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Comment by haeric | Hacker News Reader

You did say your analogy was on the fritz, but still... the "training for the olympics" analogy has a huge flaw: When he gets his degree, it probably wouldn't change anything, the coolest thing he could possibly do would probably STILL be that same startup, or something equivalent.

So why go through college? He can probably learn just as much, if not more, doing what he is doing now. The only thing I see him missing out on is "the college experience", which is a lot of different things for different people.

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>the coolest thing he could possibly do would probably STILL be that same startup, or something equivalent.

The coolest thing he could possibly do would be getting his Ph.D. and becoming the next Newton, Gauss, Turing, or equivalent.

Part of me thinks going through the whole process of one level of education can make you better. If you are doing the same thing after four years of school that you would do when you started, either you weren't paying attention, are unteachable, or were brilliant to start out. Part of me sees 16 year olds changing the world with only skin-deep knowledge (APIs, but not knowing the underlying processes), but ambition enough to float over mountains.

I can't seem to reconcile our broken world of code with things that require real education. You don't see an architecture student dropping out after two years to start his own architecture firm. We don't see premed students dropping out to start hospitals. We don't see kids in the air force academy dropping out and declaring themselves three star generals. But they'll certainly drop out to start a design firm or an online medical records system.

If collegiate computer science education weren't so utterly worthless, there might be fewer dropouts - why would a motivated and intelligent person spend four years of the most productive part of their life and approximately a hundred thousand dollars to learn things that are both largely useless and easily self-taught? If one's goal is to build a useful product and run a company (or do anything at all outside of academia), college is a very poor choice - the debt accumulated alone would sink any entrepreneurial dreams.

My only experience is with computer science, but I would suspect we would see a lot of rapid innovation in military fields were it possible for highly motivated and intelligent 20-somethings to drop out of the air force academy and become local warlords. The fact that the tech sector has so few consequences for failing and so few insurmountable bureaucratic standards is only for the best.

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