I'm a high school senior. I've done web development since I was 13, released an iPhone app at age 15, and continue to have aspirations to start my own company someday.<p>However, I'm only really good at what I'm interested in, but not much else- my HS GPA is only a 3.8, and my SAT's hover around 2100.<p>The statistics are really depressing- I feel like I'd be a perfect fit for a school like Stanford or Carnegie Mellon, but chances are I won't get accepted.<p>Is all lost if I don't get into an renowned school for CS? Will VC's take one look at me and laugh once they find out I didn't graduate from Harvard? Are there any stories of HNers who've been successful without the Stanford degree?<p>Thanks guys, I love this community and I'm glad to be a part of it.
Yes, they will laugh at you the minute you walk in front of them without a degree from a prestigious school.<p>While a great school will open doors, actually doing something will open more. So no, you aren't screwed, unless you plan on spending the next four years sitting on your ass like a bump on a log.
Other posters have emphasized the apparent declining value of college. I agree with their positions, but I would like to emphasize that college isn't so much about becoming a better programmer as it is about gaining deep knowledge in an _academic_ area (not practical), broadening your knowledge (something you should do if you're only good at programming), a very particular and magical social setting that you will only have access to for 4-5 years after the age of 18 (you never get those years back and if you spend them working, then you missed a chance to have a _unique_ experience. You will be working your whole life. You can only go to college for the first time once.)<p>Studying an academic discipline may seem pointless to you, and that's fine, but if you do decide to go to college, I would recommend that you see it more as a luxury than a means to an end. Try to geek out and enjoy yourself, purely intellectual pursuits are one of the main reasons for living in this world.<p>Two other perks of university:<p>(1) if you get into a good one, people will be more likely to respect your opinion. By good one I mean name brand: Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, etc. This is perhaps an unfortunate artifact of the transition from a more stratified society to (an even more stratified) meritocracy that may disappear in our lifetimes, but it's very much the case now.<p>(2) you will learn how to write better. This is super important.<p>All that said, there's no reason to go into 100-200k of debt. I managed to get out of university with no debt thanks to inexpensive tuition in Canada, but I promise you that university is not worth 10-30 years of wage slavery.
Paul Graham has written an essay about this:<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html</a>
If you love this community, I'm surprised you missed all the recent top-voted "unschooling" articles claiming that college isn't even a worthwhile investment anymore, and/or saying that starting a business is a better education for entrepreneurs.<p>There are a ton of successful tech people in the valley that don't have more than a high school diploma.