As someone who dropped out of college and had to cope with the consequences, I often think if college is worth it for the typical use-case in HN discussions: an ambitious & hard-working American citizen < 24.
While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:
1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and ultimately run PayPal.
The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating. Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any metric.
2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years? Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is literally $500k (just for undergrad).
I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who win wars, not soldiers.
I took a course on DesignLab, a platform for learning how to design as a hacker, and it was really good. Learned all the basics of how to MVP my own sites with some polish. www.trydesignlab.com
Just signed up for one of these too. Looks like exactly what the OP is looking for. I haven't taken the course yet, so I can't speak to how good it will be, but I like that their approach seems to be learn/build/critique cycles.
As someone who was influenced by Peter Thiel to drop out of college and do a startup with my room mate, I can say it was a mistake in hindsight. Even though I was able to land on my feet (I'm now 25 and making 6 figures), I had to go through a lot of extra hurdles, stress, and doubt to prove my worth to the world and employers when starting out my career.
The odds were greatly against it working out favorably in my circumstances (I went to a tier 3 school, didn't get my startup funded, etc) and I had to possess serious hustle and grit to make it to where I am. I see people who simply studied hard, followed a plan, and graduated from an Ivy or similar college coasting by much easier - that's the path I would take if I could do it over again.
Because Peter Thiel was a big influence on my decision 4-5 years ago to drop out, I look back in hindsight on my experience and think he is wrong to advocate a path he didn't take. He went to Stanford, then got a JD, worked at a hedge fund (try getting that job as a college dropout), and then became a monstrous success at PayPal & Founders Fund after building credibility & success. To think he could have replicated his career path as a college dropout is incredulous. The odds are 10x more against you, and many more doors are closed than open (finance, grad school, etc).
If you want to be successful there is a very easy path if you're mature enough to work hard during high school: goto the best school you can, study a science, engineering, or finance major, and you will have >50% chance of becoming rich enough to live comfortably and retire if you continue to work hard and hustle after you graduate.
Are you sure that you wouldn't have had to face those hurdles even if you'd gone to college? I went to Amherst (#1 liberal arts college in the country when I matriculated). A number of my classmates are almost a decade older than you and would love to be making 6 figures.
I don't know a single Millenial who hasn't struggled with reality post-graduation. (Actually, that's not quite true, I know a couple Googlers who got in straight out of school. They're a minority, though.)
Personally, I think that the biggest advantage a person can have today is to consider rejection Somebody Else's Problem. The people who can get rejected over and over again and still bounce back to full energy immediately tend to succeed no matter where or whether they went to college and no matter what they try.
I'm sure I still would have had plenty of hurdles even with a degree, and I don't mean to discount that starting a career is hard for anyone, but the matter at stake here is whether it's optimal for smart, young people to go to college or skip it/drop out.
My personal experience is full of rejection, stress, and closed doors (I still can't go to grad school to get a higher paying job such as an MBA or Law Degree in my 30's, and finishing my bachelors has a huge opportunity cost).
Compare that to liberal arts students at Ivy League colleges who a few years ago were getting handed $100 bills to attend a 1 hour on-campus recruitment session with the hedge fund Bridgewater. That path for capable people seems much better to me than what I had to go through.
If you're a smart, talented young person, I advocate studying hard and going to a top college rather than dropping out. You might just end up becoming a billionaire and paying people to skip college as part of a personal experiment :)
I think that even the hedge fund stories have more to them than meets the eye for a casual observer. I have a classmate who works at Bridgewater, and has since graduation (well, graduation plus the six months of unemployment it took to find a job). He got there by e-mailing everybody in the Amherst alumni directory who worked in finance and asking if they'd give him a job, and an alum at Bridgewater was the only person who responded affirmatively. Now, he ultimately got the job through the alumni network, which is a tool that wouldn't be available to someone who didn't go to school - but his path was still full of rejection, stress, and closed doors.
I suspect that college does help skew peoples reactions toward you favorably, but that the ability to hustle ultimately matters more to your long-term success. Then the question is whether having that lifetime skew effect is worth the $100K+ and 4 years of opportunity cost. My personal feeling is that it probably is if a.) you get into an Ivy League or "brand name" college or b.) you come from a lower-class background and your parents don't have a network or much cultural capital. But for most middle-class kids going to a second-tier college, the opportunities it opens up are mediocre, and you are far better off putting the $100K+ and 4 years to work distinguishing yourself in some other way.
> I went to Amherst (#1 liberal arts college in the country when I matriculated). A number of my classmates are almost a decade older than you and would love to be making 6 figures.
I bet a some of them are in or finishing up graduate school, pursuing a subject that they're interested in though. Plenty of smart and well-adjusted people I know from undergrad make less than me, but for some of them - tbh, I'd switch places with them in a heartbeat for personal, job security and job satisfaction reasons.
I used to laugh secretly at my liberal arts peeps at Wesleyan (a worse liberal arts college) when we just graduated 6 years ago. But now peeps are pushing out their films in film festival, post-doc research at conferences and published novel tours and still relatively poor; but I'm quite envious of people taking creative control of their destiny and shipping something, which IMHO more important than the dollar figure. But ironically, it took me making six figures the confidence of reaching a certain "threshold" and the disillusionment of that "threshold" to realize this.
> a couple Googlers who got in straight out of school. They're a minority
Yes. I bet most of them are graduates of top US engineering schools whom arguably have had a very sheltered experience (but probably still less sheltered than Amherst or Wes tho). They for sure got a head start compared to everyone else in "personal finance." But tbh, like you say, dealing with personal difficulties is actually a blessing in disguise and an important phase in your life to know to keep going and going esp. when the going is tough. In some ways, I think the jury is still out for your Googler youn'g vs. the battered Amherst post-grad's toughing it out. I'd give it another 25 years when everyone's in their 40's, 50's to make the judgement.
All teams who applied by the application deadline have been, but YC's homepage states they'll review late applications that are submitted on a rolling basis until June, before S14 actually starts.
Amazon's UI will never be considered beautiful, but it's core strategy of focusing on the numbers has allowed it to accomplish more than 99.9% of companies ever formed.
I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to where they are.
FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press & on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.
To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on the subject.
Would it be easy to sell a more advance EHR to hospitals if you could show it would cut down on malpractice? Sounds like all the comments are saying penetrating the hospital market has huge barriers. But if this is obviously better, and could save time & lives, they should use it.
I'm sorry to reach out to you directly on a public forum like this, but my company's website encountered a major negative SEO attack last month and we were hit with a manual penalty by Google today. I thought you might be interested to hear about what happened, and I of course I would like to resolve it as I do my best to always keep my company's SEO efforts within Google's guidelines. Please reach out via email to me at mbrody@myclean.com if we can help each other fix this! Thanks again for everything you do to help make the web a better place, and in advance I understand if you're too busy to respond.
Don't apologize to just Matt, you're pseudo-apology and better-sent-as-an-email question pissed me off. Why would you take up three extra lines with a BS platitude and a signature? Please keep a personal request for assistance to better-suited channels.
While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:
1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and ultimately run PayPal.
The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating. Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any metric.
2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years? Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is literally $500k (just for undergrad).
I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who win wars, not soldiers.