times anyway. If you are planning to start a company, you'll know for yourself if college is important to you or not.
shhh... don't tell anyone. they don't like to hear it!
well I do, but if only more people would too. alas, norms are norms.
by the way, the "reply" link above is also italicized. the tag is closed properly, but it is visibly inconsistent. just in case pg feels like changing it.
Jeff Skoll - Stanford GSB
Richard Fairbanks - Stanford GSB
Steve Ballmer [this one isn't going to get me love] - Stanford GSB
Vinod Khosla - Stanford GSB
Scott McNealy - Stanford GSB
...
I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees. I think it says a lot about their intelligence and their ability to focus. What I can't stand however are companies that won't even look at a candidate if they don't have a degree. They miss out on truly great people. Having a degree means something, yes, but it doesn't preclude the candidate being great.
I have to rely on persistence and connections to get work. In a way, it sucks but it's also a satisfying challenge.
When the day comes that I have to interview and hire people I will not take their degree into consideration. I'll use YC's approach and hire them for who they are, what kind of ideas they have and my instincts about what kind of work they can do.