Poll: What's your level of educational attainment

...I honestly don't know. I just didn't go. No truant officers ever showed up that I heard anything about.

I also dropped out of high school. I just stopped showing up, and spent my days writing code. Way better education than classes.

About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13).

BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials.

And now I'm a Ph.D. student.

I agree, but it's too late to change the title.

It sounds like you may have gone to the wrong college. Over my three years of programming for both enterprise-y SaS companies and agile little tech startups in the valley the most consistently helpful knowledge I have came from my courses in college. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't necessarily study the implementation details of Current Technology, but the theoretic underpinnings of Past, Current, and Future programming.

As an example: most people who code in javascript probably don't cite familiarity with lambdas and closures as a relevant and highly-useful skill, but I certainly would. After I submit this comment I'm going to return to my web app that uses closures to bridge the gap between the DOM and the javascript variable environment. Outcome: awesome. Could you do it with a Javascript for Dummies book? Probably not.

I have this guy to thank: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/

I suspect there is the pattern: very limited knowledge obtained during formal education, most as self education.

Help those self-educating?

I know, the path is a little beaten by, for example, certification programs.

Is there business opportunity? Maybe.

My so-far limited formal education(I'm a senior in high school) itself has taught me some things about biology and chemistry and medicine that I might not have learned purely of my own motivation, but in the case of chemistry, I learned most of that by reading the textbook and then doing other things in class and ignoring the teacher. In the case of my biology class, I wasn't motivated enough to read the textbook(or to take it to class or home, for that matter), so I took notes and did other things in class and learned it. In the case of anatomy and physiology(the source of aforementioned medical knowledge), we don't have textbooks, so as in biology, I take the notes and otherwise don't pay attention in class but still learn it.

Calculus is something I did not from my formal education; however, I was taking the course when I learned it. I had wanted to learn it for a while(my first attempt was at around 8 years old, but I saw the strange notation and didn't realize the text explained it), but I had yet to actually do so. In part, this was because I didn't have any books on the subject and the wikipedia article didn't seem like a very good introduction. When I received my textbook for the course, I learned differential calculus. After a while, I got bored and learned integral calculus. I got bored again and learned how to do iterated integrals and partial differentiation. I'm glad I got bored so often during that year because the course itself only got us through definite integrals.

In American secondary education, I think that the main educational utility is from the provision of textbooks to the students. That has been, at least, the main utility of my school to me(other than exposure to such things as the creative writing and theatre clubs). My school is, however, a particularly bad public school in a very poor small rural town. It's possible that other formal education may be much better(I certainly hope that the college I attend next fall will utterly change my mind about formal education).

Congratulations. You've attended good schools.

I would say maybe 20% (for me).

Now that I'm back in college, this time assistant-teaching as well as taking grad-level classes and sneaking in time for research, I am more amazed than ever by how wasteful the academic world is. They chop up your day into many context-switches (one of the worst things a knowledge-worker can do), they focus on lectures and exams instead of mentoring and experiences that bring about learning, they require useless courses, they emphasize grades relentlessly (known to decrease learning), and they present material out of context (so it's hard to retain or apply).

I think good teaching can be done in the academic world (I have seen some), and of course it's the place to go to do scientific research. But overall, the academic world is just not very good at what it does (except arguing about minutiae and winning research grants and endowments). The basis of its strong market position is subsidies and prestige. It's ripe for competition from savvy entrepreneurs.