It's Never Really About Dropping Out

Spot on. I am a college dropout and founder of a YC-funded, venture-backed startup. Whenever I talk at my old university, I always tell people that dropping out is by no means a rite of passage or prerequisite to success. I have an acquaintance who was able to start a company with $1MM in revenue while staying in school.

There is no glory in dropping out. "Dropouts" are not some super-class of people who are destined to save America. It's just something I had to do in order to have the time to start the company I wanted to start.

Addendum: The best dropouts are those who would do well in school anyway. I've had people tell me "I'm barely passing in school because the stuff doesn't interest me. I'll drop out and I do what I want to do". There are 1001 things about running a company that are more boring than your school homework. If you can't do well when someone gives you a curriculum and is helping you, you don't stand a chance keeping yourself motivated enough to start a company.

Recently, I've been thinking very hard about dropping out of college. Here in Ireland, the education system is somewhat different to the way it is in the US and many other parts of the world. You pick a course, and then for the next three or four years, you attend only the classes that belong to that course. There's very little choice in the matter (though you can technically attend other classes, but not officially and at the lecturer's discretion).

I'm in my third year of a four year computer games development course. I absolutely love the course, the lecturers, and of course my friends at college.

I've been thinking about dropping out because I've been finding the course difficult recently and because I've got a skewed vision of myself, of my motivations and my abilities. It's so easy to think "I'll drop out and then I'll have the time to do this and this and this and this," and much harder to think "If I drop out I'll spend every day on the couch playing videogames and growing less and less as a person."

That's not the way it is for everyone, but it is the way it is for me. If you told me you were thinking about dropping out, I'd ask for the proof that you're not going to waste, because that's such an easy trap to fall into. Dropping out gives you a chance to do the best things you can do, but it gives you the chance to do nothing, too.

People drop out of school and out of university for all the wrong reasons. Laziness, unable to look past the next test to the larger picture of what being educated is all about.

The people that drop out for the right reasons may have such motivations as 'I can't learn faster or more here than elsewhere', 'the company I started needs me more than I need a degree' and so on.

Those people aren't really dropping out. They're taking a short-cut because they already accomplished what the people that stay in the program are still trying to achieve.

I went to a job fair a few weeks ago where a few of the engineers from a very hardcore coding company said "Why don't you drop out? I never really found a degree useful." That's the problem though. College isn't about the degree or the resume building. It's about meeting people, having fun, and spending late nights hacking on projects for the hell of it.

I could graduate in three years or less, but I would be missing out on an experience that will most likely be extremely beneficial.

The key is education, not schooling. The conflation of the two is unfortunate.

I feel schools teaching and testing terribly boring and insignificant material has helped romanticize the concept of dropping out. After all, people will say, why are you in school, if you're better than that?

The sooner people stop expecting university to be a stepping stone rather than an experience, the sooner the dropouts-will-save-america notion will fade. University is a lot of fun, and it's not just a passage to a job.

For people who have the smarts, supportive family structure (have the ability and will help) and already know what they want to do, they can probably do well despite dropping out. For people who haven't figured things out or need the nurturing and or guidance and don't have anyone back home as safety-net dropping out is not going to help; I don't think.

So, yeah, for super smart people institutional education might prove redundant, but for many, that's where they are going to learn how to interface with the economy with improved effectiveness, make connections and build relationships (network).

People get such different experiences at institutions of higher learning. I completed my BA at a small, teaching-focused college, and don't regret a minute of it. I felt like it was an excellent preparation for my subsequent career, even though I was in a completely different field than I majored in. I had passionate professors with high standards, who continually challenged me to up the ante. I came into college thinking I was pretty smart, and, like intellectual boot camp, they stripped away those egotistical veneers of self-congratulatory-smartdom and made me realize how impossibly huge the world is, and how many perspectives there can be, and how I exist in the world not as a calcified foundation of knowledge and opinions, but as an agent who navigates the world by learning, listening, and observing.

One moment that stands out is when I turned in what I felt was a nicely articulate paper, one that would have been an easy A, and it came back with a D and a "see me in my office." The professor dressed me down and had me write it again. Why? Because I was critiquing the subject material rather than respecting it.

I plunged right into start-up world after graduating, and it felt very familiar, in the sense that in a startup you're constantly confronting uncertainty and unknowing to the point where you have to become comfortable with those feelings. Once again, you become an agent of learning rather than an agent of knowing.

I hear about people from larger schools complaining about huge classes taught by processors with no interest in teaching, where they have no conversation happening, and no direct feedback--and I think I would be sufficiently frustrated in such a situation that I would have been more inclined to drop out if the opportunity were there. I even hear from people who went to my school who hated every minute of it--you just can't tell.

I also don't think college is a foundational requirement for success--I know plenty of people in the tech world who didn't complete their BA and who are doing just fine--I honestly can say it doesn't have much bearing to see someone's educational credentials on a resume unless I also can see their body of work.

It all comes down to what your own experience is. Which is why I'm throwing in my two-cents...I'd hate for someone who IS having a good experience think that they need to drop out because Steve Jobs did.

Explain Steve Jobs please.

Sure he went and sat in some courses but only for a limited time and only when he thought they taught something he liked, like calligraphy.

Doesn't that imply that school is but a matter of interest? So if your interest lies in building something great RIGHT NOW, wouldn't it be better for you to not waste time and money at school but rather go do something you so dearly want?

My intent here is not to discredit your post. Though I see the value in your post, I post this only to avoid you and your readers from clumping all dropouts into a category. My view is that school is not for everyone. Some people have this innate understanding of the world and thoughts so radical that school only serves to beat them into another brick in the wall. This is unfair to them and unfair of society to judge them.

Personally, I think that if YOU believe in it and if you believe in yourself, then right now is as best a time as ever. School or not. Everyone has to decide for themselves.

I agree with the article.

My story is not as romantic as most dropouts that have started a company / followed their dream. I have had to work for a living, and because I started working in what was the equivalent of a sweat shop with very inflexible hours and a lot of hard/boring work, I had to dropout since I couldn't do both. The time spent and the things learned in college, however, were invaluable and I regret not finishing it.

With that said, I do believe that the industry still places too much weight on college/masters degree. And I think this is what amazes people: that a couple of dropouts that wouldn't pass through their shitty filters are some of the richest / most innovative people in the world.

A college purpose should be to teach and enrich people's lives, but shouldn't be used for classifying people, unless you're talking about people with no work experience.

I dropped out not once, not twice, but three times from three different courses; I now make more money than most of my high-school peers, and this only because I WAS DAMN LUCKY to end up in a fairly obscure niche of a very small but lucrative market.

I'll always regret not getting that damn degree, because now I simply couldn't get back "on the rails" if I wanted to: my CV will be dropped by 99.9% of standard employers, no matter how well I might be performing at my current job. My sons (now 2 and 0) will get a university education, may that be the last thing I do.

At the same time, I know people who saw through their undergraduate course in 7 years (not uncommon, in Italy, for hard-science degrees) and that also was not good -- some of them are now damaged in psychological terms, clinically depressed and underemployed. That should not happen.

While all the companies mentioned are the creation of dropouts, it still took hundreds (thousands in some cases) of people to bring all those companies to the point of maturity that they are at now with the help of extremely talented college degreed people.

Dropping out and continuing on to be very successful is a sign that

1> you did not fit in with the college establishment or other students

and/or 2> you learn in a different way than others and were not benefiting from college

and/or 3> you had already obtained/saw the possibility of obtaining better opportunities in another way.

Does this fit all successful people? Is this sort of history distinctive to very successful people, or required of them? Of course not. Some very successful people have similar experiences, especially #2 - but going into the world without the college experience is not for everyone.

Smart people go to college but they don't know what they want yet. If they find out and make it before they graduate, they drop out, because it would be an incredible waste of time to do otherwise.

This should be re-titled to "Lazy people drop-out, genius is doing something better before dropping out"

"After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made."

Steve Jobs' reasoning was probably the main inspiration for me dropping out. And he makes a really good point. I also dropped out before I had any form of "success" (and it's also been one of the best decisions I've made). I'd like to think that if you'll succeed in life you'll do so whether or not you go to college. But the pressure to succeed becomes immense when you do something like drop out of college. That probably speeds things up.

But still, I agree completely that this Steve Jobs type dropping out should not be so readily encouraged. I only did it because I was absolutely sure about most of the things Jobs described in that quote above.

Definitely.

The problem with the word "drop out" is that people are starting to use it as if every drop out has something special to offer. Most drop out for reasons that do not leave them in a state to be helpful to society as a whole. Some drop-out just because they signed up for the wrong course to start with (and, disillusioned, often don't return for another shot at something else), some because they get lazy, and so forth. I dropped out for personal reasons (I went properly metalist for a while, bipolar before it was trendy to be, and was medically signed-off) though luckily I'd made an impression on a local company the year before and got a part-time job with them while I sorted myself out (one day a week at first, then two, and so on until I ended up there full time) and I'm still there now.

It isn't dropping out that is important. It is where you drop in to, or push your way into, afterwards. Just dropping out is not an answer to anything. Dropping out to pursue a thought-out and potentially ground-breaking idea (or just a dream: it can be about personal growth more than career building or world changing) often is.

Most drop-outs make nothing of themselves and we shouldn't be encouraging it as a way forward (though I firmly believe that many people would be more successful building their career without University (the system is against me on this one!) but again dropping out isn't the answer on its own here: don't go, or if you go and find you've made the wrong decision have somewhere to move on to planned before you make another big decision that might be equally wrong). I was lucky. Mid-/long-term (short term was a slowish start, the first 6 months at least mainly spent "fixing" myself) I dropped into a better position then some of my friends graduated into and have built a healthy career. Many aren't so lucky, or are just perpetual drop-outs. Some are following an idea or dream and a few of those are destined to be game changers, but only a few.

The problem is that a lot of people think that dropping out == stopping to learn, which is extremely wrong (at least in my case). I think that's what Michael Ellsberg is describing so well in his book.

Education is still important, people. But how you get it (formal, informal, practical, etc.) doesn't matter anymore.

It's not simply about what's "boring" and "not boring", which is subjective anyway. It's about tangible vs. intangible. Most school coursework is intangible & lacking context; grades have little to no bearing on real-world performance and book knowledge very often doesn't translate into solving problems & generating solutions for paying customers.

There are plenty of people who love learning but who just aren't interested in academia, in being told what to learn, what to spit out on some trivial assessment etc. And the fact that these people can motivate themselves enough to blaze an autodidactic path as opposed to relying on dictation from other people ought to be proof enough that those are folks who have more than enough motivation to start a company.

I would also say that many that attend College do not earn more because they went to college but they were capable of doing so, they were intelligent enough to do so.

Of course there is no glory in dropping out but there is no glory in working on a startup, whatever happens it'll be tough. If you can't imagine taking the risk of dropping out then the risk of starting a company is something much bigger to overcome.

College is for a lot of people, I don't think that dropping out makes you more successful in any way. But I think that time is money and if your time could be better spent then go for it.

You have nothing to lose that this age, once you've got all this debt and as you get older you have a lot more to lose.

The worst part of this drop-out fad is people miss out on going to college-the-experience. As opposed to college-the-education. It turns out it is actually awesome to hang out, learn stuff, and meet people 24/7. Work can give you some of it, but not everyone is committed in the same way. Different ages, different motivations, it won't be the same. The experience is worth as much as the education.

What about Larry, Sergey, Jeff Bezos? Even Jerry Yang and David Filo.

None of them dropped out of or skipped undergrad college.

Thanks, in times when I'm really thinking about dropping out reading this really helps me not doing a mistake.

Great men live for mastery and academia but modern universities have nothing to do with either therefore attending is a waste of precious years. University takes up your spare time that you could be learning things that you're passionate about, it also seeds poisonous ideas into your head.

This is mostly relevant to the tech community at the moment because we have had the tools to make our education open enabling the guys mentioned in the article to educate them self.

Once the other industries start openly publishing educational material then the true power of passionate self development will be known.