Eric Schmidt on Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It

It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.

"I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2013/01/31/bill-gates...

Huh, I hadn't heard that one before.

I do think there's a particular subset of the startup sector, mostly focusing on web, MVPs, and business-model innovation, which has a negative view of academic-anything, whether it's formal education, academic research, even CS as a subject. But it's also worth noting that that isn't the whole of the technology business! Plenty of startup founders not only graduated from college, but even went to grad school (graduating from grad school seems less important than spending a few years there). A number of high-profile startups were formed by grad students or professors as spinoffs of their academic research. A few technologies that were either developed in academia, or are direct derivatives of stuff the founders developed in academia, include PageRank, Mathematica, SPARC, PostgreSQL, Matlab, etc.

Zuckerberg is not an example of why one should go to college. He is an example of the difference between college as-an-experience[0] and the diploma that one gets after graduating. In some fields, a diploma is important if not required, similar to a certification, and in others it isn't. If you want to go to college, it's important to know exactly what you want to get out of it, if the diploma itself has little value in se in your field.

Unfortunately, I think these two points are oftentimes conflated, to the point where some people completely write college off as having no value, when a more appropriate conclusion may be that college has value whether or not you receive a diploma.

[0] both a learning experience and cultural one

I'd like to see the distinction made between the historical increase in earnings resulting from a college degree, and the projected increase.

>Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that college raises wages by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students.

>When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.”

College is expensive because we tell kids that it's going to be this huge windfall so people "figure out a way to do it." The problem is that it's a correlation/causation argument that's turned into an out-of-control feedback loop.

College graduates traditionally earned far more because fields that needed a degree were higher-earning. College degrees are absolutely useful for some fields, and, in fact, I lean toward the argument against college being weaker for the more technical fields like typically get discussed here.

But the real problem is that we've been telling kids that the only way to do anything with your life is by going to get a four year degree, and as a result we have more graduates and employers are starting to require four year degrees for jobs that have traditionally -- and should be -- vocational in nature.

As a society, I think it's absolutely insane to expect these sorts of jobs to suddenly begin creating more value, and thus have higher compensation, simply because the person working it has more outside education.

My stance is that we need to sort this out now before it gets any worse. We need to destigmatize vocational education. We need to realize that while some form of higher education is almost always a good thing, a four year degree is complete overkill for many.

So people who could be spending $40k on their local state university are spending $200k just to get a crack at a place like Google. $40k over 4 years is not that much, and the earning potential of people after that more than makes up for it.

And then guess what? Google, in a moment of stark reflection, looks at the data and realizes that the performance of the few folks who went to the cheaper school and still managed to get hired is about the same as the folks who sold a kidney to get through <preferred tier-1 school>.

This image, that you need to get into a top-20 school to make it in life perpetuates all the way down into high school and it needs to stop. Kids need to focus on just getting into college, not getting into an Ivy League school, and companies need to start hiring from the local state universities, not just the approved list of top schools the founders went to.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but the way you phrased it, there's already some survivorship bias -- the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter; this ignores people who don't have a degree but want to get a job in programming.

I know people without any college degree at all making > $80k in software (in lower COL areas), and others with degrees making anywhere from $50k - > $100k.

There are probably some correlations, but income seems pretty decoupled from college degree in the software field (moreso than in other fields). Pure anecdotal observations though.

A major advantage of college is that it teaches people how to learn, analyze, and reason generally--skills which make it easier for them to change careers later in life.

The problem, though, is that increasing US college costs increasingly rule out going to college to find yourself and maybe leaving without a degree. An increasing proportion of undergraduates must graduate in a timely fashion, with a degree that employers care for, or else they'll be crushed by undischargeable college debt for the foreseeable future. Obviously this wasn't a risk for Gates or el Zuck, but they're increasingly less typical in this.

Except actual certifications attached to MOOCs generally aren't free.