I've been seeing LinkedIn posts of the same format everyday. A "founder-operator" aura-farming a post to announce dropping out of college, criticizing the BS curriculum and structure of university teachings and environment.
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. 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 in its "emphasis 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. There are 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, I found looking back it's made me the most effective and best case I could be. I didn't enjoy learning and studying. I 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 just 10 week sprints with hours and hours of homeworks, labs, quizzes, projects, essays, and exams that are happening every single week. 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, the friend group 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 on after school cram classes and Saturday ballet, art, and piano. 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 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 as a golf recruit, joining their NCAA DIII team. I left as a "D1 academic".
Though this sounds like I became an incoherent man detached from regular society, the actual result was mundane. The biggest difference I found came from the perception of smoke and mirrors 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. Similar things with internships. A problem arises fundamentally from this.