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.

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...

Of course college doesn't guarantee that you'll come out making $100k a year or more, but also NOT going to college is the same.

As happy as I am for this person, I hope no one gets the wrong idea from these posts and just drops out. Having an idea is one thing, putting it together and having it be a success is another. If anything, I would say the YouTube and Facebook guys had it right, they made the product during college, released it during college, succeeded during college, and subsequently left college. Thats the way to do it IF ANY.

And for some people, school just isn't there thing. Anyways I'm rambling, I think my point has been made.

When all those TV Shows, Newspapers and Blogs are having this debate the question they are asking is whether the environment that requires a degree should exist. So arguing that people with a degree make more money in the current environment is irrelevant to the debate itself.

(He does set up a straw man of parents on the edge deciding not to send their kids to college but I see that as unrealistic. No parent who is going to send their kid to college changes their mind based on what Katie Couric says or what they read on a blog)

No college degree will make you rich. What a college degree offers is a change in how competitive you are for higher paying jobs.

No one really gets wealthy working in STEM careers, but technical ability is one of the most direct routes to having at least a middle class life.

The choice of school matters, the choice of major matters, but not in predictable ways and it's important to weigh the costs and benefits together. Yeah, private schools have better alumni networks, but do you want to spend 4x on your undergrad to access those? To what extent can you substitute hard work for buying access?

When I was in high school, I seriously considered becoming a doctor. However, I ran the numbers - becoming a doctor vs. going into business and working as hard as I'd have to work to become a doctor. Becoming a doctor probably pays off, but not until you're in your 40s. However, you can put away a lot more money in your 20s and 30s working rather than studying medicine so the break even point is very sensitive to the ROI. But the point is the same choose your own adventure, but at least weigh the options.

Ok man, nice pulling up the ladder.

Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation the gap between college grads and non-grads is the widest it's ever been. Crisis such as the Great Recession and Covid has seen the gap widen, even as anti-college movement has gained popularity online. That's the funny thing about this, you got these people with degrees who who are saying to not go to college even as the wage premium is the widest it's ever been and keep widening with no end in sight. High inflation only makes college more attractive. Inflation hurts poor people whose wages suck.

Same for Peter Thiel...he is wrong to encourage ppl to drop out of college. You ware more likely to get rich with college, even with a liberal arts major major at a mid-ranked school, than you are to drop out (unless you got rich parents, I guess).

"Students today leave school with so much debt" I finished school debt-free. I saved up for school and applied for as many scholarships as I could. Many employers will even give you signing bonuses to help pay off student loans.

"What it teaches is out of date by the time students graduate" College is not a tech school. Going to college is more about learning how to learn and meeting people. If you really want to go places in your field of study you spend lots of time out of class exploring new ideas, and if this is the case you will likely be ahead of the curve through most of your life.

"People learn by doing, not by sitting in a class and being lectured to." Yeah. Most science and engineering classes are heavily lab and project based.

"Four years of information is too much to retain" Perhaps for some. However those same people can easily review and be back up to speed.

"The truth is that college is one big party" College is what you make of it.

What you realize later in life is that the point of all these steps by and large is simply to get you to the next step.

Go to high school and your goal is to get to college. Once you get to college nobody cares about high school, your transcript or your permanent record anymore.

Go to college and your goal is to build a network of friends and colleagues and to get to the working world or to a grad school.

Get to that and nobody cares about college anymore. And so on.

Granted you learn things along the way but learning really seems to be secondary. The ability to read, an Internet connection and a Web browser is all you really need to learn (although there is obvious value in directed instruction, course structure, tutoring/mentoring, etc). The "learning" part of education is probably the most interesting at the moment what with Stanford (and others) offering courses online, the Khan Academy and so forth.

I dropped out of university on the first try. I went through several years of "you don't need a degree". While that might be technically true it hurt my career, I didn't have the same network of contacts that others did and (for a time at least) I didn't have the same theoretical background.

In the end I got a mediocre degree from a mediocre institution studying part-time for three reasons:

1. To put me in the pile of CVs "with degree" (the "without degree" pile more often than not just ends up in the circular file);

2. As an exercise in finishing something. This is actually important, particularly for programmers. Starting things is easy, finishing is hard. There is value of sticking with college for 3-4+ years both to yourself and as a demonstration to future employers; and

3. Visa reasons. It would be near-impossible for me now to work in the US if I hadn't gotten a degree.

People like to bring up Jobs, Gates and Zuck as examples of why you don't need a degree. There are two problems with that:

1. Statistically speaking, you aren't one of these; and

2. All of them went to college.

I can't stress (2) enough. They just didn't finish. Thing is, they found their "next thing" (well, Jobs' path was a little more roundabout).

Going to college in the US involves a more complicated decision process than elsewhere because of cost and--let's face it--elitism.

Going to Stanford, MIT or CMU as a programmer is no doubt valuable and I won't question the value of the education those august institutions provide but a huge part of the value is the name. It's social proof but it's also arguably elitism.

That same social proof comes into play when you have Google or Facebook on your CV.

Going to such places might leave you with staggering debt. In CS, at least for now, that doesn't seem to be much of a problem. But there are cheaper options (eg UT Austin seems to be a well-regarded state school for CS).

Anyway, the moral of the story is that college or not you should always be looking to the next step. To put it another way: college is a means to an end not an end in itself.

Most folks who didn't go to college lead relatively trite lives. Most folks who DID go to college lead relatively trite lives. It's like Thoreau said: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." This guy's just the pot calling the kettle black.

There is no better & less expensive way for someone between the ages of 18 and 21 to surround themselves with people the same age, who are as smart as they are, and learn how to be a positive social creature.

Maybe it's because I have a liberal arts degree instead of an engineering degree, but college taught me how to be a person, in the broadest sense. I'm perfectly happy to admit I went to college because that was "the thing to do," and I'm glad I can relate to so many people by virtue of having done it.

My best friends are still the 5 people living on my freshman floor who played counterstrike on 2ms ping university servers at 4am with our doors open, shouting at each other down the hall.

College is FUN. F-U-N. It is a highly structured 4-year period where you have exactly 2 responsibilities: graduate and don't die.

Sure, there might be less expensive ways to socialize, but none that so forcefully eject you from the shell you built around yourself in high school - something I suspect many who hope to eventually be in startups have built. You can say "oh, go to tech meetups", but you can still stand in the corner there, an intimidated 18-year old, just as easily as anywhere else.

If you can take Guy Kawasaki's advice: live off your parents as long as humanly possible. And if you have to pay for college yourself, consider it an investment in what many people consider the best 4 years of their lives.

Imagine a car which gets 8 MPG and breaks down every day. Now, you know this car sucks, so you criticize it constantly. But then the car manufacturer hits back: "Cars are necessary. Cars help you get places faster. Cars are comfortable and private."

Of course, you know all this. You're not opposed to the idea of using a vehicle for fast transportation; you're just opposed to what passes for a car today.

And so it is with college. I oppose the standard model for universities which prevails in today's world (largely due to state support): four years, classes, lectures, A-F grades, rigid structure, and so on.

I do NOT oppose learning, education, networking, socializing, relaxing, and having fun. In fact, I think all of those things can be done better with a radically different school system. So please don't keep telling me college provides all this. Some of us do think today's colleges do such a bad job that you're better off not going even if you miss out on some things. But that doesn't mean we actually want everyone to miss out on these experiences as an ideal.

Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to college, but can't reason with me why.

> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites

I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me that's more telling of their true beliefs

Like college education isn’t necessary as long as you have college professors for parents?

The absurdist continuation is something like: “I’d like to think if I was motivated enough I could retroactively convert my parents from city bus drivers to tenured professors in a lucrative field, then I wouldn’t need a college education”?

There will always be time to work, and to be good at your job. School can be more than that. Pretty much everyone shits on college these days, and I certainly understand why, but this shouldn't be looked at as anything other than conventional wisdom at this point. It's not a cutting-edge take or anything of the sort.

I've always been curious, and a little disturbed, at how inflexible a college education is for something supposedly universal. People are different and need different things from their education, but everyone gets the same sort of classes at the same sorts of medium-to-large institutions. If you want something less oriented around classes or smaller and more personal or more specialized or more hands on or not forced into digestible quarter- or semester-sized chunks, you're completely out of luck.

But if this doesn't work, it's apparently a problem with you, not with the system.

And then, of course, we turn around and feign surprise when college prices go up as we artificially drive demand through the roof.

I personally valued the college experience I've had so far... with the exception of most of my classes. What really worked for me was doing research, taking graduate courses, learning on my own, interacting with other students and a bunch of external things like working part-time at a startup. But there's simply no other way to get into research, even though many seem to agree that the overlap between strong study skills and research potential is, at best, limited.

I'd like to be doing research now and, false modesty aside, would be entirely capable, but it's very difficult outside the inflexible system. It really doesn't need to be.

In hindsight, I would have loved an alternative. But, as far as I know, that alternative does not exist and, if it did, I would not have known about it in high school. The only other choice would have been going to a small liberal arts college, which has more classes and less of everything I actually liked.

The pressure to go to college is too high. The worst part is that the pressure itself is not irrational because of the irrational way the rest of the system is set up.

Sure, it makes sense for some people to skip college. And maybe someone could even make the case that most people would be better off abstaining from higher education.

But what if you want to be a researcher? A scientist? Someone working on the outer boundaries of knowledge in some particular discipline? Self-study is all very well and good, but for most of the empirical sciences, to make an impact you are going to need experiences and credentials that can only be acquired in a university setting.

Money isn't everything.

However, this makes the mistaken assumption that college's only role is to prepare you for a career. I majored in Philosophy at a Jesuit college in Chicago. Currently, I'm a software developer. College was about getting introduced to new ideas and read books I would have never sought out on my own. Really... who reads Augustine or Kierkegaard anymore? I learned how to live on my own in college; how I wanted to spend my time and my money, how to survive in my first apartment and make rent money. I also met a great bunch of friends I still keep in contact with.

Bottom line: college should never be treated like a trade school. It's not designed for job training. If you consider it so, it never makes economic sense. College, and liberal arts degrees in particular, teach you how to think.