College will kill your entrepreneurial spirit: A 9 year old's foray into startups. | Hacker News Reader

College will kill your entrepreneurial spirit: A 9 year old's foray into startups.

violentacres.com

17 pointsrzwitserloot18 comments

There's merit to the idea that college typically does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, as the prevailing assumption is that you'll go on to apply for a job. Still, I think the author is seriously underestimating the value of going to college, which Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address addresses nicely:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...

Of course, whether or not to stick around until you get your degree is another matter. But I'd argue that much of what you learn about the world, culturally, historically, theoretically, can be invaluable to entrepreurship.

If you count dropping out of college, and then attending only classes that interest you -- without being enrolled or paying -- as going to college, then sure. Of course that model of self-directed learning is quite opposite the usual cookie-cutter process where you are told which classes to attend and how many "units" of them you "need".

If everyone did things Steve Jobs's way, college administrators would have heart attacks. For the most part, going to college means jumping through the hoops they tell you to jump through, and they send you home if you don't take the prescribed courses in the prescribed timeframe and pay the prescribed fees.

When I finished high school I spent a few years working then I started my own business. I ran the business for 10 years before selling it two years ago. Recently I joined the worker bees/cubicle side of things ~ from my perspective working as a cubicle slave sucks! I can't wait till my new business can support my life! At any rate the other slaves (almost all college educated) really do live their lives for that two week vacation. But I know the unedamkaed bees (like me) live for that vacation too. So was it college or just a case of the pareto principle in action ~ 80% of the people are worker bees and 20% are entrepreneurs?

Why did you sell?

Wife got a job offer in VA.

This article depressed me.

First, 'bad' college will make you despair of life, much less the entreprenurial spirit.

Second, education in this country is so sorely lacking that to crusade AGAINST getting educated is profoundly depressing.

Third, you get what you give. If you go to college and take a bunch of crap courses and cruise your way through, you are not going to learn anything. You can go to Hicksville State and come out with a deep and profound understanding of mathematics, if you put your back into it, and you can go to Harvard and come out a total loser -- which should really shock no one.

Fourth, and most importantly, I found at college I was surrounded with impassioned people who desperately wanted to make a change in the world and to chase their dreams. The depression sunk in when I entered the working world and got a cube job and watched those hopes and dreams shrivel. So I quit, and I decided to start programming this service. Hopefully, something will come of it, and I'll be able to get a private beta going in the next few weeks before law school starts (which I am attending in the hopes it will help me understand my business better...)

Basically, this makes me sad about whatever college this poor guy went to, obviously it was not very good.

> to crusade AGAINST getting educated is profoundly depressing.

That's pretty much the opposite interpretation of what was intended, I think.

Learning is always encouraged. The point was not to throw away your life by joining the cookie-cutter brigade where you get molded to be like everyone else and your originality is stamped out of you so you can be a cubicle drone working for The Man (tm).

It probably depends a lot on which college you go to. MIT? No question - that'll do good things for your entrepreneurial spirit.

However, I agree with the idea in two situations:

1. It does not really FOSTER entrepreneurial spirit - you must cultivate a seed of that elsewhere, and

2. Only a very limited set of colleges do NOT completely kill it.

The piece kept me reading, but I couldn't disagree more with this part:

"...College does not turn people into free thinking individuals who will someday have the whole world at their feet. It turns them into worker bees that will spend their lives in cubicles just so long as they get 2 weeks paid vacation time per year."

What about it do you disagree with?

Just that college, for me, was the opposite of this vocational training ground. It was this beautiful, theoretical, pure learning environment that discouraged placing limits on what you could do with your life.

Now, sure, some people enter the cube farm (and stay there) right after college, but I don't think it was college that made those people do that. I think it was everything else (e.g., family, the desire to have material things, the need to be "normal", etc).

It depends where you go. My school wasn't like that either, but from what I've heard about a lot of places, it seems pretty accurate.

I suspect a lot of the disagreement expressed here is due to the nature of the people who read ycnews (and the colleges they went to).

Entrepreneurially-minded people view college as this wonderful opportunity to learn, experiment, develop... while, most students are there for a few years of leisure followed by a lifetime of wagework, and as far as I can see most universities do little to dissuade them of this notion

College may not be the one actually killing your entrepreneurial spirit. Most colleges just put a contract out on you. Societal hivemind thinking (which begins when you're a child) and the face-time-driven workplace are the actual hitmen that take you out.

"Right now, 6 of the 10 richest people in America are proud college dropouts. The other 4 inherited their wealth. Hell, Dakota Fanning has made more money than most people will make in a lifetime and she's still in middle school."

Source?

Probably Forbes. The 4 are the Waltons, of WalMart fame. As for the others: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Sheldon Adelson. Warren Buffet did get a degree, so actually of the top 10 (2006 list) it's 1 degree, 4 inherited, and 5 drop-outs. Buffett was already an entrepreneur with several revenue streams and felt college would be a waste of time, but he went because his father wanted him to.

And of course Steve Jobs dropped out (and started attending only the classes that piqued his interest), and Woz didn't get his degree until after Apple.

Great blog and a fascinating literary experiment.

If this person actually had a good college education they'd understand the concept of opportunity cost. The more well educated you are, the higher your opportunity cost.

Having a top college in your pocket can also help build your network if you use it right. The author also misinterprets causation and correlation. Just because X% of the richest people in America are dropouts is meaningless. What % of the total population has a college degree? Probably something like 30%. That just shows this guy's article is poorly thought out.

It's a nice sensational headline but it falls flat on its face in terms of logic.

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