Ask HN: Given A Choice Would You Go To College? [When you were of that age]

If I where to do it again, I would have went to a school that focuses on creativity like MIT or Stanford and not on one of the schools that focus on a degree for a degrees sake. I started at a state school and left school for a long time then wound up finishing my degree years later at a private school that is focused on getting students to their degree. As such my educational path felt very industrial. I learned a lot of things about different subject but it was all raw education and not experiences which I think the latter are more valuable. This was mainly due to the environment, had I been in an environment like MIT I probably would not have had the gap. What really burns my ass now is that I have a lot of peers from MIT and I get so aggravated when they say, man you would have had so much fun at MIT you would have fit right in. It bothers me because I know I missed a lot of great opportunities and experiences. On the converse side of it is though, at the time I first went to school, I went to LSU because it was a party school. Which is what made it attractive to me, at the time. If I would have went to MIT at that point in my life I don't know that I would have been able to exploit the benefit of being their. Point being make sure you are going to school for the right reasons or your are just wasting time.

That being said, I did not grow up in an environment that promoted entrepreneurship. My family was farmers, commercial fishermen, and mechanics. In this environment there is not a lot of encouragement for starting a business. So the idea never dawned on me until I was well into my 20's and had some experience in the world. I had to learn that other people just like me where doing it, before I ever got the idea that I could do it too. It should stupid, but when you grow up in an environment like that, it is true that it never dawns on you. Not to say that it was a bad environment, in many ways it was awesome growing up on a farm. Anyways, the point being, if I would have had a venture that I wanted to do back in those days, I would have forgone college and used the money to start a venture. Because it could have provided other valuable experiences that cannot be purchased at college.

I dropped out after three semesters, and two decades later nothing has happened to make that decision seem like a mistake. I've always had as much work as I've wanted, I've always been able to do the work I am interested in, and I haven't hit a ceiling yet.

The one thing that clearly does constrain me is my lack of literacy in the math-style symbology used in academic CS papers. It is all quite literally Greek to me, and I know there's interesting research locked up in those papers that I simply can't use because it all disappears off into math-land after a couple paragraphs of introductory English.

On the other hand, I have no trouble abstracting the concept out of a working example, so I can usually muddle through by simply looking for web pages that refer to the paper and include source code. In a few cases I've been able to reinvent the implementation from what I guess they are getting at in the introduction; it's a lot of wasted work but at least I know from the start that I'm headed in a direction that will eventually work out.

Drop me back in time, stand me in front of that old crossroads, and I'd make the same decision again; it's worked out pretty well, all things considered.

(Disclaimer: I did go to college)

There seem to be differences between US and Europe, but being Spanish and having studied in Spain here are my thoughts:

Yes, I would go again. Not for the degree itself, but the stuff you learn during that period. It's not necessarily technical stuff or stuff you'l explicitly use when you find a job, but you do and learn things that will come back to you at some point in time.

I got my current job because of the project I did to get my degree, it was exactly what my company was looking for, and I never did it to have more chances to find a job, I did it because it was fun.

Also, by boss once told me this: "Degrees don't matter that much, the actual work that you are able to do does. However, given 2 subjects with sane skill set I'd pick the one that fiched college, because that shows that he could commit to a 'project' and finish it." . I found it interesting.

Last, there is one thing which we (humans) can't recover (appart from death): time. If you go to college and regret it in the future, nobody can take away what you already learned, but if you regret for not going, you can't go back in time.