Will Dropouts Save America?

"I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses."<p>Even though this might sound to some like a description of what YC does, in fact we're reluctant to fund people who are still in school. There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.

I sometimes worry that some consider dropping out of college a cause of success rather than a symptom of success.<p>Many of the individuals mentioned in this article started companies while enrolled in college. It was only after they realized the true potential of these companies that they decided to fully invest themselves in their projects. You cannot simply drop out of university without some sort of plan and expect success to find you.

Sigh, there is a lot of misleading stuff in there. First of all, the whole article relies on conclusion by examples. But if you look at the data the successful start up entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly college graduates.<p>Secondly, even if we look at the examples of the successful dropouts we notice that even most of them get some significant advantage out of school.<p>Gates is the prime example. Everyone says he is dropped out of college, but he had the advantage of going to one of the richest high schools in the nation where he had access to a computer (which was an incredible luxury at the time). It is the skills he learned there that allowed him to actually create something useful and to start his company.<p>Jobs dropped out, but if Jobs was all by himself he would not be Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, and there would not be an Apple Computer. Jobs is Jobs because he met Woz, and Woz went to college where he ignited his passion for electronics and gained the skills which would later enable him to create the first Apple computers.<p>Now about Zuck. It is utterly obvious to anyone that followed the rise of Facebook that there would be no Facebook if Zuckenberg did not go to college. Sure he dropped out, but being there allowed him to assemble the team that build the site and be part of the culture that made the site useful and used. Facebook was a college phenomenon.<p>So things are not that simple. To be a successful entrepreneur you have to build something people want. And to do this nowadays you usually need to deal with machines and computers. And to know how to make computers do what you need them to do you need education. Now it is not certain whether formal education does a good job at this or not, but to say that all you need to do a successful start-up is gumption, can do spirit, "street smarts", sales skills, etc., is a dangerous lie.

One must not mistake education with school. Sometimes they are linked, sometimes they are not.<p>It would be foolish to take away from this article that education is unimportant - all of the people listed are incredibly well educated.<p>The well educated will save America. How many of these people have gone to school, that's another matter altogether.

Maybe I'm just drinking the Kool-Aid, but as a Senior at a pretty damn good college in the US, I don't think that my years here have been wasted. There was a time where I wanted to drop out and start a business, but I would have missed so much if I had.<p>I do not intend to be an academic, nor a professional. I would like to start a business someday. College didn't provide me with a set of skills which I can sell to an employer or employ to sell with. Rather–and this used to sound absurd to me as well–it improved my ability to teach myself.<p>I'm speaking from personal experience here, but I do think college has the same effect on my peers as well. I was a fairly proficient autodidact, teaching myself how to program in everything from C to Clojure, as well as a sizable array of other skills (double-entry accounting, for one).<p>But now I am able to pick up a book on the subject of abstract algebra and really learn the material. I know how to handle tricky political situations, where not all information is present and one party wants to get more out of the other. I have been exposed to people, cultures, and ideas that I would have been unlikely to come across had I dropped out to hack together a startup. I know how to talk to people with power. I am better able to see things from another perspective. I am a better person now, all around. (This paragraph is uncomfortably self-congratulatory, but I'll leave it in for what it's trying to convey.)<p>Sure, college is not for everyone. Some college are better than others, and some are better for specific purposes. But I have improved myself and my skills here, and I don't think I could have done the same had I not gone through college. I'm looking forward to changing the world in a big way.

What link-baity nonsense is this?<p>Yeah, people running/founding companies might drop out of school to do so, the people that they're directing, however, are engineers with graduate degrees.<p>Stay in school. The idea that articles like this perpetuate "Lose pounds NOW and eat whatever you want!" errr... I mean "Commonly accepted fact of life is incorrect! You're Harry Potter!" is a bad one. Stay in school. Get your degree.<p>No, high school dropouts won't "save America", people who figure out an economic system that can function in a post-industrial economy will.

Article exhibits the common fallacy that because some college dropouts are wildly successful, dropping out of college is correlated with success.<p>64% of US business owners have at least a Bachelor's degree (source: <a href="http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html</a>).<p>Unless you have a great and proven business idea that's already taking off, staying in school and getting a degree seems to have a closer correlation to success than dropping out.

After Sean Parker tweeted about this op-ed piece, there was conversation on Twitter about it by Sean, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Anil Dash, and many others.<p>I'm sure there are many I'm missing that represent good ideas, but here are at least the tweets about the piece from the people listed above: <a href="http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america" rel="nofollow">http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america</a>

I'm optimistic that future students will be more curious about entrepreneurship. Their disillusioned older brothers and sisters with graduate degrees will report back to them from the job front. There is an educational arms race that has caused the bar for degree and GPA requirements to be raised for many professional jobs. Folks are being squeezed to less rewarding jobs. And I'm already seeing a shifting mindset about the safety and inevitability of a good career after grad school.<p>As schools see their post-grad employment and salary figures drop, they will come around on what makes good preparation for life in the future job market.

There's a misconception i've noticed to why many go to college, in this area at least. I see no problem with going or dropping out. Everyone is in a different situation and at different levels in their career. Many have already ran or are running companies. In fact most of my friends that are going to college (those want to run startups) are going because...<p>They want to bide their time, as PG mentioned people should take their time. They want to have gone to Stanford, etc for the badge it holds, although this is becoming more debatable as the more people have degrees the lower value it holds and seems to be just for vanity. The most important reason is social pressure and trying to conform with their peers and for contacts they could make.<p>Next year i'm not planning to go to college at all, my current startup which launched about 2.5 months ago is about to pass 30,000 users a lot of which are buying products so we're nicely profitable.<p>I don't feel I need connections as I've been able to meet lots of great people on Twitter, at conferences like disrupt and contacting some before I visited SF. I've got about 5 months left and now i'm visiting SF, spending time meeting people and such. I'm decided.<p>I'm very happy to take the risk of moving to SF from London, this will be next spring and may be working on something new. I would say it's totally a case by case basis, it's fine if people want to go to college but I don't like that many have told me to go as it's what they had to go through. Which makes little sense.

The article highlights a handful of wild-success examples and thus suffers from selection bias. The difficultly of tracking failed start-ups has been discussed, but has anyone studied that failure rate? Seems there's a paucity of coverage in popular press, even if any actual sources exist. Playing up the genius, or the under-dog, seems common-- maybe there's a rule similar to "man bites dog".<p>The subtext of the article seems to be that US education doesn't give kids all of the tools needed ("Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure."). But that doesn't imply we need to discard education whole-sale. We probably just need to iterate (more often)-- cull obsolete topics and start testing new subjects.<p>Perhaps a passionate, motivated person can find and digest useful materials more effectively on her own than if she is distracted by formal schooling most of the day. But we won't make progress in the information age without a good degree of careful thinking. "[B]etting on the engines of future job creation" may make for a good read, but historically-informed updates to standard curricula would probably do the job.

Dropout? I beg your pardon. I completed 8th grade and then didn't go on to high school; I never "dropped out" of anything. The term you're looking for is "autodidact".

startups are indeed important job creators, and college isnt for everyone. however, in a general population, a successful startup entrepreneur is about as rare as a professional athlete in basketball, baseball, football, hockey etc. For the rest, a college education is by far still statistically the best way to a stable career and success. Would you tell all inner city kids to forget school and instead focus on being a pro-bball player someday? no - not because you dont believe a handful will make it, but because we know 99% of the rest wont. hence, this is a message targeted for the rare 1% talents, not for the 99%.

Reading both pg's comments and the article, I think the point here is that college is a great vehicle for moving ahead in life. But the vehicle may be headed to a destination that doesn't work for you.<p>In other words, use college for your own advancement, not to necessarily complete a pre-canned course of study. If you're Zuck and you've created something that's on fire, then it might make sense to leave early. If you want to become a neurosurgeon, you're probably just getting started. It all depends on your personal situation. With a lack of goals and traction in life, staying the course on some 4 or 6-year study program <i>might</i> be the best thing to do.<p>You can't mix up structured education and learning. Structured education is great for some things, but at some point you have to switch from structured education into self-directed education. That point is going to be in a different spot for everybody. Those that try to tell you that it is one way or the other -- years and years of college versus just drop out and do it -- are oversimplifying the situation drastically.<p><i>Use</i> college. Don't let college <i>use you</i>. The guys that are $100K in debt with a degree and no job prospects are just as screwed as the guys who dropped out and can only get minimum-wage labor (In fact, I'd argue the drop-outs might be better off, as long as they have a strong culture of self-education, networking, and ambition -- at least they know their behind the curve and are going to have to continue to adapt drastically to survive whereas many college grads do not -- but that's my bias.)

no. people like gates or zuckerberg will not save the country.<p>a long time ago (actually not that long) people who had wealth pursued education. they gravitated to universities they travelled the world to learn about culture. they were not becoming educated in order to increase their monetary wealth.<p>this was true even as recent as andrew carnegie, once the world's wealthiest man. according to one biography, the mentor carnegie chose to help him become more educated preferred the company of carnegie's brother, by comparison a man of modest accomplishments but who apparently had a more interesting intellect than andrew.<p>at the same time we read that gates fancies the khan academy and takes his children on tours of factories. i'm not even going to mention zuckerberg's activities.<p>things have changed i guess.<p>university has value aside from being a path to higher income. i feel sorry for the uneducated man, no matter how much wealth he acquires. circumstances can change and men can lose their fortunes. but education is not something a man can lose. it is his for life.

Getting Lay'd Off taught me more about entrepreneurship than any school.

I would think it is mostly about the person.<p>Some people - like me, are very anti authoritarian and love to do things on their own and teach themselves how to become better at things. Some people enjoy a more structured life. I dont think any of the paths are wrong its just that there are different kinds of people, and different kinds of people take different kinds of paths to achieve the same thing.<p>Will dropouts save America, probably not, looking at the stats it seems as if people fare far better going the education route but a couple will succeed and because they are in the minority people will rejoice "Hey look, we to can succeed without getting a degree", what they missed though is the mountain of work these people put into their projects to succeed. There are no shortcuts.<p>College is hard work (Im sure), doing it without a degree is also a lot of hard work. And as I said earlier, it comes down to the person to decide what is the right path for him/her.

If you're in school and thinking of dropping out, take a look at the numbers: <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm</a><p>Despite the state of the economy, college grads have a 4.2% unemployment rate.

It's all mentality. The "I'll get a degree, find a job, and move up the ladder" way of doing things is dying.<p>If you have the drive, thirst to educate yourself, and hustle to go out and do it, you probably don't need college (referring to business degree).<p>College has some good things to offer, but too often it's a false reality. You don't learn the real world lessons that come from dealing with actual clients, paying you actual money, to provide actual value.<p>You can only learn so much with case studies and papers.<p>I learned more in the first 3 months at an internship at a marketing agency were I was getting paid $8/hr than the 4 years of college, which cost $100k.

There are two types of dropouts: (1) those who can't keep up with the rest, and (2) those who are and realize they are far above the rest and quit because school would slow them down.<p>Those in category (2) like Gate, Job, Zuckerberg are rare. And schooling is necessary to train those who help make Gate, Job, Zuckerberg who they are. Without these engineers, managers, etc. there would be no Gate, Job, Zuckerberg. The dropouts of category (1) ain't going to do it.

I don't see why there is an inherent assumption that college and entrepreneurship are mutually exclusive.<p>Pretending that college prevents people from pursuing a career in entrepreneurship is ridiculous. What would those students be doing instead? Working at Starbucks while they build their startups at night? How is that better? Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out because their startups were already wildly successful. They didn't drop out to start them.

The article seems to miss that for the examples it gives, while the founders might have been college dropouts, the products/companies themselves would not have made it to where they are now if not by the work of many people who did finish college and in many cases graduate school.

The right people will be motivated by the right words. Those who aren't right, won't hear it. If you read that and wanted to find justifications (references) on why Ellsberg was wrong, then you are too risk averse.

I wonder if school sucks at teaching so much that we failed to retain most knowledge we learn in schools and thus that why even people with a high school degrees are not worth much.

I actually gave up my MS degree, and saved quit a bit time to learn sth useful.<p>3 years after that, I want to say, it was a nice decision. I do not need a degree anyway.