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Comment by markpneyer | Hacker News Reader

Not if you're smart and motivated it's not.

I went to High School with a guy named Chris. He dropped out of college to do programming work, and I stayed on, eventually going to grad school.

Now he's the founder of GitHub and I'm some no-name programmer working for a financial company nobody's ever heard of.

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In defense of the average guy, not everyone can go out and do great things, otherwise those things wouldn't be considered great anymore.

> In defense of the average guy, not everyone can go out and do great things, otherwise those things wouldn't be considered great anymore.

I incredibly, firmly disagree with this. The average person actualizes maybe - maybe 3% of their potential. It's possible for almost anyone to reach high level domain mastery in at least 2-3 fields in their lifetime, and make a at least a couple profound contributions in those fields. There's some hard tradeoffs involved, but it's something that almost anyone is capable of if they want it.

Ok let me restate that, because that was not what I meant to say.

What I meant to say was that if everyone went out and achieved 100% of their potential, it wouldn't be impressive anymore.

We all have the potential to achieve roughly equal results, but what stops most of us is desire and persistance.

I don't think you even have to be smart, because college really just forces people who aren't really motivated to learn, to learn. I mean what's a better substitute for motivation than the threat of thousands of dollars going down the drain because you failed.

EDIT: and really even with the forcing learning is not guaranteed.

Sheerly out of curiosity, outside of your anecdote, what evidence or credentials do you have to make that claim?

Now, I'm not saying you're unqualified or wrong to make that claim — I merely would like to know what you're basing that statement upon. I see a lot of people make statements like this one based on a few prominent data points, completely ignoring the vast number of data points that don't fit their claim. It seems wrong, especially for a community so hell-bent on accurate, useful data.

Totally agree with the above. Everyone can remember when success is achieved but no one seems to care about the thousands who fail trying to do the same thing. That is why medicine, my field, is no longer practiced anecdotally but based on evidence.

And Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both went to college and dropped out. So perhaps college does give some benefit, but the degree isn't necessary.

Sure, but how many people dropped out of college with aspirations to do something great and then failed?

More to the point, does college really have any particular impact on such matters? If Bill Gates had finished his degree, would he have still been as successful? If Don Knuth had dropped out, would he have still been as successful?

And how many people didn't go to college with aspirations of doing something great and failed?

I wasn't really trying to make a point past pointing out that the comment I was replying to didn't really say much.

I think if you're in college, and you drop out with aspirations. You have greater motivation to meet them then your peers who stayed in.

It helps a lot to know the right people. That's in addition to being smart. Also GTFO of Cincinnati helps too.

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