Will Dropouts Save America?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Even though this might sound to some like a description of what YC does, in fact we're reluctant to fund people who are still in school. There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.
Of course there is more to college than just making an individual ready for a career in the real world but I think that college should evolve and find better ways to teach students than the current model.
It's about mindset. Make sure that your expectations are aligned with your long-term goals. If you spend 100% of your time on training yourself in cs, then expect to be very shocked by the social dynamics of your first job. Conversely, if you spend 60% of your time focusing on becoming more social, then expect to have more friends, connections, and to connect with an overall larger number of interesting people during your lifetime.
So make sure you think about the answer to "What are my long-term goals?" and allocate your time proportionally. I didn't. I'd trade you my 10 years of advanced C++/graphics knowledge/gamedev industry experience for the college opportunity you have right now. And I wouldn't spend it by burying myself in studies.
I think this is untrue simply because smart people who are good at their job are very likeable in general. Who doesn't like the smart productive guy? Conversely, who can stand the dumb guy on the team who never does any work? Of course there are exceptions, but my experience is that the social structure among nerds is largely a meritocracy. Just don't be mean to people.
If this hasn't been your experience, I think you had some misfortune by ending up in companies where politics dominate. There are both. Look at upper management - are they technically smart, or charismatic? Whichever one they are is likely what will have propagated throughout the company. Also watch out for mediocrity, that propagates too.
Of course, I'm referring to technical jobs, not business in general. If it were MBA, I'd agree with you.
EDIT: I don't know what I replied to this comment and not your main comment about socializing at school, but w/e
I think in practice if you're in the middle 80% of the productivity spectrum, how well you interact with other people matters more than your technical ability.
You're not always just interfacing with other nerds. And in a startup context, as a founder you'll spend as much time talking to MBA types as you will on technical details.
If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.
Both skill sets are important.
For some, definitely. But if, for example, Jobs had the technical skills of Wozniak, he may have spent those critical hours hacking away at the machine instead of making smart business moves and we would have ultimately never heard of his name. The lack of strong technical skills was an asset for him.
My point is that there is nothing you can do to prepare for success. Getting your engineering degree might lead you to success, but it could just as easily steer you away from success. There is no magic formula you can follow.
At least it's worked for me. Been in SF for the last few days to have some meetings and coffees as It's hard to connect properly from London and it's been fairly good as i've spoken to lots of people in advance. People are willing to help with advice or connections, especially when you're early in your career.
If I'd been learning on my own, I doubt I would have seen the value in investing a hundred hours in a language I wouldn't ever use in industry. Same goes for a number of other courses, all with varying degrees of relevance.
College, for me, was learning how to learn, mostly that I could successfuly teach myself. It also provided some rigor in critical areas (I had a great data structures prof, for instance).
Oh, and I'm a dropout. :-)
Mine was a Large Cow College -- the U of MD -- whose CS department seemed to feed into the Washington, DC government and defense contractor businesses. When I relocated to Silicon Valley, all of my contacts were useless.
Well, there was the Arpanet; I'd been exchanging email with some Atari enthusiasts at Stanford for a while, and wound up going to dinner and users group meetings with them a few times.
But Silly Valley was (and probably still is) a terrible place for a geek to try to learn to be social. I'll probably do a blog post about that some day.
In any case, as you say, the goal of college is not to make one a better startup founder.
There's the issue. College is obviously still a great way for a lot of people who don't plan to start a startup to "accidentially" learn skills and do projects that could be useful for starting a startup. Both Zuckerberg and Gates come to mind.
However, what should young people who know in their heart/mind/gut that they want to become an entrepreneur do?
I would rather spend a couple of years networking, trying and failing on a small scale in business while learning as much as possible through books/other cheap or free material than spending $30000+ on something that possibly wouldn't get me any closer to the goal.
Zuck and Gates were successful dropouts because they went to college and learned that it wasn't what they expected. Too much courses to take that they didn't like, classes not going fast enough, social life not as good as other people said, not much meaning in going to classes (basically fill in x reason).
Silicon Valley is a truly special place and I think there is a lot of value in taking a year or two off of college and try working at a startup, traveling and/or pursuing whatever else seems cool and worthwhile. Then you can decide whether returning to college is the right thing for you...
Debt is not even the biggest concern. My biggest concern is the mentality to avoid failure at all costs. Since the world's reward system isn't structured to always reward effort, school (imo) teaches you to pass, not excel. And, as I understand, the passing grade for a startup is to excel. See the disconnect?
Except for that, college years seem to be the most formative years of one's life. I wouldn't be into startups if I didn't come do post-secondary. I wouldn't even know how to code if I didn't come here. Best experience of my life.
But by the time your 22, maybe you got an internship at a cool company, and they're offering you 80k a year. Your getting used to a decent standard of living. Maybe you get recruited by Wall Street and the dangle 140k under your nose. You take the job, and get locked in with the "golden handcuffs". Now your comfortable, and you meet a cute girl, who wants a guy with a steady job, so you never start the company.
Maybe this guy was never really meant to be an entrepreneur; maybe he wanted that comfortable life all along. But when he was 19 he was ready to go.
> There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.
I think there is a better chance that he won't start the startup at 22, cause he got a high paying job, and doesn't want to downgrade from his standard of living.
In my opinion, people dropping out of school for YC shouldn't be doing it because they see an alternative opportunity - they should be doing it for a variety of other reasons. The mental calculation should not be "I could do a start up and make money now, or I could do 3 more years of school and make 140k/year comfortably." It should be along the lines of, "I know I'll succeed, and I can't wait to do it."
That made a lot of sense to me. No doubt we can override it but...this kind of predisposition does place restrictions that one may not otherwise account for.
Plus, what better time than NOW!
I say this as I study for midterms
But yeah, most of it IS probably driven by culture. That said, I'm sure there are some biological intricacies too. Something like x years after puberty your brain starts to want more of the same things - something that would definitely help in establishing a stable lifestyle and child rearing.
In my 20's I was completely certain that I would be successful without hard work as I was smart & talented. After a decade of that imagined success not materialising I am far hungrier, more determined and working harder now than I have ever been before.
Right now, I'm working my ass off to do a software craftsmanship apprenticeship. It has taken time to develop the maturity to be content to focus on what I need to do today and not worry about when, where, and how the hard work will pay off.
EDIT: I speak for the USA only.
He calls it one of the greatest mistakes of his life, though, so it sounds like mileage may vary.
With that said, I think some states have different rules in terms of what age you're allowed to drop out at. For example, Illinois requires students to be 17 years of age (and receive parental consent, of course) to drop out. At that point you're better off just finishing high school. even if you want to rapidly track into college.
I told people at the high school goodbye, left before the end of the day, and never went back to that fucking place.
That's how I did it. Your mileage may vary.
And before you ask, our admissions are close to 100%, and our academics are some of the best in the country.
Was pretty pissed off at my guidance counselor for not telling me!
Get off my lawn!
Seriously, though, from my late-30s-with-a-young-family perspective, if being 22 with a girlfriend and an internship is enough to stop you chasing your dreams, then they weren't really your dreams after all.
Henry Ford started his company at 40. Jeff Bezos, 30. Sam Walton, 44. Paul Galvin, 33. The Albrecht brothers were 41 and 39. TJ Watson, while not a founder, was 40 when he took over CTR and created IBM. Hewlett, 26. Packard, 27. Larry, Sergey were 25. Ellison, 33.
Thanks for pointing that out.
And regarding school, there is really no reason why not to go school when you are little older. In other words, we have this assumption in US that all schooling has to be finished by 24 or something like that.
pg, May 2005: "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?"
pg, now: "Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22."
It seems this logic can be extended to say people should wait even longer. Someone with a few years of experience at 26 should be able to do a better job of starting a company than someone at 22.
So I'm interpreting this as a major change in your thinking. It certainly isn't a crime to change your mind; I'm just curious about how and when it happened.
I don't think it's a likely scenario though since getting accepted to YC and running your own startup should be enough of a merit to get you employed somewhere.
However, out of all the people accepted into YC there has to be at least one example of a person who not only did worse by doing a startup early on, but actually hurt himself pretty badly in the process. Of course, this is pure speculation, and there might not be any such cases.
Basically my theory is that pg just doesn't think it is worth it to potentially have blood on his hands (indirect as it might be).
Many of the individuals mentioned in this article started companies while enrolled in college. It was only after they realized the true potential of these companies that they decided to fully invest themselves in their projects. You cannot simply drop out of university without some sort of plan and expect success to find you.
Dropping out (or at least going on leave) 1998-2000 made a lot of sense; probably the same 2006-2007 or even 2010-2011. Assuming you could get in with a company like Akamai, Google, Facebook, Square, ...
There is nothing wrong with going to college, but you shouldn't be going because you are following someone else's plan, you need to be there because you know it is the right thing to do for yourself. Bottom line: Don't worry about what other people are doing.
Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone are other examples of college dropouts who left not to start startups and then became successful entrepreneurs. Matt Cohler left college for two years, working for a startup in China and playing in a band, before finishing up his college degree.
Each individual has to choose the path that is right for them. Every incredibly successful person is an outlier. You can learn from them but you can't just copy them
> Every incredibly successful person is an outlier.
This is true. But the whole premise of YC and other startup incubators is that there are things you can do to significantly increase your odds of being successful if what you want to do is to found a startup.
Your chance of becoming Larry Page, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg is incredibly small. But your chance of founding a startup with some degree of success will be better.
[edit] Brin, Page, Hewlett, Packard, Moore, Shockley - the list of people who didn't drop out is far more extensive.
p.s. I did not open the link. The title indicated that the click-through would be a waste of time.
Add to the that, founders are more likely to come from a middle or upper class background. The percent of that demographic that attends college is even higher.
Then factor that successful founders are almost universally ambitious, and most ambitious people start college.
Given those numbers I'd wager that upwards of 90% of people who become successful founders have at least started college.
If their company succeeds while they are in college and they quit to focus on it, or if they drop out before starting the company--instant college dropout success story.
Secondly, even if we look at the examples of the successful dropouts we notice that even most of them get some significant advantage out of school.
Gates is the prime example. Everyone says he is dropped out of college, but he had the advantage of going to one of the richest high schools in the nation where he had access to a computer (which was an incredible luxury at the time). It is the skills he learned there that allowed him to actually create something useful and to start his company.
Jobs dropped out, but if Jobs was all by himself he would not be Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, and there would not be an Apple Computer. Jobs is Jobs because he met Woz, and Woz went to college where he ignited his passion for electronics and gained the skills which would later enable him to create the first Apple computers.
Now about Zuck. It is utterly obvious to anyone that followed the rise of Facebook that there would be no Facebook if Zuckenberg did not go to college. Sure he dropped out, but being there allowed him to assemble the team that build the site and be part of the culture that made the site useful and used. Facebook was a college phenomenon.
So things are not that simple. To be a successful entrepreneur you have to build something people want. And to do this nowadays you usually need to deal with machines and computers. And to know how to make computers do what you need them to do you need education. Now it is not certain whether formal education does a good job at this or not, but to say that all you need to do a successful start-up is gumption, can do spirit, "street smarts", sales skills, etc., is a dangerous lie.
It's more than that. If Wozniak and Jobs had been in Topeka, there probably wouldn't have been an Apple computer because few people there would likely gambled on an order for 50 computers in 1976. Only in places like Silicon Valley were there the right demographics to support computer shops and create the sort of demand which allowed them to get their start. Later financing also was facilitated by location.
It would be foolish to take away from this article that education is unimportant - all of the people listed are incredibly well educated.
The well educated will save America. How many of these people have gone to school, that's another matter altogether.
The point of the book is that he found common themes in the people who didn't have college degrees but who did attain business success.
I do not intend to be an academic, nor a professional. I would like to start a business someday. College didn't provide me with a set of skills which I can sell to an employer or employ to sell with. Rather–and this used to sound absurd to me as well–it improved my ability to teach myself.
I'm speaking from personal experience here, but I do think college has the same effect on my peers as well. I was a fairly proficient autodidact, teaching myself how to program in everything from C to Clojure, as well as a sizable array of other skills (double-entry accounting, for one).
But now I am able to pick up a book on the subject of abstract algebra and really learn the material. I know how to handle tricky political situations, where not all information is present and one party wants to get more out of the other. I have been exposed to people, cultures, and ideas that I would have been unlikely to come across had I dropped out to hack together a startup. I know how to talk to people with power. I am better able to see things from another perspective. I am a better person now, all around. (This paragraph is uncomfortably self-congratulatory, but I'll leave it in for what it's trying to convey.)
Sure, college is not for everyone. Some college are better than others, and some are better for specific purposes. But I have improved myself and my skills here, and I don't think I could have done the same had I not gone through college. I'm looking forward to changing the world in a big way.
Yeah, people running/founding companies might drop out of school to do so, the people that they're directing, however, are engineers with graduate degrees.
Stay in school. The idea that articles like this perpetuate "Lose pounds NOW and eat whatever you want!" errr... I mean "Commonly accepted fact of life is incorrect! You're Harry Potter!" is a bad one. Stay in school. Get your degree.
No, high school dropouts won't "save America", people who figure out an economic system that can function in a post-industrial economy will.
That said, a degree in a technical field from a good but inexpensive college will always be worth it.
I have no intention of dropping of school until I get a degree, but I also know that I will have to learn a lot of things that school won't teach me.
How many schools are actively teaching how to function in a post-industrial economy? Not many, I'm guessing.
64% of US business owners have at least a Bachelor's degree (source: http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html).
Unless you have a great and proven business idea that's already taking off, staying in school and getting a degree seems to have a closer correlation to success than dropping out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Example - Most successful tech entrepreneurs are male (let's say 9/10). That doesn't mean that women are only 1/10 as likely to succeed in that space if they tried, it just means that most successful tech entrepreneurs are male.
People with Bachelor's degrees are likely higher than averagely smart and ambigious people with successful and supporting parents. Who knows what would have happened if they skipped over the degree they felt they needed and instead jumped right into starting a business. Sure, it would be very tough in the beginning, but I'd bet that they would reach their goals faster than delaying the start 3+ years. Ambition is correlated with success, a degree is just correlated with ambition.
Dropping out of college is, quite obviously, not positively correlated to success. Most people who drop out do it either because it is too hard/too much work or too expensive. However, I think that people who drop out (or not start at all) not mainly because of those factors, but because of a strong drive to reach their goals faster are just as likely to succeed (if not more so).
I'm sure there are many I'm missing that represent good ideas, but here are at least the tweets about the piece from the people listed above: http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america
As schools see their post-grad employment and salary figures drop, they will come around on what makes good preparation for life in the future job market.
They want to bide their time, as PG mentioned people should take their time. They want to have gone to Stanford, etc for the badge it holds, although this is becoming more debatable as the more people have degrees the lower value it holds and seems to be just for vanity. The most important reason is social pressure and trying to conform with their peers and for contacts they could make.
Next year i'm not planning to go to college at all, my current startup which launched about 2.5 months ago is about to pass 30,000 users a lot of which are buying products so we're nicely profitable.
I don't feel I need connections as I've been able to meet lots of great people on Twitter, at conferences like disrupt and contacting some before I visited SF. I've got about 5 months left and now i'm visiting SF, spending time meeting people and such. I'm decided.
I'm very happy to take the risk of moving to SF from London, this will be next spring and may be working on something new. I would say it's totally a case by case basis, it's fine if people want to go to college but I don't like that many have told me to go as it's what they had to go through. Which makes little sense.
The subtext of the article seems to be that US education doesn't give kids all of the tools needed ("Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure."). But that doesn't imply we need to discard education whole-sale. We probably just need to iterate (more often)-- cull obsolete topics and start testing new subjects.
Perhaps a passionate, motivated person can find and digest useful materials more effectively on her own than if she is distracted by formal schooling most of the day. But we won't make progress in the information age without a good degree of careful thinking. "[B]etting on the engines of future job creation" may make for a good read, but historically-informed updates to standard curricula would probably do the job.
But I have several friends who run their own businesses on a much smaller scale, still do quite well for themselves financially, and I don't see people running up to them for autographs.
In other words, use college for your own advancement, not to necessarily complete a pre-canned course of study. If you're Zuck and you've created something that's on fire, then it might make sense to leave early. If you want to become a neurosurgeon, you're probably just getting started. It all depends on your personal situation. With a lack of goals and traction in life, staying the course on some 4 or 6-year study program might be the best thing to do.
You can't mix up structured education and learning. Structured education is great for some things, but at some point you have to switch from structured education into self-directed education. That point is going to be in a different spot for everybody. Those that try to tell you that it is one way or the other -- years and years of college versus just drop out and do it -- are oversimplifying the situation drastically.
Use college. Don't let college use you. The guys that are $100K in debt with a degree and no job prospects are just as screwed as the guys who dropped out and can only get minimum-wage labor (In fact, I'd argue the drop-outs might be better off, as long as they have a strong culture of self-education, networking, and ambition -- at least they know their behind the curve and are going to have to continue to adapt drastically to survive whereas many college grads do not -- but that's my bias.)
a long time ago (actually not that long) people who had wealth pursued education. they gravitated to universities they travelled the world to learn about culture. they were not becoming educated in order to increase their monetary wealth.
this was true even as recent as andrew carnegie, once the world's wealthiest man. according to one biography, the mentor carnegie chose to help him become more educated preferred the company of carnegie's brother, by comparison a man of modest accomplishments but who apparently had a more interesting intellect than andrew.
at the same time we read that gates fancies the khan academy and takes his children on tours of factories. i'm not even going to mention zuckerberg's activities.
things have changed i guess.
university has value aside from being a path to higher income. i feel sorry for the uneducated man, no matter how much wealth he acquires. circumstances can change and men can lose their fortunes. but education is not something a man can lose. it is his for life.
Some people - like me, are very anti authoritarian and love to do things on their own and teach themselves how to become better at things. Some people enjoy a more structured life. I dont think any of the paths are wrong its just that there are different kinds of people, and different kinds of people take different kinds of paths to achieve the same thing.
Will dropouts save America, probably not, looking at the stats it seems as if people fare far better going the education route but a couple will succeed and because they are in the minority people will rejoice "Hey look, we to can succeed without getting a degree", what they missed though is the mountain of work these people put into their projects to succeed. There are no shortcuts.
College is hard work (Im sure), doing it without a degree is also a lot of hard work. And as I said earlier, it comes down to the person to decide what is the right path for him/her.
Despite the state of the economy, college grads have a 4.2% unemployment rate.
Showing a correlation does not really tell us anything meaningful. Even with a degree, you still might be missing what it takes and end up being part of the four percent. At this point, we have no real idea of what it takes for an individual to be successful in business until after the fact. Two people can do identical things with completely different results.
If you have the drive, thirst to educate yourself, and hustle to go out and do it, you probably don't need college (referring to business degree).
College has some good things to offer, but too often it's a false reality. You don't learn the real world lessons that come from dealing with actual clients, paying you actual money, to provide actual value.
You can only learn so much with case studies and papers.
I learned more in the first 3 months at an internship at a marketing agency were I was getting paid $8/hr than the 4 years of college, which cost $100k.
Those in category (2) like Gate, Job, Zuckerberg are rare. And schooling is necessary to train those who help make Gate, Job, Zuckerberg who they are. Without these engineers, managers, etc. there would be no Gate, Job, Zuckerberg. The dropouts of category (1) ain't going to do it.
Pretending that college prevents people from pursuing a career in entrepreneurship is ridiculous. What would those students be doing instead? Working at Starbucks while they build their startups at night? How is that better? Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out because their startups were already wildly successful. They didn't drop out to start them.
3 years after that, I want to say, it was a nice decision. I do not need a degree anyway.