Don't Glorify Dropping Out
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
There's something to be said for going out and learning how to get things done and build a business as well. A college degree is hardly insurance for anything.
It's clear this guy doesn't have any actual experience with startups. He rattles off the usual talking points:
> startups can be as profitable as a few are, only because the great majority of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas fail.
Uh, no, they didn't succeed because others failed; they succeed because they were able to sell a product. Also, the ones that failed did not all go hungry in the streets, many if not most of them gained priceless experience of far more financial value than what academia is offering.
I don't necessarily advocate dropping out or going to college. You can learn a lot in college, and I certainly value my degree, however it is not the source of my financial security. As the cost of college goes up, grades inflate, and the percentage of people with college degrees increase, the cost-benefit of college is rapidly shifting. Going to college simply isn't much of a differentiator any more, and because it's gotten so easy, it's not as good an indicator of competence the way it used to be.
Especially these days when companies are no longer loyal, the type of job that a degree is required for is not some bastion of stability. 30 years from now when those college graduates get layed off to cut costs, what is the value of their college degree then? At that point they will be much better off if they've learned some business hustle.
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 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.
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.
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.
Never looked back and never regretted it.
Do what you love and the money will follow.
I also find it hard to believe that there was absolutely nothing of interest to you in college, given the pretty broad range of choices.
Where I went to school, your two choices were:
- 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.
stick-to-it-ness
Not only was it a really good learning experience, but it was a hell of a lot of fun and I made a lot of life long friends. 4 years seems like a long time to 18 year olds, but it is a very short time looking at it from the perspective of someone who has graduated and is working.
So the issue is cost. I absolutely 100% agree that running up $100k+ of debt on an undergrade degree is insane. The difference in value of the degree is so much less than the difference in cost, you have to go to the cheapest place you can get a quality education. You can do the entire thing for very little money if you work your butt off in high school and pick a school you can get a scholarship to. Or just go in state.
In Colorado (where I live) you can attend Metropolitan State for something like $15,000 for four years of school. That's a car payment.
University of Colorado Denver is something like $20,000 for the same degree.
The flagship school is closer to $40,000 for the same degree. The Colorado School of Mines (an outstanding engineering school) is in the same range. That's not a huge amount of money either. Just a nicer car payment.
note: Those figures include books, but not room and board.
I went to college in Arkansas for a lot less than that (they hand out scholarships like candy).
College costs have gotten out of control on the high end. You don't have to go to MIT, Harvard, or NYU. In state tuition is still really affordable for what you get out of it.
Usually, but it depends on the degree. A Women's Studies degree, for example, doesn't make you that much more employable. On the far other end of the spectrum, someone with a Nuclear Engineering degree will be all but guaranteed steady, well-paying work for a long time to come.
There's something to be said for going out and learning how to get things done and build a business as well. A college degree is hardly insurance for anything.
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I grew up with the idea that you went to college to make sure you could be "successful", careerwise. I was inspired to drop out of college by two individuals I knew who had bachelor's degrees, had gone on to pursue yet more college, in one case had a mountain of student loans, and both were delivering newspapers. One was still living with mom in his thirties. The other was kind of pimping out his wife (not as a prostitute, I just mean he was "supportive" of her career so she would pay his student loans and support him while he remained a total effin loser). I felt like I could deliver newspapers without a degree and would be money ahead for not having the student loans. I went back to college when I had some idea of what I wanted to do with my life.
Reminder 2: College is broken. It needs challenging.
At that meeting I watched a woman with a doctorate in English scream at the future (and former) Mayor of California because he was telling her they'd have to cut her six figure salary. Even though she admitted her students test scores were abysmal and everyone in the room knows she couldn't go anywhere else and get paid the same rate she still felt she was entitled to the money on her degree alone.
Bottom line (IMHO): If society is to move forward people who deify the degree need to be relieved of that delusion even if it's painful to them.
I'm not arguing about her pay, that's up to the market. However, the condescending tone of your post shows that you have zero inkling of what's involved in the PhD process (no worries, most people don't even when they think they do). I've lived through my wifes years in PhD school (accounting). It was as intense a 5 years as I could imagine anyone enduring.
In her case she overlaps very heavily with behavioral economics (think freakonomics, predictably irrational, etc...). It can be pretty amusing watching these academics fight over what is in the realm of behavioral accounting and what is within economics. No one really knows;)
There is a capital markets side of accounting research which is much more focused on the analysis of accounting in the wild.
It is hard to sort of put your finger on what accounting research is. It does exist tho:)
If they have to argue about this, then they've probably drawn the dividing lines between their categories wrong, and they're trying to shoehorn new ideas into an ill-fitting taxonomy rather than making the taxonomy accurate.
(Related: where the hell does computer science fit? Is it a science, or a branch of applied math, or a craft, or an engineering discipline? Or perhaps an exotic species of potato? Sometimes I think we need the ghost of Alfred Korzybski to rise from the grave and harangue people.)
So I'm absolutely condescending of people who think because they went through a process of any kind they are automatically entitled to respect and high pay. I respect people who prove their worth to society.
My answer:
A difficult accomplishment should be its own reward irrespective of the outside world.
A useful difficult accomplishment will be rewarded by the outside world.
As an example, when I was in college, I received a grant from the Kauffman Foundation( 1 ) to pursue an idea myself and some friends had for a new type of 3-d visualization device. In the end we determined our idea was infeasible as a commercial technology (technical limitations based on our design), but through an arrangement between the Foundation and my college, we were able to work on the prototype and still receive credit so that all of us graduated on time (we were required to use the prototype and lessons learned as a senior project, paper and presentation, along with intermediate documentation to prove we were progressing and continuing our education).
Had we been forced to drop out, we would have failed and not even had a degree to show for it. Had we chosen to drop out, it would have been our decision based on our belief in the idea, instead of as a requirement for pursuing it.
( 1 ) http://www.kauffman.org/about-foundation/foundation-overview...
[edit] formatting.
If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, but I couldn't have done it without financial aid and I knew plenty of other people who went in with much weaker financial backgrounds than me who did just fine (i.e. without debilitating debt afterwards).
So please, explain to me how "college is broken". I don't mind challenging it, and I would certainly agree on an anecdotal basis at least that some colleges and external systems surrounding them are broken (e.g. SAT), but asserting "college is broken" without further explanation isn't a meaningful challenge--it's a provocation, and one I will gladly take.
* Big lecture classes, where a professor delivers canned lectures to enormous crowds of people as though we still lived before the invention of online video and the printing press. As far as I can tell, this is strictly inferior to having a really good teacher record lectures, then put them online. Preferably with an option to play them at 1.4--2x speed. This would also free up time and resources to focus on the parts of the educational experience where college can be better than online lecture videos plus a textbook.
* Often, a whole class of people has to proceed through a set list of topics in lock-step. Some people will find this too slow, and others too fast, for any given topic. What if you want some time to really think through a particular topic? There's no time; you've got to go on to the next thing. And then at the end of the semester, there's a flurry of activity as people finish up final projects and study for exams, and then BAM! It's over!
* The workload tends to be heavily skewed to the end of the semester, so people seldom have enough time to devote to finishing projects properly. This has caused no end of frustration.
* People are crazy-focused on grades, often at the expense of their education. Grades are a clumsy proxy for learning. It's like trying to measure someone's happiness by how much they smile: there's a correlation, sure, but telling someone to smile more is not the best way to make them happier.
I could list more, but that should be enough for starters. Would you dispute the claim that such a system is at least a little broken? Or, if you prefer, blatantly sub-optimal?
I went to a liberal arts school, and a good one. I was never in a large lecture class (my CS101 class had 12 students in it), professors were mandated to have regular office hours and email availability to meet with students outside of classes for extra discussions and help, workloads were reasonably balanced over time, and no one really cared about grades or GPAs as long as they weren't so low that you got put on probation. (It goes without saying that we also didn't have anything resembling class rank, which is an awful concept in all possible ways.) In other words, none of those were issues in my college experience.
Thus, to me, that sounds more like an argument that "X College is broken" than "college is broken". Do some colleges offer sub-optimal educational experiences? I wouldn't doubt it. Do all of them? Clearly not, for those reasons at least.
There is something to be said, and it's been said.
The question is whether not it's just said or it's real. Growing evidence suggests that college degrees are falling out of line with needs of society. (I'm not saying degrees are bad things. I love education and keep learning every day. If anything, I have a problem with certification madness)
If you'd like some arm-wavey slandering of the tech community, I'll give it a shot: younger and younger people are making millions of dollars at startups. This has, in effect, created something of a lottery system where there is huge payback but most folks don't win. VCs and Angel groups are jumping on the bandwagon, using age as a indicator of startup potential. All of this creates a perverse set of counter-incentives against a traditional classic liberal education. That's a bad thing.
But it's not bad enough to get all upset about. Not yet. It's simply something to observe and see how it progresses.
Anyone who paid and went for 4 years, knows its an inefficient use of time and money.
What we need to do is stop glorifying college.
There would certainly have to be gen ed considerations but Universities do those online now so it wouldn't be hard to make them available.
You may feel it was a waste of time and money but for me, it was a bargain.
The college model is still based around a philosophy from the 1800s when they were the sole providers of information.
As for getting the same experiences by not going, that's just silly. Sure the information is available online but it's not the same as actively participating in a lecture.
I spent a lot of time banging my head against the book (that you can buy from Amazon) and Googling, but eventually you run into things that only a professor's lecture, office hours, or your fellow classmates will teach you. That is what you are paying for. If you haven't run into that, you aren't taking classes that are hard enough or you are a genius. And even if you are a genius, you likely still struggle with hard topics sometimes.
In college you were exposed to philosophy, literature, and a host of other things. That self-educated guy generally knows a lot about quantum mechanics, but has never bothered to read a classic novel or has never heard of Kant. All of those things form the basis and experience that allow you to learn from the world around you so much more efficiently.
I don't think college is broken, I just think the expectation that college is somehow a four year skills-training institution is fundamentally flawed.
My viewpoint on this has definitely evolved over the last decade. At 22, fresh from dropping out of college after my junior year, I would have written the same thing. A decade of experience has taught me the value of what I learned in college.
I'm somewhat ambivalent on the question of whether my liberal arts education actually made a difference in my life, but "because I heard it in psych class" would be at the very bottom of my reasons to believe so. If you're going to hold the opinion that a liberal education teaches you how to learn and informs all your future decision-making, hold it because experiences have corroborated that, not because you read in a psych textbook that that's how it's supposed to work. Textbooks do lie, y'know. ;-)
Otherwise - well, you haven't really learned how to learn, have you? If the point of a liberal education is to make sense of the world around you and form your own opinions, and you're still regurgitating things you read in a book, that liberal arts education has failed.
First of all, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.
However, yes I do take much of what I've learned at face value. After all, it would be foolish to take years of expert research and toss it out because I personally didn't conduct it. Unless it runs wildly counter to my personal experience, I have no real reason not to trust it as the best scientific explanation at a given time. Thankfully my personal experience most certainly corraborates it.
There is a world of difference between healthy skepticism (consistently questioning scientific theory through empirical observation) and doubting for doubting sake. I haven't personally verified that the earth orbits the sun, but I'm pretty sure we have that one right after all.
I welcome "continuing education" opportunities that would give me exposure to such varied academic disciplines once again. How would you purport to achieve this?
But more than that, I think you're grossly underestimating the value of four years of collaborative work with other smart students and professors. I honestly don't see any way to get a half hour of a math professor's time, every week, for three months, without taking a course in mathematics at a university and going to office hours.
It may be that you think it is too expensive, which means it's not worth it. That's fair enough. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that college offers nothing that you can't obtain somewhere else.
Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could have gotten through the high end math without a lot of help.
Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?
The degree is for his/her own benefit. What I care about is whether the doctor is smart and well-informed.
No, I don't think that earning the right to use the suffix "M.D." means that the doctor is well-informed and knowledgeable.
With a self-taught doctor, you just have the questions that you ask to help you judge. With a doctor who's been through school, you have both your questions and the fact that he/she has been through what has been set out by the school issuing the degree.
Areas differ, as always. There's an amazing amount of philosophy out there for free, for example. (I was recently impressed to see how much of Sextus Empiricus was available, and works on the Pyrrhonian skeptics in general.)
Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books.
Even if you think university will teach you absolutely nothing, you've got a one-time offer from society that we're going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you'll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it.
Just one example of many from my college experience: one day after my Digital Devices class I described a concept to my professor that I was having trouble with. I was a poor student and couldn't afford a logic probe to do my own experiments with so I figured I'd build one with the parts I had on hand.
He then spent the next 2 hours carefully deconstructing my design, showing me why it didn't work, how I could force it to work, and in the end what a much better design approach would be.
In the 20+ years since, for all the time I've spent on BBSs, Usenet sci.electronics.* , and now web-based electronics forums, I have never seen anyone provide the depth and breadth of understanding that I got that day (OK: one person on Circuit Cellar comes to mind). And bear in mind that this not an isolated incident -- I made sure to get my money's worth by asking my share of dumb questions :-)
Sure, we all try to help each other online and some of us are pretty good at it. But at a good school professors are expert, paid to teach and love doing it, and have both the time and the motivation to do so. Random strangers online seldom have either and very rarely have both.
Can colleges do better? Absolutely. But to claim that you could "get it all for free somewhere else" so completely misses the point that it's frustrating.
I paid nothing for college because I had a scholarship, but I'm well aware of what college loan debt looks like. My girlfriend is currently paying off about a BMW worth of college loans.
I point that out becuase I drive a 6 year old car and she drives a 7 year old car. If you take out what we're paying for student loans (and we're very aggressively trying to get rid of them so we can eact start businesses without debt), we could take that money and each lease a BMW.
Is that really that much of a sacrifice? I really think people are just overspending for college and it isn't the system that is broken, it is the decision making process high school students and their parents go through while picking their schools.
But not all careers are like software development. That's why I said the job I have right now is not one I could have gotten without a degree.
I notice the meme "college is a waste of time and money" thrown around all the time on the internet, usually by programmers, but what I really think they mean is "a computer science degree is a waste of time and money, and I also look down on liberal arts majors".
So CS majors extrapolate "I can learn my field without college" onto "Everyone can learn their field without college", and don't realize that CS is the exception, not the rule. I took a bunch of CS classes including some grad ones and I think the only one that I learned considerably from was computer vision.
That said, in Silicon Valley, a few companies on your résumé, a single high profile company and/or a major achievement is more than enough to compensate for a lack of education.
Outside of Silicon Valley? Well that's another story.
It's the same here in the Boston area. I suspect it'll be the same at most companies with heavy software work.
We started with zero online presence and are now able to run Groupon-like social marketing campaigns and gross around $20k in a week. These are good numbers for a B&M business. Especially useful skillset for a business with narrow margins and notoriously low profits.
I did this instead of try to transfer from a city college to a UC.
Seems like two years running such a business is a bit more educational and resume boosting than getting a degree. I am technical but do not have the discipline to study technical majors or really teach myself enough of a language to build something. I can make minor tweaks and know enough to work with devs.
I don't feel like I'd be half as far along with my 'career' if I'd chosen school over life.
One major weakness of the article is that it points to the contributions of professors and researchers who made it all possible for gates, ellison, the google guys, and so forth by publishing unpatented research that served as the foundation for blockbuster companies. Great that they did this, of course, I love these guys, but he seems to be saying that everone else is depending on some other underpaid schlub to stick it through. Next career day, I'm going to go to my local college and say "some of you need to finish grad school and do PhD's - otherwise, how will other people get rich off your ideas?" Jeez, what a pitch.
Frankly, the world needs all kinds of people, and the work many people do (not just entrepreneurs) depends on the work of others. Many two-income families would be SOL if there weren't people willing to clean homes and take of children, for example.
I learned an awful lot there, but a lot more from the environment than the actual courses. I learned about money (I'd never really seen it before), I learned about class in America (we didn't have much of that growing up in Wisconsin), and I learned about a lot about cultural relativism (theory and practice). Given a chance, I would highly encourage anyone to attend the best institution they can possibly gain entrance to. It will be eye opening.
But actually getting a degree? Optional. It always felt to me that the certification was at odds with the education. Instead of learning anything in particular, I was being taught to juggle, and to not care too deeply about what I was keeping in the air. This is likely of great value to an employer, but as an individual I want the freedom to care deeply about the content, and never found this to be possible in even an excellent liberal arts college environment.
Financially, I'm probably doing worse than most of my peers who stuck with it. But I think this is more a factor of my personality than the lack of a degree. I left the final time to work at a computer company founded by some friends of mine (social networking advantage) and we managed to sell that successfully. The current startup is much shakier, and at this point all the savings are gone, but I'm pretty sure the lack of a degree has not been holding me back.
Anyway, I'm all for Peter Thiel. I wish something like this had been around for me. It would have been great to have the feeling there was some approved alternative to college rather than just slogging through.
Best way to learn? No, but you'll learn something. College is about being socialized into society. You'll meet people and join networks. You'll have fun, go to parties, and date. You'll be away from home and learn to live on your own. You'll get a certification that will allow you to apply for certain jobs you would otherwise be excluded from. In short, to fit into the role society wants for you.
The people who are supposedly being glorified for dropping out are actually being glorified for dropping out to do something better than the usual thing. And to those comfortable with and benefiting from the status quo, this act of rejection is perceived as a threat to their plans for you.
It's frustrating to see how much better education could be, if only more fields would start using the internet properly.
(Fun fact: I don't have a CS degree, but I'm taking graduate-level CS classes and doing fine. I know that CS it something you can learn well from the internet. I know what it feels like to learn the equivalent of an undergraduate degree online. And EE could be that way, too.)
The resume/interview process is broken, too, but I think most people would consider it poor judgement to explicitly invest in those who didn't get through it.
If he really felt like the degree is just a poor indicator of performance, there would be more discussion about what metric serves as a good alternative, or focus on improving the current metric. Instead, with the age limit, he asserts that degrees are a negative indicator, which makes it sound more like he's purposefully making a poor investment to give a voice to those who have contempt for those who finished college.
I do not think Peter Thiel is encouraging people to crap on colleges. It all boils down to an individual - people going to college and those that don't - both can make a difference.
As much as I admire entrepreneurs, facebook and myspace do not solve pressing problems (disease, hunger etc). Sure, we admire the founders because they made it, but money is not the end all. I'd be scared to live in a world full of entrepreneurs :).
An education has 3 valuable components: the people it lets you meet, the experiences you get to have, and the story it lets you tell about yourself to future listeners. If you're not going down the path of a formal education, you still have to make sure you cover these bases.
I believe college is not for everybody or at the same stage of life (i.e., you could go back if the company you started doesn't work out). But I do agree with Thiel's point that a degree provides some level of insurance.
I'd never attempt to convince someone to drop out of college, but if they do and it works out well for them, I'll be happy to congratulate them.
I'm not saying school doesn't help you think. But for many it seems to inhibit their ability to act independently.
And for many today, there's too much analysis and not enough experimentation.
dropping out to work for someone is just stupid.
If I had a great idea and an investor was $100k confident in the monetization of it, I would probably drop out, too. The author's whole premise is that dropping out is universally bad and should be discouraged, and that staying in school is universally good. Neither are true.
The article also misses the point: Where might we be if some of the 'usual celebrity dropouts' hadn't dropped out? What if they had said, "I'll get a real job first, then work on my idea." The world might look very different.
Non-Ph.D. entrepreneurs and academics can peacefully coexist.
EDIT: I concede to gxti that my statement about the author's premise is false. I stand by my other opinions: The scholarship is a neat idea and will not convince most people to drop out.
I don't think the article misses the point. He never says Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg should never have dropped out. He's just saying that dropping out should be rare. For the vast majority of people, it's not the right thing to do, financially. The "right people" will ignore all the discouragement and drop out anyway. People like Sergey Brin & Larry Page will drop out, with or without Thiel's investment.
"It's better to discourage than to encourage dropping out, so that it's done only for compelling reasons."
That is probably precisely the part that Thiel disagrees with you about. Who knows how many would-be Brins and Pages couldn't afford the risk?
No, the entire premise is in the title: Don't encourage kids to drop out. If they want to do it, they'll do it, and good on them for it. The last paragraph even argues against "extreme points of view" which would suggest that interpreting the article as "they say drop out, don't do it" is totally wrong.
> Where might we be if some of the 'usual celebrity dropouts' hadn't dropped out?
Worthless speculation. We'd be somewhere different, yes, but no less interesting and no worse off.