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Comment by jasonmp85 | Hacker News Reader

> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure.

I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself.

But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college?

I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's not. Not here.

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Neither is the contempt that moves people to say things like:

> “It’s really the worst when school comes up,” Backus said. “It’s offensive, the way people ask about it.”

"Offensive" is a loaded word, and I wouldn't choose it were I to make a similar statement. But I could make a similar statement, because I'm also familiar with the prejudice that a lot of people have toward those of us who have not completed, or indeed begun, a course of tertiary education.

I'm not a wildly successful entrepreneur, of course. I'm not even an entrepreneur, and I sure as hell don't have a billionaire in my corner. I'm just a redneck with some smarts who's had a whole lot of luck, and managed to parlay those things into an uninspired but solid software engineering career. It surprises me to see that people who are wildly successful entrepreneurs have run into the same prejudice that I've long since grown accustomed to encountering. The old saying is that "nothing succeeds like success", but apparently there are some folks with whom that's just not so.

An alternative view is: "If you're already successful, everything you could learn at a college you can also learn out of college (see: the internet)".

That would be an incorrect view.

First, few are so motivated that they'd devote years to self-learning at the same scale as university provide. Next, it would be difficult to put together a cohesive curriculum for yourself because you don't know what you don't know. Relatedly, understanding the arc/trajectory to pick it difficult, and to do it all alone with no guidance means there's no one qualified that you can ask questions from on the daily. It also ignores the value of mentorship, learning from your peers, and being inspired and pushed by your environment. It also is isolating and does not give you any social benefits, business or personal networks.

Everything you say is true, but you can still do it if you're that way inclined. As long as you don't mind poverty and social exile :-)

Career-wise this has been a terrible life choice for me and I advise people to go to college for precisely the same reason you do. On the other hand career and material gain are only one aspect of life, I can't say with conviction that I really wish I'd done anything differently.

If you aren't personally motivated devote years of self-learning to complex and deep topics, you should stay in school and get a Phd?

You can be motivated without going to school. It would take seconds to find curricula from major universities. You can find most textbooks for free on Libgen. You can talk to people over the internet and find better mentors than people you'd find in your local university. It's not isolating any more than going to the university and staying in your dorm reading textbooks is.

So, yeah. It seems like a completely correct view. My guess is that it will only become more and more correct with time, as the internet provides all the building blocks that colleges provide currently. The knowledge is already there. Credentials are there for some professions (Github > sheepskin). Networking is probably the hardest part, but hardly sounds undoable.

Pirating textbooks can be done in college or not in college, just as you can buy textbooks in college or not. But if you're not in college, then you most likely won't know what to buy, and certainly won't have anyone to explain it all to you in depth.

It is difficult for most to self-motivate 4+ years worth of self-study in isolation. Few would do that on their own. Further, getting a random stranger to mentor you for any real period of time is a difficult proposition without anything in return. Typically this only happens in extreme cases such as if you are a superstar and "worth their time."

If all you do is stay in your dorm and never venture out, then you're not getting much out of what the university offers, so that's not particularly relevant. You can also just not attend any classes either but that's not much of a comparison.

You're also ignoring majorly important components such as opportunistic learning from peers, being motivated by your environment, and having others guide you through subject matter when you don't know what you don't know. The internet cannot replace any of that as effectively.

Guess what, people in college don't know either what textbooks you should buy. Maybe they're the teacher's favorite textbook, or a textbook the teacher wrote him/herself. Will that be the best textbook for you? Maybe. Maybe not.

Regardless, as mentioned before, if you think colleges do choose the best textbooks, you can find what textbooks they're using very easily.

My experience is that the best thing you can do is sample many textbooks and keep the ones you like best and are most likely to learn from.

That few people are willing to self-motivate for 4 years doesn't invalidate the possibility of doing it. I would also question the necessity to study for 4 years to learn most subjects.

The point about staying in your dorm is that if you're studying (i.e. not going out with your friends), it doesn't matter whether you're doing it at home or in a college dorm. You can socialize in other ways.

Serendipitous learning happens outside of colleges too. Etc. Etc.

Having been through college, and having learned a lot of things on my own, the only thing I think (some) colleges provide is just sheepskin prestige. If you want to work for a company that screens based on what university you went to, don't make the mistake of skipping that part. Learning-wise? I don't think it makes much of a difference.

People often focus too much on what is technically possible, and not enough on what's likely, given social and psychological realities. "Possible" isn't really possible if it requires an unusual psychology to work.

In my mind it's a question of what the purpose of college is, implicitly there's two sides to the argument:

One enters college to better themselves and for the purpose of a collaborative education.

One enters college to improve their ability to interact with the world in a meaningful fashion.

For those in the former camp, college is a means to an end. Those in the latter value the aspects of a collegial environment that you can't get elsewhere when learning. I find myself in both camps, I'd love to return for a PhD but it's such an economically poor decision that I don't.

Yeah, that was Bill Gates' answer. He takes "classes" all the time. @4:35

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-10-17/the-david-ru...

That isn't a very empathetic perspective. Consider perhaps that it has nothing to do with ego and nothing to do with thinking that college has nothing to teach you. Instead, it might be the case that these individuals think either or both of:

1) Yes, college could teach me a lot, but my resources (time and prime years) are finite, and I'm willing to make a tradeoff that forgoes some valuable elements in favor of an arrangement that helps me achieve my personal goals

2) College is not an option for me because it's incompatible with the reward centers in my brain and things like entrance exams, prerequisites, and the rigor and structure of academia are environments in which I flounder, not thrive.

There are many experiences in life that have value, but it is up to each individual to decide for themselves what they should pack into a few short years. It could just as easily be argued that the egoism is on the other side of the table for being so dismissive of alternative paths to success.

On the one hand I think college's value is overstated.

On the other hand I think a lot of people who promote the mentality described in this article seem driven mostly by ego stroking ("I'm so smart and motivated I don't need college I just learn on my own") and remain ignorant.

Still this is an obviously great opportunity for any young person and is well worth exploring. College is a fine fallback if you "fail."

For example: I have an undergrad degree in computer science. I hope to one day be successful enough to get an MBA from MIT or Harvard. Both $100,000+ for a two year program.

That may sound funny because if I can afford that tuition without a giant lifestyle change (like selling my house)[1] it means I've already made it, so why do I need to even get the MBA? In fact the average salary for an MBA grad from one of those schools is not that much more than I make as a CTO.

For one, I enjoy the challenge, the joy of learning, and the feeling of accomplishment. In short, it's a trophy. A luxury. For me at least.

[1] It would certainly be easier if I was a early 20-something going full-time with no wife, no kid, and no house. But that is not the reality I live in. For someone with those things going back to school when your employer doesn't pay for it (in my case my employer is my own startup) is a big deal.

Often employers foot the bill

Yeah, unfortunately to do that I would have to leave startup life and go work for a corporation which is not a tradeoff I'm ready to make.

Startups are just baby corporations. You want to be the business equivalent of a kindergarten teacher. I don't mean that in a pejorative way, mind - sounds like a perfectly sensible career path to me if that's what you enjoy.

I'm curious why you would do an MBA if not for career advancement. I can see someone going back to school to study something like mathematics/literature because they love the subject but not MBA.

> I can see someone going back to school to study something like mathematics/literature because they love the subject but not

I happen to like business! Kind of like if I decided to go into Medieval Literature. That fact an MBA is useful to my career is second to that I enjoy it.

With that said, if it does help me grow my next company larger without having to hire a CEO, or if it gets me a CTO job at a fortune 100, just a nice bonus.

Also, a lot of MBAs are a little smug when they talk to Software Engineers. Like "You need me." It would be nice to throw that back at them. Granted I know us Software Engineer throw it the other way just as often. Every technical founder things they don't need a business founder. And every business founder thinks they can outsource the job of technical founder.

You can't imagine someone being as interested in business as others are in math?

I remember Bill Gates said in an interview that he still regularly takes online courses on subjects such as oceanography. People still love to learn, just, I don't think a formal college environment with grades and exams is necessarily a pre-requisite for learning. There are so many alternative mechanisms out there.

You can learn a lot casually. On the other hand, it is considerably less effective:

* Many people talk about forgetting things as soon as the test is over, but why would they remember it even that long without a test?

* A formal course is more than just reading the textbook; it's a guided tour by someone who is a professional teacher as well as someone working in the field. (Yes, some are bad. Most are at least middling and some a very good.)

* And then there is the whole issue of things you wouldn't study on your own if you weren't required to. A CS degree, for example, is more than a bunch of CS courses.

> Many people talk about forgetting things as soon as the test is over It could be argued that when learning specifically for a test people tend to forget things asap, because things learned this way now carry with them a spirit of something being forced on you.

>but why would they remember it even that long without a test? If you learn something that bores you, sure. But I claim that when you learn not for a test you would properly inspect things and their domains and try to get insights into them, their necessity to the object being studied and so on.

I think you are missing the point by oversimplifying what Thiel actually says.

He isn't talking against all kinds of education. He is talking against large parts which is mostly things that could be taught via self study.

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