College was my biggest mistake | Hacker News Reader

College was my biggest mistake

stevecorona.com

170 pointssachitgupta182 comments

Most articles and comments about higher education commit the gravest sin of thought: they assume what is right for one person (namely, the author) must be right for everyone.

I'm enrolled in a public institution pursuing a double major, working two jobs because I'm also middle class. I have a good -- not great -- GPA, and I get to do amazing and interesting things every day; I got into programming after volunteering with a CS major -- I learned about HN, ironically, from my Finance professor. After drudging through a K-12 curricula which routinely belittled the entire point of academia, I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.) It's unequivocally been the best three years of my life.

A lot of people are realizing college isn't a universal gateway to a better life, and that's good -- I don't particularly think it was meant to be one. I'm happy that the author made his way.

"College was my biggest mistake?" I'm glad you got out, then. But it sure as hell isn't mine.

I'm glad this has been said -- this is very true.

I have two comments:

>> "College was my biggest mistake?" ...it sure as hell isn't mine.

How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure? Firstly, opportunity cost is an impossible thing to calculate with certainty, especially when dealing with something so incredibly costly both in terms of time and money.

If you find yourself reasonably discerning, and learning efficiently what you are out to learn, and enjoying it and life, then great, you're likely in a good place.

"Double majoring", having an OK GPA, working two jobs and being middle class -- these all say absolutely nothing about whether you're making a mistake or not.

>> I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.)

Now that means a lot, and congrats for finding a place that has such an unusual but hugely beneficial atmosphere!

The job lead I got from my college advisor alone was worth the opportunity cost. And the humanities classes opened my mind up in ways wikipedia just can't dream of.

Yeah that's exactly the part that is so hard to quantify -- the liberal arts component. The purpose of all gen eds is basically to "open your mind", ie. to refine you as a human being. But what high school student goes to college for this purpose? Or a better question, what high school student truly knows that, or understands what that means? The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.

I did, I had a rather high IQ, and solid high-school achievements so I could probably gone to MIT etc, instead I went to a small, local, and cheap liberal arts school. One of the things I realized in HS was being a slightly better programmer is not really that important and does not actually make you significantly more money etc. But, avoiding debt and actually having fun in collage is worth a hell of a lot.

It took 3.5 years plus ~70k. I did learn quite a lot both from computer classes and the more liberal arts. But, in the end it was the social scene that IMO was the most important part.

PS: I did take 23 credit hours one semester just to see what it was like, and even making mostly A's with one B I think I learned more when I had free time than I did cramming in more course work.

That's the way I looked at it. Get through it without a lot of debt and be a big fish in a little pond.

I'm smart enough to work on "hard" problems, but the stuff I do now is interesting, and while my gross income is lower, my net income is quite a bit higher.

I love how so many liberals that would never dream of insulting someone for being poor have this attitude that if you didn't go to college, you are some kind of uncultured hick. Somehow beneath all those baristas with hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt.

>The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.

This is the opposite of what I saw before the recession. Maybe I am hanging out with wealthier people than you are? or maybe you are just too young to remember a time before the recession. I don't know. As far as I can tell, at least until the recession hit, considering how much money you'd make when you got out of college was considered extremely déclassé. College was all about finding yourself and becoming a better-educated person. Only the uneducated, uncouth hicks actually thought about money. How gauche!

Of course, now with the recession on, a whole lot more people find it impossible to pretend to not be poor, and actually taking steps to see to it that you can feed yourself later in life are gaining some social acceptance.

Personally, I'd say that I learned a very similar lesson to the barista when I bought a BMW during the first dot-com. You see, pretending to be rich is really expensive.

Yeah, I tried to warn my friends, but they all looked down on the idea. Now that they're out of college, most of them are working retail. They have no idea how much they owe or when it might be paid off--math is scary, so they just defer and defer and make the minimum payment when necessary.

Of course, given their relative inability to comprehend fiscal realities, almost all of them live with their parents. Any free money they have they immediately blow on unnecessary things (trips, designer clothing, etc) instead of even trying to get out from under their loan debt.

I really hope that people come around some day, because I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills. Not all of us have parents we can move back in with, you know? But even that concept is offensive to them.

People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.

>I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills.

you've gotta choose your friends and your peers. I'm not saying you should always insist on friends that accept you for who you are, it can be good to have peers that challenge you, but you need friends that would admire you if you became the person you want to be.

A whole lot of the misery of my younger life can be traced back to that. It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.

>People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.

but... that's a lesson that needs to be learned through experience. Really, that's a big part of why I think the fact you can't get out of student loans the usual way is such a big problem; I mean, when I was that age, making my own stupid decisions, no bank would be idiotic to loan me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were, I'd have ended up bankrupt and the bank would have had to take the hit, as they should, for making such a boneheaded loan.

>It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.

That's exactly how I feel all of the time. If I am who I am around normal people, they get all insecure about their intelligence. Technical people tend to accept me and make me feel so at home it's amazing, but they're a very small minority of the population where I'm at compared to the non-tech savvy. I wish I could learn how to interface with normal people better without compromising my identity and interests.

I think I've been there. My advice? put more effort into finding more of the sort of people you want to be around. You might need to move, too, but moving alone won't do it. The key is to initiate relationships. It's better (well, better for you) to be loud and slightly annoying than to be so quiet you don't have a chance of initiating relationships with people you meet. (I mean, by all means, desist when people tell you to go away. But don't be afraid of embarrassing yourself by initiating a conversation with a stranger.)

The thing is, most nerds (and most of the people that nerds get along with) are kinda introverted. Introverted people tend to not initiate new relationships. If you wait around for other people to initiate relationships, you will only be able to choose among the extroverts that like you, so practice going out of your way to initiate contact with people you think you might get along with. You don't have to be an extrovert; but you do have to initiate conversations, extrovert-style, at least until you find your group.

Moving to an area with more of your target person type helps a lot, too. I mean, I meet all sorts of interesting people, for instance, waiting in line for BBQ. Living in a higher-density area gives you more people to meet, and some high density areas have more of us than others. I'm in silicon valley, which is medium density, but you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.

If you are like me, learning to better interface with 'normal people' won't solve the problem. In fact, I suspect the real problem is that I see 'normal people' and I see 'my people' - but I haven't been able to overcome that.

Thank you very much for your advice.

treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills

People treat you like shit for your choice of major? Hasn't happened to me (engineer) but if anybody did this to me I would choose to spend time around different people.

A lot of people have looked down on me for it. Especially arts/liberal arts majors who have graduated and now make like...8-12K/year with their degree. They like to imply that they're the better person because they went to college for ~knowledge's sake~ or whatever. (Like I don't also love learning???)

Ah, got it. Sounds like a rationalization based on envy and resentment.

As in, their college experience isn't paying off financially, but they are better than you for pursuing pure love of knowledge rather than chasing the filthy dollar.

If you hadn't gone to college you would have been doing something else during those years and you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else. You can know that the job lead you got was good, but you have no way of knowing that your lead was better than you might have gotten by going to a jobs fair or some sort of special-interest convention or local community center.

And note that you could have taken humanities courses at a community college or audited them for free at a private college or done self-study. You don't have to be paying full college tuition to "open your mind" that way.

I took my humanities courses because I was required to. At the time, I would have been happy if all of my classes were math/CS. But afterwards, as in, a few years later, I realized that I probably would have learned most of the technical stuff on my own. It was being forced to study the non-technical that really taught me something new and interesting that I likely wouldn't have learned on my own.

This year marks ten years since I graduated. I cannot prove that college was a worthwhile thing, but I look back on that time very favorably.

you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else.

I'm not sure this is really true. I wasn't out of school yet, I had very few contacts. In fact after that first job I was effectively out of work for 9 months. College let me go to classes a bit, study a bit, and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time, while still getting the benefits of a huge professional network at the end.

Hitting up job fairs for months on end was equally effective as following up on a single email my advisor sent me.

Well, I guess you could take a humanities class...or, you could, you know, get a library card.

Believe it or not, there are actually sources of information outside of wikipedia and $1000000000/credit college courses. Amazing, right?

The big difference is the discussions with a group of other people (especially great: of different majors!) and a professor who knows what you're talking about and how to steer the conversation. Trying to understand a book and trying to understand people is very different.

I had a great seminar this semester where we would talk about "knowledge" from a philosophical, historical, theological and physical point of view with the respective students and professors. Often, we were none the wiser about our original question afterwards, but had had a great discussion, and quoting the philosophy professor, "understood the question better". Again, my point - it is not about gained knowledge, and the way a conversation engages your mind is hard to replicate with a book.

But then, I live in Germany and can live off 6000€ including university costs for a year, so YMMV.

Here I feel that it's a lot more common to pay $20,000+ a year to have a professor read off a slide. Most professors I've had can't steer for shit. (Although I've had 2 philosophy professors who were very good at it! They are in the minority, unfortunately.)

You also have to keep in mind that colleges here will accept just about anyone (no matter how stupid) if they have the money to pay--from what I've heard, Europe's system is free for those who are smart enough to get in, and the entrance standards filter out a lot of the dumbasses who would otherwise just destroy the intellectual level of the class discussion.

I'm not talking about sources of information. I mean someone who knows what books in that library are worth reading. And honestly, I don't remember 90% of the "information" I learned in college, but I learned a ton of new ways of approaching information that I don't think I would have learned except by example.

You could listen to someone tell you what books are worth reading, or you could learn critical thinking by trying to work it out for yourself. In the real world, you often have to parse data from a variety of sources without much guidance from a higher authority as to what you should consider legitimate.

I'm not saying that college isn't helpful for some people--but it's certainly not the only way.

Sorry but I think having a guide who knows things that have been passed down over centuries is much better than re-inventing the wheel every generation. It's like getting a 2,000+ year head start on understanding how to think. By all means get some experience in the actual territory but don't forget to take a map.

> How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure?

Well then how does the author knows that his assessment is the correct one? I agree with the GP for three reasons: (1) I am not a super intelligent, 140 IQed, childhood prodigy who can learn so much faster than most if not all of my peers that I find the courses in my university program slow/unnecessary. (2) I fail at keeping myself motivated for months without direction, peer support and proper schedule. I am more likely to slag off in a side project that I am doing than in a course project that I have to do. (3) I am also more likely to learn things that are absolutely necessary but I personally don't find interesting (Logic Design, for example was one such topic).

> people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am

I think that is largely a function of how good the university is and how likely you are to identify motivated people. I was lucky to find some really motivated people around me who would challenge everything they encounter. I am much more passive than they are during sleep and just observing them struggle to tackle the weirdest problems was worth it. I am of course, not from a US university. My 5 year program (B.Tech. + M.Tech) would have costed me not more than $20K as a large part of my academic expenses are subsidized by our government. But all I can say is that at a good university, neither is this behaviour unusual or is it rare.

Oh come on. I just feel like this is another in a series of "let's indict education" posts. I take issue with everything in here.

$44,000 a year for tuition, why? Why did you choose that school if you had no intention of studying? You can teach yourself more in an afternoon than in a 10-week class? Really, let's prove it. I want to see it.

You made basically all Fs but yet you can teach yourself more in an afternoon ... because you're better than others or something?

You happen to have chosen a field in which it is very easy to make a modest income, $60K, without actually having very much knowledge (not saying you didn't have x knowledge).

I mean, sure anyone that is not slobbering on themselves can probably follow a RoR YouTube and make a blog engine and then know enough to convince someone to pay them >$50K. I don't know how long this is going to last though. But this is not much a real recipe for success in my opinion.

The idea that everyone can just teach themselves everything and that no one is actually learning any content in college, at best they are just learning "life skills" is just completely ridiculous.

I don't know, not to make another anecdote and I don't have hard data, but I have probably "self-taught" a lot more subjects than most that claim actually have and I wouldn't say I didn't learn any content from CS in college, not even close. In fact, I don't know any PhDs that would say they didn't learn any content (not just this life skills stuff) in college; I think it is just a fanciful notion and probably makes people feel better about themselves: "I'm Srinivasa Ramanujan, I don't need college to teach me anything."

The autor is clearly talking of his own experience. He is not generalizing and trying to convince everybody to drop out of college.

My experience is that after 5 years of professionnal activity college is not relevant anymore as long as one kept learning and gaining experience.

It is what you've done and accomplished that will make the difference and get you closer to success.

Beside 44k$/year + interests is far too expensive for what cellege gives you. I fully agree with the OP. This puts you in the rat race from the start. It will be very hard to get out of it. That's not a path to success.

The idea that a college degre is a step closer to success is plain wrong.

Reread the article, it is exactly what you're telling me it's not (last paragraph). :(

Also, beside that point, this is thrice daily conversation, whether it's Peter Thiel, or KA, or whatever the "anti-college" hit of the day is.

As far as 5 years of experience ... It depends on what you spent 5 years doing.

The $44K/yr is a non-starter. Sure, it's a big waste of money if you get a .33 GPA, agreed. Big deal. That's so much higher than average that bringing this up is sort of a strawman; if that school is way outside of your budget and you're not just dead-set on that school, why go there. That's more than B.S. + PhD for many people. Give me a break!

As far as the idea of college being step closer to success being "plain wrong," this is just a naked assertion that is really generalized and kind of ridiculous.

My understanding is that being successful means reaching our life goal. If your goal is to make career in the academic or research domain, than a college degree is indeed a must have and a step closer to your success. Otherwise, it's not and a waste of time and money.

Especially, if you think that a college degree provides you a guarantee to get and keep an employee job, or being successful in it, you are plain wrong.

The opinion of Paul Graham or Peter Thiel about college make sense when considering the goal they are talking about for which a college degree is indeed a waste of time and money.

A college degree is good to become educated in some field, but you are spoon fed and you get all the constrains that come with it.

There is a world outside the software industry, a world in which a college education of some kind is necessary to get and keep a position or strike out on your own. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, and professional engineers are all required by law or regulation to obtain one or more accredited degrees. There are other fields, such as finance and some government-related positions (such as social work and child education and development) where degrees are not necessarily a legal requirement, but you will not be hired without one.

I know too many people get useless degrees. I know people get pressured go to college who should not be going. I know people have unrealistic expectations of what they are going to get out of it. However, software development is a unique case in the professional world in that you can develop significant skills and experience without a formal education, or even a formal job. That does not translate to other fields. Hell, it doesn't even translate to some parts of this field.

I found my undergrad to be a very valuable experience, despite not getting any of the "soft" experience. I was a commuter student at a public university in Florida who lived at home and did not spend any more time than necessary on campus. I did learn quite a bit once I got to my major classes (EE), and I got to experiment with multiple aspects of engineering in the presence of very knowledgeable people. I also had a $55k/year job on graduation in 2002. I would do things differently given hindsight, but I would still be going for an undergrad degree.

I am European, so I really don't get that. Why don't you try to make education cheaper? Why are you taking it as granted that university must cost x 10000's dollars a year? Out here outside of UK it is mostly around 1000 Eur max a year.

Having free higher ed changes the picture. When you are from a middle class family it is your ticket to maintain or even climb the social ladder. Even if for some people, the education content is less useful, then you get a huge lots of social interactions that you don't get elsewhere, and probably not out of a online learning offering.

European universities are cheap because they are government subsidized. The US has state schools that, once upon a time, were partially subsidized and cheaper, but not quite free. State governments have stopped giving money to these universities forcing them to raise tuition. This is a political decision, is what the voters want, even though it might not be in their best interest. It would be nice to have low cost universities in the US but is not going to happen in the near future.

That's true... and at least in my area (Colorado/New Mexico) that cost for a resident is currently between ~3.1k and 5.2k per semester, a far cry from the 22k per at RIT. And that is without scholarships. A full four years at that price is about one year at the original article's cost at RIT.

Not free, but not outrageous.

We don't know what the true cost of going to college is. There are plenty of prices, but there are few places in the world where the student pays 100% of the actual cost of their education. But I can tell you, the cost of a college education is NOT 1000 Eur, anywhere. That's heavily, almost completely, subsidized by the government.

1) Most tuition is posted at a higher sticker price with merit and need scholarships lowering the price for many.

2) Most state schools are government subsidized to some extent.

3) Most schools have some form of endowment (i.e. giant pot of cash donated by alumni) that they invest and sometimes pull cash out of for scholarships and capital projets.

4) The schools vary in price quite a bit based on their standing and whether or not you live on campus. The $35-55k numbers thrown around are top tier private schools including living on campus, i.e. the most you could possibly pay. Many people are getting solid college degrees from state schools (including room & board) around $30k per year. Many more are commuting and paying $20k per year. Community (2 year) colleges are on the order of hundreds or thousands of dollars a semester.

I know that European universities are subsidized a lot. I also think this is right, because it creates an incentive to study - price is low and reward is high. The graduates consumes more afterwards, and pays also more taxes. That's what you call a win/win.

Still I am always surprised that Americans are so much willing to go into that game where the winners are mostly university workers and banks.

This is a bit like inflation in Germany, or housing in the US - you get burnt once and then exaggerate in the other direction.

For housing, these are people never wanting to buy a home again. Wrong reasons - there was a bad bubble until 2007, they just bought too high. Doesn't mean there won't be good deals anymore. Same for education - "it is overly expensive so I jump it". For me it is the wrong solution to the right problem.

If you could teach yourself in an afternoon what was covered in a 10 week class, then you probably wouldn't have failed out.

The same points I make on every post like this.

1) College isn't for everyone.

2) The 'I'm so smart that college was a waste of time' people should have just gotten a scholarship and not paid for college. 5 out of the 5 schools I officially applied to offered me scholarships. All were in the top 50 schools for my chosen major (originally, aerospace engineering). If you are smart enough that college is a waste of time, then you are also smart enough to not have to pay for college.

3) Don't extrapolate the computer science major to others. There are better books, tutorials, and online communities for hacking than seemingly any other profession. Try to find the "O'Reilly Press" of aerospace engineering pumping out 100 books a year on every imaginable topic - it just isn't happening. Same for StackOverflow, HN, etc.

4) Don't extrapolate the software engineering profession to others. It's normal for non-CS majors to be getting software engineering jobs. I personally graduated with a mechanical engineering major and CS minor. I'm now working in software engineering. The company I just left (where I worked as a mechanical engineer) would never, ever, hire a computer science major to fill a mechanical engineering job. The only three possible majors other than ME that they would hire are math, physics, or aerospace engineering.

5) If you don't do well, college is a waste of time & money.

He didn't fail out because he's an idiot, he failed out because the classes were mind-numbingly boring.

Paying $44k a year to not go to any of your classes was indeed a big mistake.

I could tell you another story about how I decided to take on a stupid amount of debt for school, but -- in the face of a lifetime of certain poverty -- the people I grew to know and the projects I actively pursued and worked hard on led me to a fulfilling life and a job that I love that covers my loans with ease.

There is a point in this post somewhere: asking 18 year olds to decide whether or not taking on crushing debt to attend classes they aren't sure they want to take (or even which ones they should take) is not a great thing to bet our economy and our children on. I don't really have an answer for communicating to someone just leaving home that the amount of money they're paying isn't worth it, though. Several people said it to me, but it was so abstract to me it was easy not to care.

In any case, anecdotes can give us guidance in our own lives (and crucially, they can provide us hope as we walk into an interview or open a late payment notice from sallie mae), but they're a pretty poor decision basis if we're aiming toward a societal optimum here.

Should they have to acquire such burdening debt to come to this realization, though?

No, perhaps if education was better subsidized in the US they wouldn't have to.

Sorry -- I don't like these kinds of posts. They just incite the same sort of college-vs-no-college debate I've heard a million times. I think there's some kind of "hacker" pride that makes people act as if not attending college is "bucking the system" or circumventing some dumb thing the Man tells you that you have to do in order to succeed. It's not.

One size doesn't fit all. If not going to college works better -- do that. If going to college works better -- do that. I did both, sort of: I went to college but studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate while working tech jobs to pay the bills. I loved my classes but also self-taught myself the skills I used for work. And I got exposed to a lot of stuff that I never would have learned if I had just worked and not taken those classes. That worked for me.

I'm not sure what we're supposed to get out of some single anecdotal experience that this guy didn't go to college and turned out okay. Except to say: I'm happy that's the case! Self-education rules.

Also: Can we please stop acting like college has to cost $44k/yr. It doesn't. State schools. They rule. They're relatively cheap. If you're unsure about college then, yes, going $200k in debt over something you're not sure you want is dumb. Especially when there are cheaper options.

Thank you. Drive safe.

I completely agree with the sentiment about high college costs, the state school I went to cost ~44k for all four years, add in various scholarships (some of which I got as I'm pretty sure I was the only person to apply for them) and internships and I graduated college with no debt and more money than I started. Going to college does not necessitate taking on crushing debt, it just requires some extra legwork and picking a school that more fits your budget.

Not getting a CS education was my biggest mistake.

I got most of a Finance degree, then dropped out when I ran out of money and found out people would pay decent money to a relatively inexperienced programmer. I'm happy with the way things have turned out for me career-wise - I think I'm a pretty competent developer and have a decent income and good future prospects - but I feel like there are opportunities that I'm much less likely to be able to take advantage of because I've mostly learned things as I've needed them.

Yes, I can (and am) independently learn everything you would in a CS program, but it is much more difficult, and the piece of paper is sometimes useful, too. Yes, plenty of folks get by without one, but I hope people don't get the idea that because they can teach themselves to throw together a website, they won't learn anything from a CS program - when I was 18, I had this idea that CS degrees taught outdated and relatively useless information, which I now believe to be false.

Even beyond the core CS curriculum, there are a lot of benefits to attending college - I feel like I at least got some of those by completing most of a degree.

It is certainly valid for some people to skip college, and that's fine, I just hope that all of this anti-college sentiment we've seen recently isn't just going to create another generation of people like me who regret thinking they didn't need the formal CS education.

I'm fine with anti-college sentiment as long as it's not anti-learning sentiment. College and structured, traditional, classroom based learning works for some people and it slows others down. All of the material learn in a CS degree can't be learned independently outside of college. Any benefit college gives to a person is going to be subjective and highly anecdotal, like "professor interaction" or being around like-minded peers as though people can't learn from others without being at college. Often times, if those concepts are learned outside of college they are learned out of necessity and immediately applied, rather than pushed to the back of one's mind on the off chance they might come in handy sometime down the road.

The OP's beef wasn't with college - it was with the false belief that college is the only way to become successful in life.

I don't know that anyone says it is the "only" way. The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down.

Hard to say how most High School students would be able to accurately gauge that college would be useless for them ahead of time, except if they already couldn't handle academics.

"The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down."

That sure makes it sound like it's the only way.

Of course not, because it is not implied that it is impossible to do without, only that it is an advantage and that it is prudent to take all the advantages you can afford.

College is also too much for some people who have very specific goals that don't include a well-rounded education.

College isn't necessarily about well-roundedness at all. If your very specific goal is to become (say) a doctor, lawyer or professional engineer then you don't have much of an option of avoiding school (though you can certainly take a pass on a liberal arts degree, that isn't college in general).

The most interesting thing about this is the feedback loop. These kind of stories seem to strike a chord and in turn more people will post about this.

Yet the discussion always goes along the same lines. The problem is that all of these are unavoidably anecdotal in nature and thus something that is basically impossible to discuss.

Sure, it might have worked out for some and might not have worked out for others. The problem is that everyone has their own experience with this, which basically confirms or denies other anecdotal evidence.

These posts pop on HN a lot, yet I find them useless. Sure it worked out (or didn't), but nobody is able to tell how things would have been if the poster had stayed in college (or in other cases, if he had left college).

All these submissions seem to do is get the "anti-college" crowd on here happy, giving them more anecdotal evidence that really, see, all I ever said is right because that dude had a similar experience while at the same time bringing out everyone for whom college did do something to scream at those who disagrees.

Repeat ad infinitum...

I think these types of posts are becoming popular because we all grew up under the belief that college was the only way to become successful, and it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is that not true, it can be harmful in some cases. This is a big shift from the thinking of previous generations and probably amplified by the current looming student loan crisis and poor economy.

Yes, college works for some and not for others, but only recently has the suggestion that maybe college isn't a golden ticket to success started to sound pretty reasonable.

I think you have a good point. I grew up never hearing anything negative about college, only positive things. All the adults I knew, when I was young, who went to college had nice houses, cars, vacations, etc. Then me and some friends went to college, and many of us were not so fortunate. Bearing large debt that keeps us close to poverty, seeing people that have almost half our IQ, half our discipline, half our ethics making more money than us ... it was a shockingly rude awakening. And when people have such a shift in thinking, we are drawn to articles that try to explain and make sense of our shattered perceptions (kind of like a Phillip K. Dick novel).

Good point.

The US alternatives to college are terrible, particularly if you didn't have money/access. Trade schools are almost fraudulent (and not like Canada, which at least encourages vocations) and the whole entrepreneur out of high school mindset seems downright irresponsible (I would hope there's a better pipeline for ambitious world-changers than just going through the school of hard knocks).

And the worst part of the discussion is it's not even informed. Like, you will never see anyone in these threads recommend joining the military. I joined the military 2 years after college, but had I been informed of my opportunities earlier (say, in high school), I would have definitely joined the military right out of high school and then done college later, once I was ready for it and had GI Bill benefits to use.

All that said, college went okay for me. I don't really know of anyone in my circles that didn't get at least something productive out of going to college, based on where they are now, over a decade later.

You have a point there, especially when you name the economic situation, which arguably changes behaviour patterns.

To expand a bit more on my previous "anecdotal in nature" point though, I think that the articles we see here are not just anecdotal, they are also overgeneralising. I reckon CS is one of the few areas that lends itself most to showing qualification in a way other than presenting a degree.

Normally, the degree signifies the consensus that you have done a certain amount of work and passed a certain set of requirements. In CS (amongst some other things), this can also be shown to a potential employer by showing them your actual coding work, prototypes, programs, scripts, websites etc. Here then, the degree becomes less of an issue because you can show proficiency in a different way.

This however does only work in a limited area of expertise, such as design, art, programming, journalism (to a degree) etc. For most other purposes, a degree is still a certificate of (baseline) proficiency, so saying "college becomes irrelevant" (not that you did) is overly broad and only partially true under certain circumstances.

Now I know HN is mostly programmers, CS students, maths students, some designers etc., as can be seen by the outright hostile attitude towards the humanities displayed by some of the other comments to this submission (especially further up), but it still peeves me to see people inductively draw conclusions from their own experience, ultimately concluding "how things are", thereby implying "for everyone".

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Classes didn’t hold my attention- I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class.

If this were true then you would have spent four afternoons learning Calculus, Business, Communications, and Databases, and another four afternoons showing up for the finals, and you would have gotten a 3.0 instead of a 0.3.

Provide those subjects could hold his/her attention, which is really the qualifier there. OP taught themselves rails and bootstrapped themselves into a $70k+ job in a matter of months. I'd say that took as much effort as passing a few introductory courses in your average public college.

Yeah but that's probably just a purely theoretical concept; let's be honest. It's like saying "I could be Einstein or Newton if I just found physics interesting." It's just kind of self-serving. I don't think learning RoR to get a $60K job is that much effort. There are many "programmers" that make six figures that don't know anything ... and then this is like something is unique to our industry and may not hold for so long. I mean, good for him, no ill will, but let's be honest.

I feel like everything I read nowadays on this topic has had the tone of "don't go to college it's a waste of time" etc etc. While I agree it's definitely not for everybody, I don't agree with it being a waste of time or that nobody should go to school (even if you're not pursue a career a law/medicine/etc).

I have self-taught myself everything I've learned in software engineering, beginning in middle school when I picked up a VB6 book. Then through high school/college with some C++, Delphi, and then eventually moving to the LAMP stack and beyond. Although even before getting into college I knew exactly what I wanted to do (I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early in my high school years) and knew college wasn't going to do much in helping me achieve my dreams, I was still excited for those 4 years.

I wanted to have that college experience rather than looking back years later in life and saying "man I wish I got to see what that was like." But more importantly than the experience of college, I wanted to learn things I knew I'd seldom get the chance to later on in life, such as philosophy, art, history, astronomy, finance, theology, etc. While many argue that you can learn those things on your own without having to go to college, and yes I agree anyone can order an eBook or go to your locally library and pick up a bunch of books on those various topics, but it won't be the same as getting taught by a professor who has spent a great part of their life learning, teaching, researching and working in those various fields.

My goals in life have been not only to be a successful entrepreneur and a great engineer, but to also be a knowledgable man overall, one who is well versed in a number of topics. And while college won't give you all of that in 4 years, it'll definitely help you get started on your journey.

I believe that going to college is worth it if you're being selectively taught by the top 1%. The rest of the 99%? Forget about it-- you can learn more with an internet connection.

Yes I came in to say something similar. I would of absolutely loved to attend MIT or Stanford but went a shoddy 3rd tier state school. All this talk about research opportunities and connections with renown professors does not apply to students in universities not in the top ~50. Modern universities are extended high schools with more parties and social events than actual studying.

I think if you can get into a Carnegie Melon or Harvard then you should definitely attend, but there are over 2500 universities in the US. I, like many others, did not have any direction in high school and ended up attending a local state school where most of the professors were grad students more preoccupied with their own course load than with their students being able to understand the material.

Heh. Usually that criticism is even worse at higher ranked universities since they're research focused.

Lower ranked ones tend to be teaching focussed.

I'm glad you are motivated enough to give yourself a complete college education with an internet connection, and smart enough to parse all that information in a vacuum without advisors/peers to help.

Not all of us are as fortunate as you are.

Most people likely have not tried teaching themselves anything. It's like learning anything else-- it's hard at first but it gets easier as you practice. You can teach yourself to teach yourself.

Actually, he never encouraged anyone else not to go to college. I think the part about college being a waste of his time was really just to emphasize how he persevered and was able to create his own success.

My friend just linked me his own blog post after reading Steve's. http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/success-is-very-far-away-but-pe...

I often wonder how many people who write these kinds of posts actually benefitted greatly from college in ways they don't understand. For example, most people who didn't go to college can't write a blog post like this one.

In short, I think most people who can write great posts about how college didn't help them actually gained a lot of their most valuable (if intangible) skills from their college experience.

> For example, most people who didn't go to college can't write a blog post like yours.

I'm fairly certain this has more to do with the average type of person that doesn't go to college rather than any causal link between Freshman Composition and good writing skills.

Do you really believe that a collegiate level composition class doesn't improve writing skills at least a little bit?

That's somewhat of a straw man. I have no doubt it improves writing skills at least a little bit on average. I contend that it doesn't make a difference in any absolute sense.

I received AP credit and thus passed out of Freshman Composition so my experience is slightly different. In my AP class, everyone's writing skills improved but no one who was a bad writer became a good writer.

If you ask any author the most effective way to become a better writer they'll tell you to read. Most people don't like to read and thus (I believe there is a causal link here) most people are bad writers. It takes much more than two semesters of Freshman Comp. to radically improve ones writing skills. Quality writing is something that you internalize over many years.

I more often hear they say to write. Though I'll concede reading a lot is also important.

Yeah, I agree with this. My English skills have always been top of the line (99% on standardized tests, 5s on APs, etc), and I fully accredit this to the fact that I have been reading CONSTANTLY since I was little. You have to develop an ability to hear the written word inside your head as your eyes move across the page--a lot of lower functioning people don't seem to have this, as indicated by the bizarre sentence constructions they vomit all over their word processor.

A knack for sentence flow isn't practiced, it is absorbed. Want to be a good writer? You need a vocabulary to match. Those of us who acquired extensive vocabularies through osmosis can tell when a lesser person has whipped out the thesaurus in an attempt to sound "smart." (usually, the fancy words they try to insert just end up hilariously misused, since they don't understand the different shades of meaning attached to them. You can only get that through observation of the word in its natural setting.)

As anecdata, I know someone with an English degree from our flagship state school who can't manage to comprehend the difference between "its" and "it's," "your" and "you're," and routinely mangles grammar in a manner absolutely horrifying even before you take into account the fact they studied English for OVER FOUR YEARS and still never managed to grasp the proper use of the possessive.

I dunno. I tested out of it based on what I learned in high school, so it seems likely it merely reinforced the same techniques.

Possibly. But I have seen college itself (not just dedicated writing classes) help people write immeasurably. This is because writing is involved in most everything one does there. It's an extension of high school. Same concept.

My highschool courses were all graded on essays except the hard sciences. College is not the only place to learn to write. I also remember my 5th grade teacher telling me we all deserved As (for average instead of E for excellent) but that if anyone were to have an E it was me or this other girl. Writing is encouraged at all ages, not just college.

Causation and correlation makes this entire topic grey.

The truth is for 99% of people college is the best option for them. They'll get a job paying a decent salary, with a better work environment and the possibility of upward mobility if they so choose. Better than had they not gone to college.

There's a small, no miniscule, fraction of people who are motivated enough that they can achieve the same or more without the institutional learning and degree.

* I never finished college but benefited from my 3 years spent there.

Are you saying that you can't learn to write without going to college?

You can learn everything you learn in college somewhere else. But it's nowhere near as easy.

I disagree with what you say, but a lot of people tend to agree with you. I'm assuming that most people haven't actually tried teaching themselves something to know what's more effective.

I would also argue that while learning stuff on your own is doable for most people, it is even more important to know what you need to learn and to stick with learning it, even if it doesn't seem immediately useful.

This is one thing I think CS programs provide that is really, really hard for people to do on their own. As programs like Udacity and Coursera get bigger and more mature, I think this is one area where they can really add a lot of value: giving people a roadmap and an external way to gauge their progress.

It's true, going to college for a semester taught me that I never, ever want to write java for a living.

Most college educated people I meet can't write half as well as the OP.

It seems like most of the people who complain about college received poor education or were not receptive to education in the first place.

College isn't for everyone but there are a great number of us whose lives have been greatly enriched by our years at good liberal arts colleges. If you're evaluating college through the lens of some kind of personal business plan then it's not a clear win but if you care about the life of the mind there are few substitutes to studying with your peers under passionate dedicated professors.

Whether or not someone should go to *IT or get a CS degree so that they can pursue a technical career is mostly a function of the person and their capacity to engage in self-directed learning.

I live in asia and I'm a dropout. And now after some years of reading great books I found on amazon and other courses from the teaching company, I regret gotten a bad education. In my country the quality of teachers is not very good, plus the teaching is not holistic. The books they use to teach is just plain bad. The people you hang out with or befriend also influence your attitude and worldview. I find here in my country bad schools and colleges have students with either bad attitude or worldview. They were not smart.

Also I was also stuck in a kind of catch-22, I too had a bad worldview and lived in a bad neighborhood which further got worse when I tried to hang with not so smart people. How do you change yourself when your whole neighborhood and peer group have weird beliefs and worldview, its like hanging out with people from Afghanistan/Iraq or something.

It is my firm belief that everyone should study philosophy or humanities. Just to learn critical thinking and "how to think" part of it, without it all the other STEM subjects(science, tech, engineering, math) just doesn't connect well. Checking the beliefs and assumptions you hold dear to yourself is very important. Systems thinking is very important. Every subject interconnected to each other. Plus the type of people you hang out with is very important.

"I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class."

This is either outright bullshit, or your college was complete crap. Most likely the former.

Don't do this. You think you're gaining respect or credibility, but in actuality you're losing it.

> This is either outright bullshit, or your college was complete crap. Most likely the former.

He says it was RIT or Rochester Institute of Technology. I went there (although it was a much better value for me, since I was in NTID, the deaf sub-college, so I basically got half off tuition); and now that I check, we actually overlapped.

It's a pretty good school for tech, but the quarter system is/was brutal for people who weren't very conscientious because you get very little chance for recovery once you screw up. The Rochester winter probably didn't help. Retention rates weren't too good, and people like him demonstrate why.

It's the former. RIT is a pretty good school for science, technology and visual arts (Kodak and Xerox donated stupid amounts of money over the years). Like any college, you get out what you put in. It also has its fair share of over-confident freshmen. You know the type: always the smartest person in the room all throughout high school. When they actually have to do work to keep up, they "lose interest." Sometimes they don't even understand what they don't understand, and start to think they can teach themselves as much in an afternoon as a course covers in a quarter. As they say in the computer departments, "If you can't hack it, pack it." Someone has to design those boxes for Apple.

None of this is to say that university is the one (or even best, or even a good) way for a specific individual to start his/her career. But college-bound kids could do much worse than RIT.

I went there for a few years, so take what I say with the appropriate amount of salt.

This thread is full of people who think this is impossible, but it's not. I pretty much did that when I was in school, and I had about a 60% chance of an A and a 30% chance of a B, according to my GPA.

I wasn't quite as quick as the poster -- the total amount of effort I put into a course probably amounted to 2-3 days of work, including time spent in classes and exams. But, I knew people who were easily an order of magnitude more productive than I was; for them, it would have been an afternoon of work. If you read quickly, you can finish reading a textbook in an afternoon. The extra time I burned was the time it took to work through enough exercises to convince myself that I really got the material. For some really easy classes, I only had to do one exercise per section to convince myself that I knew it, so it ended up being just one afternoon. There are plenty of people who are smarter than I am, who could do every class that way. I don't know if the writer of the original article is one of those people, but it doesn't sound implausible to me.

Just for reference, I went to Wisconsin, which is approximately as rigorous as RIT, and I double majored in math and computer engineering, which are both comparable to CS. But, I graduated in three years and my tuition was a few thousand a year, so the total was was easily covered by an engineering internship. At a place like Wisconsin, you might as well stick around and get the degree -- after all, it's only a month or two of total effort, and you can easily make enough to cover the degree from doing internships, or working as an RA on campus or even at Starbucks. If the price tag were $44k a year, I probably would have dropped out, too.

No, its still not possible. There is a big difference between dedicating 10 weeks of thought and consideration to plumb the depths of a subject and simply being able to fake that effort in order to pass a test for a grade. You and the OP did the latter. Nothing wrong with it but in the end you're just fooling yourself, your professors, and anyone who puts value in your degree.

Since there are (currently) four replies that express the same sentiment, let me just reply to everyone here, to avoid making this thread tediously long.

I admit it's possible I'm fooling myself, but it's the way a lot of people are saying -- that I just skated by on easy courses and missed out on the material in the hard courses. I actually got my As mostly in the advanced undergrad and grad classes. Most of my Bs came in my last year, when I had to go back and take all the intro classes I skipped in order to meet graduation requirements. The math department was fine with, e.g., letting me skipping undergrad abstract algebra because I'd taken graduate matrix analysis (which requires grad algebra), but the engineering department wouldn't let me skip intro e-mag even though I'd taken high powered diode lasers (which, IIRC, required grad e-mag II).

A lot of the Bs came in "easy" classes where the average grade on exams was 85-90. I never did enough problems to stop making mistakes, so I got an 85-90 on pretty much all my exams, which is only good for a B if that's average. The classes that I did really well in were the ones where professors asked questions on exams that required real original thought; the average grade on one of those exams might be something like 30 or 50, but I'd still get an 85-90 most of the time. The one way I selected courses that were "easy" was that I chose professors who made homework a small part of the grade, so I wouldn't fail just for not doing any homework.

Someone else mentioned Ramanujan. Well, I'm not a genius, and I know that. One of my high school friends got a silver in the international math Olympiad, and he didn't even think he was good at math because his little brother was a lot better (and his little brother later got a gold). I'm not even close to that, and even those guys aren't in the same league as Ramanujan, but I read pretty quickly and I have a decent memory for abstract concepts. I think whether or not people are sure the original poster is full of crap depends on who they hung out with in high school and college. Frankly, I was the dumbest of my close friends in high school, and about average among my college friends. When I look at my high school and college friends, any of them could have done this (with the exception of the guy who never made mistakes because he was slow and methodical, even on easy stuff), so it's not obvious to me that the original poster is just spouting off, even if it seems obvious to everyone else.

The math olympiad friend I mentioned above would go through the text for his classes and do every problem in the book before the class started. That took him a few of weeks. Someone mentioned that an engineering problem set takes more than an afternoon. That's probably true for a lot of people, but problem sets in engineering and math don't take much time if you know how to do them. The limiting factor is how quickly you come up with a solution, which can be pretty much instantaneous. There are some exceptions -- I remember some VLSI questions that basically amounted to doing a SPICE simulation by hand. And most labs are, unfortunately, gated by the amount of tedious work you have to do.

On the comment that my experience doesn't count because I'm an outlier, well what's P(guy makes original blog post | not an outlier) vs. P(guy makes original blog post | is an outlier)? I don't have any idea, but neither does anyone else here, and yet every other poster seems to be completely certain that the guy who wrote the original post is full of it. I'm not even saying that it's likely that the guy is credible; I'm just saying it's possible.

I can also believe that someone who's capable of doing that would fail out, because I almost did the same thing in high school. IIRC, my GPA was about 1.6 when I applied to colleges. I only managed to get into a decent school because I was lucky enough to be from a state that had a decent state school that had a policy of letting anyone in with an ACT score above some threshold (32 or 34, I forget which). And even then, I almost didn't got my admission rescinded by failing to graduate. A lot of teachers in my HS had a policy of giving people As in their class if they got a 5 on the AP exam. I got a 4 on the AP chemistry exam, and a big fat F in the class. I'd failed enough classes that I didn't have enough credits to graduate without AP Chem. The chemistry teacher didn't know that, but he was still nice enough to change my grade to a C when he saw that I got a 4. Thanks Mr. Swanson. I don't know what would have ended up happening if I failed out of high school. I spent most of my time in college in libraries, just reading. In theory, I could have done that even without being a student, but I doubt I would have.

I'm just going to do what most people won't and just say I don't believe it. Sure it is possible. But is it likely that you're the one? Now what you're talking about is an extreme outlier.

I don't believe you spent 2 days worth work on a non-trivial course and produce A or near A level work.

People are promoting this anti-college line with utter propaganda and lies. It's one thing to debate whether college is for everyone ... But come on guys, don't lie.

Now, yes I admit it is possible that you are like Ramanujan so I'm not going to commit 100% to this, but I'm going to commit 99.999%

Even if it were true, your ability would be astronomically beyond the vast majority of even highly educated people. Therefore, this would be the most statistically insignificant data point ever, which makes me further question this ability -- how could such an error be committed????

Why is this anti-college view of so many built on such a weird foundation?

I don't really think this is as weird as you think it is. The key part is "non-trivial." Speaking as a current university student, the vast majority (>90%) of required coursework is trivial and can be easily summed up within a page or two of text per class. The ability to figure out what couple paragraphs are going to be tested on and to regurgitate them on demand is really all you need to get a passing grade for a significant percentage of your college career. Figuring that out over a period of a few days doesn't exactly require a superhuman effort, and is (in my experience) quite common. Cramming isn't a new phenomenon, and computers make it significantly easier to find a bunch of information and memorize it for a few days (before forgetting everything.)

Of course, that is not to say that there are not courses that require greater diligence - but they're often avoidable, and a student can compensate by putting effort into those specific classes. Or simply cheating.

It can be done sometimes, I done it for my 4th year OS course. Pretty much a day of cramming, sleepless night + uppers + .. = A-. Trouble is I remembered or learned absolutely nothing from it. For the record I loved university, but that particular course was taught by a prof who had no business teaching anything to anyone(great researcher absolutely terrible teacher) so I could not bring myself to come to class

> the total amount of effort I put into a course probably amounted to 2-3 days of work, including time spent in classes and exams. But, I knew people who were easily an order of magnitude more productive than I was; for them, it would have been an afternoon of work.

A single math/engineering problem set at any reasonable university will take more than an afternoon, so I really don't see how it's possible you knew people who were learning everything in an afternoon and getting A's/B's. Maybe it's possible in the lowest level courses where you went in already knowing most of the material, but otherwise I'm calling shenanigans.

Well the poster failed out. There's no proof that he even was able to learn the material at all, let alone in an afternoon.

This whole attitude that you are above college is just ridiculous. You get out of college what you put in. If it's really so easy, and you are so self-motivated, then you would put in your 15 mins a week to get your degree with the understanding of the benefit of the diploma, and then pursue your own self studies / startup / career on the side. Or if the cost-benefit isn't there you just don't go. You don't go, and then fail out, and then make excuses about how you were too good for it. That's not to say you can't game the system what with grade inflation and easy classes, but that's not a true indication of the potential value of college.

I found the early CS classes extremely easy as well, you know why? Because I've been programming since I was 10, so of course the class is going to have to move a little slow to allow beginners to grok pointers and recursion. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you have to turn it over in your head for a while, which some of us happened to do before college. On the other hand, by year 3 when I was taking 5000-level Networking, Graphics, and Compilers it was definitely not so easy, and I guarantee neither you nor any of your brilliant friends would be plowing through that material 10 times faster than the course was designed.

I think this perception, and the ever-present debate surrounding it, really boils down to the differences between structured and self-driven learning.

Structured learning tends to be methodical, thorough, and slow. You proceed chapter by chapter, book by book, building knowledge on top of knowledge. It's good for establishing a foundation, or for pushing you through dull but potentially useful topics, but because you must stick to the track, it doesn't give you much leeway to follow up on bursts of inspiration.

Self-directed learning, in contrast, tends to be patchy and undisciplined, but it crucially allows one to harness and follow those winds of inspiration when they blow, and that offers incredible benefits for motivation and retention.

Structured learning provides a syllabus and a schedule to ensure that you fill in the gaps. Learning when touched by the muse makes you yearn to fill in the gaps, yearn to reach the next level of understanding.

"I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class."

This psychological shift is what self-learners are referring to when they make such claims. They aren't saying that they can literally get through 10 weeks of coursework in an afternoon, they're saying that being allowed to take their own path through a subject and approach it in a way that truly motivates and inspires them makes them potentially orders of magnitude more effective as learners.

I am currently receiving an education in computer science with the intent to pursue a Ph.D. following graduation. I grow somewhat tired of all this anti-college talk - at the bike shop a while back, the worker asked what I was majoring in, I told him CS, and he asked if getting a college degree was really worth it, as if he thought it wasn't. Yes, it's worth it if what you plan to do is go to grad school or enter academia. It's worth it because it's the only feasible way to do this. It's worth it because my current presence on a university campus gives me opportunities for research and for invaluable interactions with faculty and fellow students.

I understand that the backlash is mostly driven by the observation that increasingly, people are pursuing expensive college degrees only to end up working at Starbucks, simply because they have been made to believe that it is in some way "the thing to do". But college is still worth it and a good idea for a great many types of people, not the least of which are programmers (as distinct from computer scientists). An education in CS is almost certainly one of the best things someone who hopes to be a programmer can obtain.

Why do Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, etc keep coming over to universities if it's so outdated and useless. Why aren't they out on Tumblr or photo sharing sites trying to work on problems and recruit? They could save a lot of money on these plane trips by just looking at blogs! Don't they know any better? :)

Haven't you heard? All of these companies are dead/dying/about to be obsolete. Of course they recruit at universities!

Um, Google often recruits by posting puzzles on billboards or in magazines and by running contests and by paying headhunters. I mean, I'm sure they go to universities too, but they certainly don't recruit exclusively there.

Actually they do. Write some interesting posts on tumblr, get it on LinkedIn, get high score on stackoverflow and you'll see the google recruiters writing to you at some point.

Exactly, but the mystery is why they are wasting time at those useless universities! :)

Success is sitting right infront of you.

But if he'd finished college, he'd know that "infront" is two words!

But in all honesty, I also dropped out of college and I agree with the sentiment of this post wholeheartedly.

In fact, I might go a step further and say that the fear and uncertainty that came with not having a degree actually pushed me to hustle harder than I think I would've otherwise.

> In fact, I might go a step further and say that the fear and uncertainty that came with not having a degree actually pushed me to hustle harder than I think I would've otherwise.

Stress caused by feeling behind is not a strong endorsement in my opinion.

I'm glad it helped give me the motivation to push myself to get where I am today - and in the process learn how much that work and dedication could pay off in the long term.

I have little doubt that, had things turned out otherwise, I'd be sitting at a desk working a safe little office job in my home town.

How is this any different than going to college because you're afraid you won't be able to get a job without a degree?

It could be worse, you could have started law school circa 2006.

3 years completely wasted, vis-a-vis programming and arguably just about the whole tech universe, $150,000 in tuition. After that you get a degree that serves as an entrance to a profession that is extremely economically depressed, near universally reviled, and the few jobs there are have terrible working conditions and are filled with unhappy people.

Live, learn, and try and pass on some hard won lessons.

As someone who started law school in 2005, this hits close to home -- and is unfortunately true. Unless you were an engineer beforehand and went into IP law, probably the only field in the profession that's still hiring now. But then you'd end up writing patents, which sucks your soul and why I still work in tech at a startup now.

This brings me to my new motto I tell those considering the profession: "law school is never the answer."

Sounds like one lazy and irresponsible student to me. It's great that you made it. More power to you for that. But why did you waste your money if you were not gonna do the work? Doesn't matter how scared you were from your parents. You dropped out and then decided to grow up. I'm a guy that does NOT believe college is for everyone.

The problem with this line of argument is that it is anecdotal. Yes, it’s great that this guy has gone on to earn a lot of money, but that result is not typical.

This is the data from Australia:

Over the working lifetime of a university graduate the financial gain generated from income is more than $1.5 million or 70 per cent more than those whose highest qualification is Year 12, even after taking into account the foregone earnings of students while they study. (http://www.youth.nsw.gov.au/__data/page/1165/whatpricethecle...)

Bruce Chapman, the designer of Australia's income contingent education loan system, found that the Return on Investment of higher education in Australia is between 10 and 6 per cent. (http://vital.new.voced.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download...)

The problem with such studies is that they don't demonstrate causation: does college make you successful or do most successful people just go to college?

Right, but it seems more accurate to attribute the income discrepancy to the productivity of those people, rather than "oh you went to uni here's extra money". This means we need to decide if "people who are super-productive tend to go to uni at some point" or "uni produces super-productive people".

different viewpoint on ROI calculations:

The average tuition cost is approximately $16,000 per year. Plus assume another $10,000 in living costs, books, etc. $26,000 in total for a complete cost of $104,000 in a 4 year period. Some people choose to go more expensive by going to a private college and some people choose to go a little cheaper by going public but this is an average. Also, a huge assumption is that its just for a 4 year period. According to the Department of Education, only 54% of undergraduates graduate within 6 years. So for the 46% that don’t graduate, or take 10 years to graduate, this is a horrible investment. But lets assume your children are in the brilliant first half who finish within six years (and hopefully within four). Is it worth it? First, let’s look at it completely from a monetary perspective. Over the course of a lifetime, according to CollegeBoard, a college graduate can be expected to earn $800,000 more than his counterpart that didn’t go to college. $800,000 is a big spread and it could potentially separate the haves from the have-nots. But who has and who doesn’t? If I took that $104,000 and I chose to invest it in a savings account that had interest income of 5% per year I’d end up with an extra $1.4 million dollars over a 50 year period. A full $600,000 more. That $600,000 is a lot of extra money an 18 year old could look forward to in her retirement. I also think the $800,000 quoted above is too high. Right now most motivated kids who have the interest and resources to go to college think it’s the only way to go if they want a good job. If those same kids decided to not go to college my guess is they would quickly close the gap on that $800,000 spread. There are other factors as well. I won’t be spending $104,000 per child when my children, ages 10 and 7, decide to go to college. College costs have historically gone up much faster than inflation. Since 1978, cost of living has gone up three-fold. Medical costs, much to the horror of everyone in Congress, has gone up six-fold. And college education has gone up a whopping tenfold. This is beyond the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, any bubble you can think of. So how can people afford college? Well, how has the US consumer afforded anything? They borrow it, of course. The average student now graduates with a $23,000 debt burden. Up from $13,000 12 years ago. Last year, student borrowings totaled $75 billion, up 25% from the year before. If students go on to graduate degrees such as law degrees they can see their debt burden soar to $200,000 or more. And the easy borrowing convinces colleges that they can raise prices even more. http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/dont-send-your-kids-to-.... http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-par.... http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-colle....

College was actually exactly what this guy needed. He found his passion, discovered what did and did not work for him in terms of learning, and managed to enter the job market at a time where people with his level of experience and expertise could demand salary like what he has now. Offsetting a few years in either direction and he likely would have entered the job market at a very BAD time for people without college degrees.

"I'm in the middle of college but like work a lot better, I'll finish someday" is very different than "I never went to college, and spent the last few years making ends meat. I programed at home, and I'm great. Give me $100k." Pretending those are the same is just intellectually dishonest.

If he thinks college was his biggest mistake and he's doing really well after doing some college (and still trading on college acceptance/progress as part of his contract negotiation), well that's just a poor understanding of cause and effect.

> Years later, I started working at Twitpic. College didn’t even enter the conversation.

A lot of people assume that college is this magical place where people find their passions... People usually don't change too much and stick to their passions well past highschool/college(meaning that they would've come to a similar conclusion with or without college). Many people cite all these CEOs and CTOs who left college and did amazing things, but these people are merely finding out that they can't learn in a classroom setting(neither can i) and pursued a different path.

I studied aerospace engineering at college. I think it was great.

When faced with a large amount of work to do, it's easy to dismiss it. It's not so easy to actually do it. When I realised that (unlike high school) I actually had to do work to pass (and letting down extended family by failing wasn't really an option), I managed to work out how to apply myself to things that I didn't necessarily enjoy. Interestingly, when you actually apply yourself to a course what once seemed like a pile of uninteresting work to slog through starts to become interesting.

I've had plenty of courses that I wouldn't have learnt about myself. It's not until you force yourself to spend a semester studying something that you realise just how useful it can be in other areas of your life.

It was only really the last two years of my degree that I went from sort-of enjoying it to truly enjoying it. Sometimes there's a bit of a slog to get through before you can do interesting things. Engineering degrees (and probably computer science degrees) are like that. You have to learn the (often dull) basics before you learn the interesting things. The author makes the mistake of assuming that their experience (one year of OK performance followed by a year of not going to classes) is indicative of the college experience. That's not necessarily true.

Beyond academics, I got so much out of college in many ways. The ability to spend a year studying in another country, the wide range of people I met, the opportunities that I had to work with lots of people on interesting projects. College isn't just about going to classes and doing exams.

My degree didn't cost nearly as much as the authors one would have. I don't think I would have paid $40,000/year for my degree. However, there's plenty of options that don't cost that much that offer the same (or similar) teaching experience. I completely agree that college isn't for everyone, but I don't think the author really addresses why. What the article really says is that they didn't apply themselves very well to hard topics that they weren't interested in. Unfortunately not everything is instantly fun.

I commend Steve's effort and hard work.

I am a dropout; and we have recruited dropouts, engineering graduates, MBAs and students pursuing a degree distance a learning program at our startup. The best recruits were actually the distance learning students and dropouts by far.

I always recommend young hackers to take a year or two off before going to college and figure out what they want to do. For most jobs in Internet, a University degree is hardly helpful.

In fact, you can actually learn more by working at start for a year than you would learn in 4 years in college. An undergraduate programmer who can network his way to a job can get salary similar to graduates. The only challenge will be to network and demonstrate your skills because recruiters won't be selling you.

I think even great programmers who get solid on-the-job training doing a startup job will have major gaps as they progress. There is something to be said for learning fundamentals.

Is there anything we can't learn from Internet?

Give a kid access to computer and Internet, and he will find his way out. This was experimented with kids in Indian slums, who never went to school and can not even read/write.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.htm...

Oh poppycock. This was Carnegie's line, only it was about libraries. Without the Internet, libraries were there for everyone to use. How are kids that can't read going ... Oh come on, can we stop with this "The Internet solves all of our education problems" nonsense?

I know it is, because this well educated populace doesn't exist and yet the Internet does.

I submit to you that there is very little you need to use the Internet to learn and I also submit that by your reasoning about how easy it is for people to learn then if if they were to purchase physical books, all they would need would be the "canon" of Penguin Press books. But yet people have never done this en masse or even in any significant other than ... wait for it .. outliers. :)

So, basically, the whole view is just one big unproven naked assertion.

See http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t... and http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.htm...

> How are kids that can't read going

A picture is worth a thousand words.

No. :) That's interesting and wonderful but does not prove anything about this discussion. I haven't watched the whole but I saw the description, learn to use a PC. OK, there is a big difference between learning to use something and that designed with "usability" in mind and learning CS, physics, chemistry, law, medicine, whatever.

I learned most of what I know from Internet. Not just programming; but arts, science, mathematics etc.

I agree, basic schooling is very important; there is no replacement for it. College / University education is nice to have, but it is not must.

The internet is a great resource but never a replacement for a great teacher. There's so much to learn that most people don't even realize that only a good teacher can show you. During the first years at university I was confronted with so many things I never thought I'd have to learn which proved to be invaluable.

Additionally, a great teacher makes you learn things a lot quicker than you'd learn them yourself, because of the insights he can give you.

Oh and btw, I've found textbooks to be infinitely more useful than the internet.

As a European I find that the sheer amount of money required to get higher education in the US is absolutely crazy. In most (if not all) of Europe, universities are paid from tax payers money and are basically free for all who have the necessary qualification to attend them.

That shows though. I have the impression that you can make rather decent money in the US without ever going to college but there's not a glimpse of hope for you to do that in Europe. Without at least a minor in something you'll top out at about 2.5k€/month (that's an annual salary of abour 35000$) being employed anywhere. So, all in all, you're expected to go to university.

Oh and btw, going to university was in fact a great idea for me, personally.

$44k a year for tuition is ridiculous and entirely not worth it if your primary goal is to get a job that does not require a college degree.

However, paying a reasonable amount for tuition with the goal of personal enrichment and/or getting a job that requires a college degree is certainly worth it.

As a current college student and part-time developer, I feel like college was a great choice for me-- even though I could've landed a full-time programming job without it. Although the curriculum can be monotonous at times, just having the chance to talk and work with other computer science students on a daily basis has been enlightening.

Yes, you can teach yourself programming-- but college can help (really!).

You can talk to smart people without having to go to college. If you live in the city, you can attend a number of meetups chock full of ridiculously smart people, some willing to teach you/work with you.

Going to college (as an adult) was by far the best thing I have ever done for myself.

I already had a career and thought I knew it all but the experience of working on theory and mixing in with some seriously smart people really pushed me to places that I would never have gotten to on my own.

Also I owe much of my current success to the relationships I formed during my time at university.

I'm in the same boat as the OP: I've been in school for 3 years but everything I know comes from teaching myself. I dropped out and started teaching myself rails/html/css and I'm currently looking for a programming gig(hopefully in a startup). I agree with the OP's sentiment that you shouldn't go for a college degree unless you're looking to work in something that requires credibility(law, medical, etc) and I always tell Highschool graduates about the many options they can pursue without having to waste money paying for a diluted and meaningless education.

This article is awesome.

If people don't want it to be advice, then don't take it as advice. It's just another anecdote to put inside your little book of anecdotes.

The thing is, the OP is targeting his advice at people who are in similar situations to him - people who know that university is moving too slowly, is too expensive, and not right for them.

His advice clearly isn't prescriptive to everyone. It is worth noting his circumstances. He may not have had the opportunity to attend a university that stimulated him. Attending a State College may have been cheaper, but even worse from a quality perspective.

Nobody knows. Point is, instead of judging the guy, why don't you read the piece for what it is - a story about how, for some people (and an increasing number of people at that), college is their biggest mistake. And you will notice that the title reads 'College is my biggest mistake' - not necessarily yours.

ps Statistics about populations of people who don't graduate are useless, as it clearly includes all sorts of idiots, drug addicts and fools who are on the wrong side of the bell curve. Show me statistics on people who drop out of degrees two years in to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities vs the graduating population and I might pay attention.

It's kinda sad that you have to pay that much for an education. In other countries, for example in Scandinavia, higher education is free (with the cost of higher taxes of course). Although, some people in IT still choose to skip it. It shows.

Not that this is a particularly insightful point, but I keep wondering, why does it never come up in these discussions that college is FUN? Regardless of its financial value or lack thereof, it really is an experience like no other.

Probably because many colleges cost like 200K nowadays. Fun's justifiable maybe when you're graduating with, I don't know, 0-10K in debt, but at 200K you've really gotta question whether or not it's worth it. A lot of people have their four years of fun and then end up slaving away as indentured servants to Sallie Mae for the rest of their lives.

It really doesn't need to cost that much though. I wouldn't be surprised if every state in the US has a public school that costs less than a quarter of that. (and obviously college is much cheaper in every other country). To clarify, I wasn't saying I thought that was the sole benefit of college - just one that never seems to get mentioned.

In my state it's about $80,000 for all four years. (including tuition & room and board--but not including where you live during the summer)

As someone who failed every aspect of my education in high school with exception for music, English and the boringly easy to pass computer classes this resonates with me so much. I had always shared an interest in computers and electronics as a kid, but never went to college or undertook any secondary education whatsoever.

I went from having nothing to living comfortably and I'm still in my early 20's without a college education and don't plan on getting one. I work alongside people who spent 4 to 6 years studying to work where they are now and it feels nice knowing I didn't have to get in large amounts of debt to get to the same place as they did.

You definitely need to be able to sell yourself though. Every employer I've ever worked with has been impressed when I tell what got me into development was building a gaming clan website for a Tony Hawks Underground 2 game clan and I kept learning from then on.

This has inspired me to share my story which I'll write a blog post about shortly as well.

The only thing I feel I got from college is meeting my wife. Oh, well that and 85k in debt. I did graduate, with a 3.0, but the sentiment is the same. College hasn't done anything for my career so far.

That said, the whole "I can learn more in one afternoon vs a semester" is just dribble. Total BS. And turns me off to the whole message, sorry.

The real moral of the story: make most of the NOW.

You didn't do that in college, and failed.

You did that afterwards, and succeeded.

In my experience, I almost never look into "education" part of the CV when interviewing. I do ask questions which are taught in decent CS courses, but I couldn't care less, if the answer is right, about where it came from. Degree is just a piece of paper, it is knowledge and skills that matter.

I have a CS degree and I think it gave me a lot and helped a lot in my professional advancement. However, this way of learning is not for everybody, and I do see how somebody could have acquired the same knowledge and skills without any formal framework. I probably could not - and I know that if I join any formal framework, even free no-commitment one like Coursera - I learn much more effectively than if I just try to do it by myself. But for many people it is the opposite, and these people can be and often are more successful than I am.

So formal education is very useful - for some. For some it is not, so I completely understand why OP thinks it was his biggest mistake and I think he has made the right decision for him. I'd suggest him to try some free education though - like Coursera or many other major colleges have now free online course. You don't get the degree, but you do get the knowledge, and that's IMHO much more valuable.

OTOH, the formal degree may also be usable for some big companies and some other things (e.g. immigration, for those that want to live in different country than they were born in) - but one can do without it too.

The article seems to suppose that the purpose of education is a job. The purpose of education is not a job.

If you want to hustle, create great internet products and live a creative free, independent life then college and it's massive debt may not be right for you.

But if you want a lower risk, stable life with good long term prospects then college may not be such a bad idea.

One of the things college (actually my masters degree) taught me is that the answer to most important questions is 'it depends'. There is no one size fits all approach to most big decisions in life - that I think is wonderful because it leads to such diversity.

Of course "find your passion and the rest will follow" works great if your passion is for something that has a great market salary. What if your passion is sculpturing, or gardening?

For me personally, college wasn't about academic learning. It was about personal growth and making a lot of mistakes (and learning from them).

Before university I programmed for the love of coding. My four years at university ripped the programming soul out of me. A year after university I regained that love again and started learning on the job as an apprentice programmer.

Everything since then has been learnt off my own back, via the internet, or from my peers and work colleagues.

Education, especially learning how to develop software applications, is not taught well in traditional "red-brick" British universities. That may well have changed since my days some 20 years ago, but back then it was all theoretical lectures and very little practice. I was not inspired by anyone nor aspired to become anything better during those four years (from an academic perspective).

Don't get me wrong, university isn't a place where you get you should expect to be hand held through your studies. Personal drive is absolutely required. College isn't high school where you get hassled for your home work submissions. However, good mentors and inspirational tutors would have made the whole thing much more attractive.

That aside, there is one thing I have learnt that I would happily pass on; it is to never assume someone that didn't go to college isn't as smart as you are. I work with several very smart people. Regarding two in particular, one went to Oxford and the other didn't go to university at all. Both amaze me every day with their abilities to tackle hard technical problems.

I ended up paying $23k for a piece of paper that I'm pretty sure hasn't done me any good. I learned a little, but not much, and I could have learned it on my own anyhow. Most of it I already knew.

Yet I'm still not willing to say I wasted that time and money. There's still some chance that it'll turn out to be really valuable, and getting through the system helped with some of my issues with valuation of my own abilities.

When I eventually got a job, they didn't care about my paperwork. In fact, my resume was worse than the other candidate's, and they said so. What got me the job was the BrainBench tests they put me through. Without those, I would not have gotten that first job. (Actually, it was the second, but the first was rather non-traditional and before college.)

Anyhow, I think the value of these anecdotes is to let people know that there are alternatives to traditional education. It's not right for everyone, or even most people, but you shouldn't feel railroaded into it. If you have the skills to do the job already, you should consider just going and getting a job, instead.

I actually have never been in college nor in 'high school'. I have attended a secondary school in germany and continued with being chef. Later I started learning to program on my own, because computers have been always fascinating to me, especially writing software. By the age of 24 I applied for a free lance job. The company I have been working for has employed me after two months and let go all other freelancers :D Now 6 years later I am team leader in the development department of AVG Technologies. However now going to RedHat to pursue new paths :)

I can second that it is not really necessary to have a degree in computer science, maths or physics or anything to get a job. If you are good and you show passion you might get a job easier than you might think :-)

A little advice to Recruiters/HR people: Stop filtering out people based on their degrees, you're missing out on good opportunities by doing so.

I am astounded at the cost of college, just some 10 years after I started school. My first semester at a decent State university cost me something like $900. I even had a scholarship for enough to cover that semester from doing well on some standardized test. By the time I finished school a few years later It was about $1700 a semester (maybe not exactly, but close to double).

I can't imagine paying $44k for a bachelors degree in any subject. If that $44k only covers tuition, not books or cost of living, it is insane.

Why is going to a community college for the first one or two years of your higher education experience never promoted? It gives you a chance to see if you'll enjoy that 'college experience', you'll get to sit in a wide range of classes or relatively little money and if you want to continue you can then transfer out. I didn't take this path, but if I had to do it again I would.

The value of a university education does not principally lie in how much money you can make afterwards. Many people go to university to learn, to build a philosophy for life, to meet and engage with other engaged people.

But I paid orders of magnitude less so maybe that gives me the freedom to be more contemplative.

US college education is increasingly demanded even for middle class jobs. new generations will have a tougher time landing decent gigs as even the manufacturing jobs become more and more complex.

while software engineering is something that can be learned by reading a book and hacking away at home until one can get through a jr programmer interview, or maybe even pick up programming on your own to a higher degree, not everyone can learn this way, and not lots of jobs will require formal training.

i don't like when this is painted in black and white colors .. i.e. "college education is a waste of time and money" or.. "college education is a must" .. but i do think it will be in higher demand as more jobs become high tech, and we can't all be Steve Corona smart :)

Good God man.

I wasn't born in the US, but came over young. The whole college evaluation, application, and selection process was one giant set of mysteries to me. Yet, this is all about exactly those questions. At least I feel better, apparently I could've done a lot worse.

Cost - debt or opportunity cost of cash. Treat it as exactly that, a risk you're taking for some expected gain. A high-ranked, expensive school is only worth it if you're going to get something out of it. Your ability to withstand debt (or cash burned) is runway you can use for other things. I'm sorry this guy spent a mercedes benz on stuff he didn't want. But he shouldn't have spent a mercedes benz. My highest undergrad tuition over 4 years was $4k (after fees) per semester. Without a strong interest in a particular field that the school's well-known for, I don't see why it's worth it. And if you're not sure, there's always grad school. People tend to look only at the school of your last degree.

Specialization - I can't understand how people choose majors without looking hard at the ease of getting a job in the field, the effort spent in the degree, how much they like the topic, and the amount you can expect to make. Somehow it turned into a "what's your calling?" question, which is an asshole question to ask anyone, much less some poor 18 year old coming out of 12 years of highly homogenizing k-12.

Frankly, if I had supreme fascist control over a school, departments with poor (say, <85% after 3 months of searching) hiring likelihood should charge double tuition, and require field-specific talent auditions like a good music school to get in. Waivers if it's a second degree, or a written letter of intent to go to law school after.

Finally, what happened to trade school? Les time, higher per-class-hour relevance to the primary goal, and it's a job you can explain to your friends. My CS dept had a 90% drop rate over 4 years (300 freshman, 30 graduating seniors). A lot of those kids would've been happier in trade school, instead of hopping over to business (or business IT). Paid at least as well, and with less debt.

There's something of a survivor bias to this story. That is to say, there are probably a lot more people who drop out of college and don't amount to very much. Those guys don't tend to shout from the rooftops very much. Which should mean applying his approach, to college, for our own situations it might not necessarily be wise.

Having said that, there are probably quite a lot of successful people who didn't amount to much in college. And I think being a free-thinking, rebel, hustler doesn't necessarily make a good student but might very well make a good captain of business. But how cool would it be to have/be both?

But he's right, if it's not for you it doesn't necessarily mean you've failed.

You people had to spend 100k+ on a college education to learn "humanities" and how to be social?!? You don't think you would have "grown as a person" if you hadn't gone to college?! This.is.horrifying. If you do anything Please do one of the following: Talk to a real life person, visit a library, read a book about something other than vampires, and most importantly- GET OUT AND SEE THE WORLD! The author is challenging you to take a good look at your path in life and make the best choice for YOU. He's not saying all of us degree carrying people are idiots. He even acknowledges that plenty of careers need a degree. Maybe some of you SHOULD stay in school...

Mac OS X: Avadis Tevanian - B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University

Python: Guido van Rossum - masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam

Ruby on Rails: David Heinemeier Hansson - bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto - He graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba

Linux: Linus Torvalds - master's degree in computer science from NODES research group

SpaceX: Elon Musk - From the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he received an undergraduate degree in Economics, and stayed on another year to finish a second bachelor's degree in physics.

...I could go on

I think this link started out as a post here on hn[1]. I'm not sure why the author insists on using $175k in debt as a strawman for the discussion. In the earlier thread on HN he stated that $100k, not $175k, was the actual debt figure he was confronted with. It is unfortunate because the discussion of higher-ed/debt is an important topic (I dropped out of law school for similar reasons) and the inflated debt figure needlessly cheapens the discussion.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332885

because I dropped out after two years. if i finished all four, it'd be way more.

You: "Luckily, I left after my 2nd year and only walked away with $50k in student loans."

Me: "Why did two years cost $50k but four years costs $175k? (2/4 != 50/175)"

You: "No one really pays sticker price for college. I had some grants, financial aid, and (like someone else mentioned), the co-op program helped pay for some of my tuition."

Me: "If nobody pays sticker price for college why did you use the sticker price when discussing how much debt you chose not to accept?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332885

It is possible to get by without documentation backing up your experience, but having an education doesn't close doors, and not having an education will close some doors.

Yes, fine, many times, in the right market, with the right skill set, you can rely on high demand and great ability to sell yourself, but my college education means that I can change country and get a cushy job at whim, even in a totally shitty economy, with very little effort (but the education took a lot of effort).

It might not be for everyone, but a college with courses like "World of Business" and "Data Base Concepts" is laughable as all hell anyway. At least go to a real college.

There is always an opportunity cost. I did a startup over last summer and dropped out to focus on it, and I have learned exponentially more since being out. I still advocate an education, because I wouldn't have had the base to learn on my own after that. Being a self funded scientist rather than a student has been more more interesting/beneficial. I still learn every day (business and tech side..)

Like most things, you get what you put into college. If you aren't going into it with the idea that you want to be there, chances are you won't come away with as positive an outlook as somebody who did want to be there. With that in mind, I think the title should be "Don't spend money on things you don't want to do" but then, I guess nobody would click on the link...

"I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class"... depends on what you consider "learning". Of course you don't need to go to any class to learn Rails and get a pay check. To learn hundred other life skills you need to go to class. You are equating "success" with size of pay check. That might not be the measure for many.

i both agree and disagree.

if IT sector wouldn't be so hungry for developers, author of this article would be called at minimum insane when he asked 100k salary. and it isn't some constant thing. i think that if now would be bubble burst in IT sector, this author would continue to work for 10$ per hour.

i agree with main idea, that college should not be mandatory thing in everybody's life - all job market should be in balance : somebody must work lower-level work, somebody has to do programming, managing, financing. if everybody would be with Professor-level education, who would clean toilets in restaurants?

Yup. Go 1-2 years, take as many higher level classes as you can, meet people, begin to learn world != high school, hustle for that first job.

It also helps if economy isn't in shitter like it has been for many years.

OP, you are my inspiration from now on. I'm in a very similar situation. And you've just given me some hope. And thanks for that. I'll strive to teach myself more stuff.

I really wish people the best in their careers. As far as attending college, I know the things that you don't and won't and that is good enough for me.

Just because you fail at something doesn't mean you didn't learn or gain something from it.

Failing college could be the reason why he is so successful.

just goes to show how over-inflated salaries for programmers are. it is not rocket science anymore.

actual rocket science though? good luck without an actual education.

and i sure hope as hell that this mindset doesn't reach the medical field. studying to be a surgeon? i taught myself...yeah, sure...

Does anyone know if this blog is a Tumblr? I just like the layout. Thanks.

College rocked! I dorked out with some really smart people, learned a fuckton, got laid somehow, and after paying teh dues got a fabulous job. At the time, state school didn't cost so much, so no debt! Blah dee blah, good for you no-college man.

I'm less likely to use twitpic now from the tone of this article.

it's all a question of : did you learn the right thing, or meet the right people.

i did both outside of college, while attending it. So it's not my biggest mistake.

More challenging colleges teach you far more than you can teach yourselves.

A top 5 computer science school churns out a much more capable and knowledgeable computer science major who is both well versed in theory and knows how computers actually works down to the bytes.

Kudos to the writer, his ability to hustle is strong. There is more than one kind of talent.

I am well versed in theory and know how computers work down to the semiconductor level. (An aside: I am eternally grateful to Feynman for his wonderful book on that subject.)

Incidentally, I dropped out of high school my Junior year after I landed a programming internship at a local game studio. I have a GED.

I would say I'm capable of being put to work on any software project in any domain and in short order attain a high degree of productivity.

I spend my days researching optics and color theory. I'm the process of building a graphics research lab in my basement, and my purpose in life is to one day write a program which generates images that appear so real and so detailed that the observer would be convinced they were captured by a digital camcorder, rather than output from a 3D renderer.

Computers have been my life and passion for well over a decade. I'm 24.

Like many people have said, this is very anecdotal. Not all drop outs are as motivated or as capable as you seem to be. At the same time, neither are all college graduates. However, graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.

Graduating from a top 5 cs program will at least ensure that you have learned a good deal of information from a wide variety of topics in computer science.

As will books: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/list.html

It's been my experience that the most capable members of a team have all shared a passion for learning combined with open mind. The fact that the top schools tend to select for those traits have led people to conflate credentials with excellence.

That's great, very impressive. No one denies brilliant computer scientists with no formal education exist. But just because Ramanujans exist, doesn't mean the other 99.99% of people don't need an education. :)

Having gone to two of the top five cs schools, I haven't really learned much about computer science from either. The lectures were boring/unintelligible and not motivational (foreign researcher prof., you know what I'm talking about). The MPs were great, but they're not something you really need to pay for. These days you can find technical challenges for yourself anywhere. Read a book.

The biggest benefit was forcing me to learn things on my own, otherwise I would have never forgiven myself for flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet. All of my best CS experiences were when I individually worked on machine problems meant for two or three people, learning a lot through the struggle. At the end, I learned how to learn a little bit better, but I didn't learn much about CS. I thought I was the hottest thing on the block once I got into the job world, only to find out I knew nothing.

That was THE ONE thing that greatly motivated me and pushed me to learn everything I could about the domain. Once again, it wasn't college that did it.

Name those schools

I'd like to see some of the code that this guy has written. He said he can learn more in an afternoon than a whole class? HA! He's confidant I'll grant him that. But also a deceiver. But perhaps the good kind of deceiver. Press him to cut some code, and in an instant will get some other poor programmer to do it for him. There are plenty of good rule-following programmers out there to purchase... For a salary.

I respect people like this because without them, there would be no companies to work for. Someone has to get pissed off with the way things are, and go out and BUILD something great. But he doesn't come across as a rule following person. We need their charisma and confidence, but without someone to cut the code and do the job, it will be like the cure for cancer, constant vaporware. The substance of venture capitalist's nightmares.

We need people like him, but we have to understand he isn't the generative force in the world, he's the scrappy leader. Hopefully his defiant vision for the world is good. Else he'll get his big bubble popped and end up looking for a job without a degree. And I don't wish that on any passionate-for-learning people.

He has a story very similar to mine, but I don't really use my personal anecdotes to give other people advice.

And yeah, that first job where I started making decent money after years of minimum wage?

Just like winning the powerball.

I'm very happy and grateful for what I have, but I'm even more grateful I joined a startup of such great people.

Lol! "I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class." Really genius? "Calculus B: F" Any it says repeated! Why didn't you take five afternoons and graduate then?

It is a well-known fact that becoming a "high-level" web programmer doesn't require brains or a degree. Now this post makes it clear that, even such people who miserably fail to get a degree can write PHP programs and Javascript.

Yeah thats the thing. There's so much more to cs than learning rails or whatever.

Learning the fundamentals of cs theory, machine learning so forth, make you a better developer indirectly. Yet a lot of this stuff is not covered in detail on web, sure there plenty of web tutorials, but a lot are superficial, following a "how to" format for HTML Php etc. Only now with edx and coursea are decent courses coming out.

Accountability is what school offers you. You are forced to work the homework problems and then you really learn. You can do this on your own but without the social motivation it is much less likely. Udacity, etc. are solving this problem for online education now in CS.

I'm so tired of these articles from people that didn't even make it in college who are so proud to proclaim what a waste college is. Or that having skills means getting a job.

I knew rails and linux and a half a dozen other things and had built a product for a client before graduating highschool. I also lived in the middle of no-where in the Midwest.

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