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You Are Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
theodp writes "Over at TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa offers some don't-be-a-fool-stay-in-school advice to students that sounds a bit like an old-school Mr. T PSA. TechCrunch CEO Michael Arrington's questioning of whether students need to get any degree or go to college at all may sound appealing — dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did do alright for themselves — but Wadhwa gives some good reasons why you should probably take the school-is-for-chumps argument with a grain of salt. 'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,' and many big companies won't even consider hiring you for that fallback job without a degree. And, believe it or not, you can still become a tech billionaire later in life even if you're cursed with a PhD." Tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson approaches this question slightly differently; here's an analysis he made a few years ago, with the conclusion that the college investment pays off only about half the time.
There should be more people like you. But one question, what do you do when hiring a graduate with no portfolio to speak of? Do you judge their suitability for the job by character alone and train them? Subquestion: are the people you are hiring the type of people who can be trained on the job?
I ask because I know now that I've worked for a major international oil company for several years no one is ever going to be interested in what uni I went to or what my marks were, but they sure as hell were when I first started.
Most of the people don't realize how useful is the theoretical background they receive. They think like "hey, why do we learn about XY, I will never use it in practice" but in reality we DO use lot of these stuff. Theoretical stuff changes your thinking and extends your abstraction capabilities. Your vocabulary grows as well. Just ask any outsider what do they understand when you start talking about technical matters. Maybe you will never use matroids or Galois fields or Laurent series in your life, but you heard about them and you will know where to search if needed. If you don't know the basics, then you cannot search.
Average student loan debt coming out of college is around $20,000. I went to a $45k per year institution, and with loans, grants, and work study I was able to graduate in 4 years with just under that much. College debt is excellent debt to have. There are tons of repayment options, deferment options, rate discounts for on-time payment, and low interest rates. Mine vary from 2-4%.To top it off, when you pay them off your credit goes sky high, so when you're ready to buy that house in 10 years you'll be saving money due to a lower interest rate. I can easily afford my payments of around $150 per month.
Sure, that person $100k in the hole is not in a good position, but he's not in a usual situation.
Also, if you want to start your own small business, college is one of the best places to do so. You meet tons of talented people just like you who can be potential partners, and you meet professors and other business people who can be mentors and help incubate your business. It's called networking, and it's very difficult to do (though not impossible) if you're not in that kind of environment. I used to be president of the Entrepreneurship club at my university. I knew all the businesses starting up out of my school, local investors, and incubators who specialized in providing seed money to university startups.
It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.
Except, of course, if I know that you payed $100 for the same taco you knew full well you could get for $2 right down the street. Knowledge and personal development are not confined to universities, believe it or not they can be obtained elsewhere for a lot less money.
-Wes