I've been seeing LinkedIn posts of the same format every day. An 18 year old "founder/growth hire" posting about dropping out of college, criticizing the BS curriculum and structure of university teachings and environment being worthless.
Similarly, out of touch traditionalists with an AB in East Asian Studies from Harvard 30 years ago swear by the importance of advanced education, promising "problem solving skills" they somehow developed learning about 1950s Maoism.
Honestly, me? I don't know who's right. But I'm just here to write out some of my thoughts about this topic, and my personal beliefs given a few friends were curious. If it helps anyone making the decision even one bit, that'd be great. If not, it's still a good way to spend my afternoon at Starbucks.
It may be helpful to give some background on myself first, so if it influenced your viewpoint you can understand where it's coming from.
I went to a T10 liberal arts college in rural Minnesota that has been ranked 1st on US News in undergraduate teaching and education the past two decades. Carleton College is an institute that literally prides itself on its "emphasis on providing high-quality instruction to undergrads". Class sizes are 15-30 people; every professor gives out 8 hours of 1-on-1 office hours a week. It also has the highest percentage of students going into PhD graduate programs across any college or university in the nation. We're basically a school of nerds.
I'm not saying all this to flex my school. Most people have never heard of it, and some think it's a community college. There are also things I am dissatisfied with from my college experience and Carleton as a whole, especially so with its handling of preparing undergraduates for career prospects outside of more school (masters and PhD degrees). (I may write another post specifically focused on these thoughts some point down the line). But I'm giving this info to provide a context to the type of environment I was in, and its subsequent shaping of my current thoughts on higher education.
I was an outlier at Carleton, but got boxed into a "schooling" path due to social and structural constraints. Oddly, looking back, it's made me more effective than I would've been otherwise. I didn't enjoy learning and studying. I was a golf recruit who loved the outdoors, running, falling, playing in the dirt. I didn't want to be locked in a classroom staring at whiteboards.
However, Carleton made me do it. We don't have a semester system, we have trimesters that are essentially 10-week sprints with hours and hours of homeworks, labs, quizzes, projects, essays, and exams that are happening every single week. For instance, I had a 3-class term with 8 essays, 3 final exams, 6 midterms, 2 final projects, a daily quiz, and a problem set and code assignment due every class (all in 2.5 months). We don't have 500 person lecture halls or remote zoom options that are taught by TAs, we have 20 student capped lectures from the professor who wrote the book we're using, and a single absence means a personal email inquiry from the professor.
Furthermore, one of the friend groups I was in mainly consisted of a bunch of international Chinese students from all the top international high schools that believe a 4.0 gpa on top of hard coursework is more impressive than Shohei Ohtani, and who have literally been working 996 startup hours as a 12 year old if you count after school cram classes and Saturday dance, advanced math, art, and piano lessons. Either that or Midwest folks walking barefoot with shorts on in 12 degree Minnesota November on their way to Complex Analysis or Advanced Linear Algebra, who find more comfort in Singular Value Decomposition than their fellow humans. In this environment, it's hard not to focus on education. So that's what I did.
I found myself double majoring in CS and math, while also taking a fleet of courses in other disciplines spanning american politics, banking, theater, metaphysics, Chinese pop culture, game theory, and history of board games. All this time grinding my a** off to do well in all of them so I can keep my pride up.
I had come into Carleton for golf, joining their NCAA DIII team. I left as what I call a "D1 academic".
Though this sounds like I became someone detached from regular society, the actual result was mundane. The biggest difference I found came from the perception of academic prestige and actual competence, stuff I see only when I step outside of the Northfield bubble I called home for 4 years.
In our current society, outward prestige and perception is everything. Your "persona", especially online, makes or breaks how you are viewed and valued. We're taught you don't need to graduate college, or even go to college. As long as you got the offer to go to that school, the prestige is there. We are no longer judging people based on the experience, knowledge, and skillset they accumulate through higher education, instead we look at where they're accepted and perhaps what their major is, that block on LinkedIn or the line on the resume. Similar things happen with internships.
But a problem arises fundamentally from this. Think about it, this causes a shift where socially we reward external prestige over knowledge breadth and tangible skills. Sure, marketing and pitching yourself is one of the most effective and necessary skills to develop and lock down. But optimizing for empty things like surface level prestige instead of building yourself from the ground up may come back to bite you in the long run.
There is a Chinese idiom coined from the Warring States period, 舍本逐末 (shě běn zhú mò), which means abandoning the root to chase the branches. Practically, it's used to describe optimizing for the wrong thing, often in chase of superficial goals. Such is reflected a lot in the current condition of our education.
This is why I personally believe the decision to drop out or not must be guided by a fundamental question. What are you truly optimizing for. What are your real goals. If the answer is you don't know, but "school is boring and you just want to build + it's cool to drop out/your friends did", then you need to stop and really think. If your answer is more along the lines of you truly have a unquenchable, immediate thirst to build and create, and really will fill the terrifyingly free time you earn from quitting school with satisfying that itch, then maybe you should seriously consider making that leap. Pro athletes like Novak or Kobe never went to college, but you better believe their days were filled with 10x more intense workouts and obsessive pursuit of even minute improvements to their craft. Few people reach a devotion or passion even close to that, and if that's not you, why drop out?
Back to using myself as an example. I dabbled in a few startups/projects while continuing school. Though I was passionate, I never reached the level of commitment that I thought granted me reason to quit school for it, and I was mature enough to recognize this. So if you do see me start a company one day that is my full-time job, you'll know for sure that's when I am giving it my all. Sure it was challenging to continue coursework while working on side projects or outside learning. For a while I considered dropping out too. But all in all, I'm very happy I continued and graduated. I'll probably never touch half the math proofs I learned or code in Scheme or Kotlin again, but the fundamental skills I learned from each course stays. Econ-influenced me would say the opportunity cost I sacrificed from not leaving school would have been marginal at the time, yet the utility from staying in school surrounded by a community that pushed me to work harder, become smarter, and develop myself would be far greater.
I don't think college is everything. But I also don't think it's nothing. For me, it was a something: even if just a forcing function I probably needed at the time. And those of you thinking of dropping out, just be sure your reasons for doing so outweigh that "something" college provides.