Will Dropouts Save America?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html?smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all

by JJMalina • 15 years ago

187 112 15 years ago

One must not mistake education with school. Sometimes they are linked, sometimes they are not.

It would be foolish to take away from this article that education is unimportant - all of the people listed are incredibly well educated.

The well educated will save America. How many of these people have gone to school, that's another matter altogether.

jdvolz• 15 years ago

I would like to echo this sentiment. Further, having read the author's book 3 weeks ago, I'm confident even he wouldn't say the uneducated are going to save America. His book is about the alternative education that you can give yourself if you choose to seek it out, particularly around topics that are business centric (sales, marketing, personal branding, networking, etc.).

The point of the book is that he found common themes in the people who didn't have college degrees but who did attain business success.

blhack• 15 years ago

What link-baity nonsense is this?

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.

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.

No, high school dropouts won't "save America", people who figure out an economic system that can function in a post-industrial economy will.

wisty• 15 years ago

Depending on what the business is, dropouts might be just as capable as graduates. If the post-industrial economy demands more hairdressers, cooks, and barristas, then the ability to make a low-cal hamburger could be more useful than the ability to write a 3,000 word essay on why Hitler was possibly not solely responsible for WWII, but still a bad person (or whatever kids in college do these days). It depends on the course, and the student.

That said, a degree in a technical field from a good but inexpensive college will always be worth it.

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

I guess it was taken too far, but the main point is that school doesn't teach you a lot of really important skills you need to succeed.

I have no intention of dropping of school until I get a degree, but I also know that I will have to learn a lot of things that school won't teach me.

How many schools are actively teaching how to function in a post-industrial economy? Not many, I'm guessing.

bennesvig2• 15 years ago

My 100k college education didn't teach sales...which is kind of everything. If you can't sell yourself or your ideas, what good is your education.

Permit2• 15 years ago

I sometimes worry that some consider dropping out of college a cause of success rather than a symptom of success.

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.

pg3• 15 years ago

This is an important point that I don't think many people understand. Gates and Zuckerberg didn't drop out to start companies: they started companies in college, whose success drew them out.

rdl• 15 years ago

In addition to working on something yourself which takes off, the external business cycle might be a factor.

Dropping out (or at least going on leave) 1998-2000 made a lot of sense; probably the same 2006-2007 or even 2010-2011. Assuming you could get in with a company like Akamai, Google, Facebook, Square, ...

abiekatz4• 15 years ago

Steve Jobs would be the notable exception to this, he dropped out well before creating Apple

brudgers2• 15 years ago

They didn't drop out of some junior college or public high school either, but from Harvard following an education at elite private schools.

[edit] Brin, Page, Hewlett, Packard, Moore, Shockley - the list of people who didn't drop out is far more extensive.

Hitchhiker• 15 years ago

Listen very carefully to pg kids. And I think its easier to herd PhDs if you at least did some grad school. Look at Larry and Sergey, most respectable situation, they are on perpetual leave from their PhDs.

p.s. I did not open the link. The title indicated that the click-through would be a waste of time.

learc83• 15 years ago

It's a very complex situation. First a huge percentage of American's start college. So the odds of a successful founder having at least started college are going to be very high.

Add to the that, founders are more likely to come from a middle or upper class background. The percent of that demographic that attends college is even higher.

Then factor that successful founders are almost universally ambitious, and most ambitious people start college.

Given those numbers I'd wager that upwards of 90% of people who become successful founders have at least started college.

If their company succeeds while they are in college and they quit to focus on it, or if they drop out before starting the company--instant college dropout success story.

garethsprice• 15 years ago

Article exhibits the common fallacy that because some college dropouts are wildly successful, dropping out of college is correlated with success.

64% of US business owners have at least a Bachelor's degree (source: http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html).

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.

wanorris4• 15 years ago

It's transparently obvious from looking at data that getting a college degree is correlated with success, assuming success means having more income. The gulf is significant and growing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

randomdata4• 15 years ago

But all that really tells is that there may be some correlation to the attributes of a person which allows them to make their way through increasingly challenging levels of education (smarts, drive, luck, etc.), also allows them success in business. It is more than likely those attributes were present before entering college. Perhaps even as far back as birth.

kristofferR2• 15 years ago

The problem with statistics in discussions like this is that they don't really mean anything. Sure, the statistic you mentioned shows that 64% of business owners have a Bachelor's degree, but it doesn't show that having a Bachelor's degree is useful in starting and running a successful business. This is a common flaw with statistics.

Example - Most successful tech entrepreneurs are male (let's say 9/10). That doesn't mean that women are only 1/10 as likely to succeed in that space if they tried, it just means that most successful tech entrepreneurs are male.

People with Bachelor's degrees are likely higher than averagely smart and ambigious people with successful and supporting parents. Who knows what would have happened if they skipped over the degree they felt they needed and instead jumped right into starting a business. Sure, it would be very tough in the beginning, but I'd bet that they would reach their goals faster than delaying the start 3+ years. Ambition is correlated with success, a degree is just correlated with ambition.

Dropping out of college is, quite obviously, not positively correlated to success. Most people who drop out do it either because it is too hard/too much work or too expensive. However, I think that people who drop out (or not start at all) not mainly because of those factors, but because of a strong drive to reach their goals faster are just as likely to succeed (if not more so).

pg3• 15 years ago

"I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses."

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.

tzm• 15 years ago

Where were you 15 years ago when I scratched my itch? Consider me an early adopter of this sentiment. :D

abiekatz4• 15 years ago

Though I wonder, what is the best way to spend those years? Would working at and/or creating a startup at 19 better prepare the 22 year old to start a successful startup than attending college?

Of course there is more to college than just making an individual ready for a career in the real world but I think that college should evolve and find better ways to teach students than the current model.

palish3• 15 years ago

College isn't about learning. It's about forming social connections.

pg3• 15 years ago

Depends on the startup. Starting a startup will teach you more about startups, certainly. But you could end up on a local maximum. For example (this is just a conjecture of course) the Google founders might not have known enough to build Google at 19, and if they hadn't stayed in school, they might never have learned enough to.

In any case, as you say, the goal of college is not to make one a better startup founder.

zohebv• 15 years ago

Not everyone becomes a successful startup founder. Most people work as employees and not graduating will put a sever dent on their career prospects.

jjmaxwell42• 15 years ago

Can't things change quite a bit between these years? When your in school, you're broke. Its not weird to eat ramen and work all the time.

But by the time your 22, maybe you got an internship at a cool company, and they're offering you 80k a year. Your getting used to a decent standard of living. Maybe you get recruited by Wall Street and the dangle 140k under your nose. You take the job, and get locked in with the "golden handcuffs". Now your comfortable, and you meet a cute girl, who wants a guy with a steady job, so you never start the company.

Maybe this guy was never really meant to be an entrepreneur; maybe he wanted that comfortable life all along. But when he was 19 he was ready to go.

> There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.

I think there is a better chance that he won't start the startup at 22, cause he got a high paying job, and doesn't want to downgrade from his standard of living.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

I don't think YC really wants to fund people who would give up on a start up, just because of a 140k/year job. Start ups seem to be a lot of work, and you'd need to be really dedicated to succeed.

In my opinion, people dropping out of school for YC shouldn't be doing it because they see an alternative opportunity - they should be doing it for a variety of other reasons. The mental calculation should not be "I could do a start up and make money now, or I could do 3 more years of school and make 140k/year comfortably." It should be along the lines of, "I know I'll succeed, and I can't wait to do it."

Cushman2• 15 years ago

Better idea: Drop out of high school to go to college. Then start your business at 19 after graduating.

nickzoic• 15 years ago

> But by the time your 22 [...] Your getting used to a decent standard of living.

Get off my lawn!

Seriously, though, from my late-30s-with-a-young-family perspective, if being 22 with a girlfriend and an internship is enough to stop you chasing your dreams, then they weren't really your dreams after all.

littlegiantcap• 15 years ago

As a student working on a startup I think I can bring some perspective. They are both incredibly good learning opportunities. I'm the business side of things and, for example, there's a big difference between taking an accounting class versus actually having to keep books. My partners have said the same thing in regards to taking their comp sci classes versus actually working on a startup. It's also important to note that education is moving in a way where a lot of our classes can be taken as either night courses or online. We've been able to not have to choose one or the other, but be able to structure our schedules so we have enough time for both. Which in my opinion is the best way of doing things.

j2labs• 15 years ago

What about at 30?

trimbo3• 15 years ago

I agree there's no rush. There's no rush at all.

Henry Ford started his company at 40. Jeff Bezos, 30. Sam Walton, 44. Paul Galvin, 33. The Albrecht brothers were 41 and 39. TJ Watson, while not a founder, was 40 when he took over CTR and created IBM. Hewlett, 26. Packard, 27. Larry, Sergey were 25. Ellison, 33.

Jerky2• 15 years ago

So, if I'm over 30, there's no time like the present!

tlogan• 15 years ago

Fear of being poor increases as you get older (at least in US). And that is the bigest obstacle for many people to pursue entrepreneurship dream.

And regarding school, there is really no reason why not to go school when you are little older. In other words, we have this assumption in US that all schooling has to be finished by 24 or something like that.

johnnybgoode• 15 years ago

I'd be curious to learn more about your thinking on this. A few years ago you were heading in the other direction -- i.e., you were talking about how people could or should start companies at younger and younger ages.

pg, May 2005: "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?"

pg, now: "Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22."

It seems this logic can be extended to say people should wait even longer. Someone with a few years of experience at 26 should be able to do a better job of starting a company than someone at 22.

So I'm interpreting this as a major change in your thinking. It certainly isn't a crime to change your mind; I'm just curious about how and when it happened.

arvinjoar• 15 years ago

Let's say YC funds a 19 year old who bets everything on his startup instead of going to college. The startup fails and he has nothing to show for it. This puts pg in a bad spot, since he enabled someone who could be deemed a kid to screw himself royally.

I don't think it's a likely scenario though since getting accepted to YC and running your own startup should be enough of a merit to get you employed somewhere.

However, out of all the people accepted into YC there has to be at least one example of a person who not only did worse by doing a startup early on, but actually hurt himself pretty badly in the process. Of course, this is pure speculation, and there might not be any such cases.

Basically my theory is that pg just doesn't think it is worth it to potentially have blood on his hands (indirect as it might be).

michaelschade• 15 years ago

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.

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: http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america

hristov2• 15 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

doomlaser• 15 years ago

Woz's passion for electronics started waaaaay before college. More like at age 11. (I'm reading iWoz right now, it's great)

hristov2• 15 years ago

You are right there, but I am sure he learned a lot of useful stuff in college. I studied a lot of hardware and electronics myself and those fields include a lot of theory and high order math that one usually cannot learn in high school.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

>"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."

It's more than that. If Wozniak and Jobs had been in Topeka, there probably wouldn't have been an Apple computer because few people there would likely gambled on an order for 50 computers in 1976. Only in places like Silicon Valley were there the right demographics to support computer shops and create the sort of demand which allowed them to get their start. Later financing also was facilitated by location.

brackin2• 15 years ago

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

kiba• 15 years ago

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.

pallinder• 15 years ago

I would think it is mostly about the person.

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.

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.

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.

smashing• 15 years ago

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

benrpeters• 15 years ago

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.

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.

d-roo• 15 years ago

If you're in school and thinking of dropping out, take a look at the numbers: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Despite the state of the economy, college grads have a 4.2% unemployment rate.

randomdata4• 15 years ago

On the other hand, if those numbers are the only thing that is keeping you in school, you might want to consider the quality of the education you are receiving.

Showing a correlation does not really tell us anything meaningful. Even with a degree, you still might be missing what it takes and end up being part of the four percent. At this point, we have no real idea of what it takes for an individual to be successful in business until after the fact. Two people can do identical things with completely different results.

ihodes2• 15 years ago

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

josefresco• 15 years ago

How much did it cost you?

ihodes2• 15 years ago

Well over 200k.

clebio• 15 years ago

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".

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.

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.

bennesvig2• 15 years ago

It's all mentality. The "I'll get a degree, find a job, and move up the ladder" way of doing things is dying.

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).

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.

You can only learn so much with case studies and papers.

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.

terse• 15 years ago

no. people like gates or zuckerberg will not save the country.

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.

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.

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.

things have changed i guess.

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.

Jerky2• 15 years ago

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.

vph• 15 years ago

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.

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.

eding• 15 years ago

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%.

dkrich2• 15 years ago

Well that's just wrong, unless you're definition of success is creating the next Facebook or YouTube, in which case I would agree.

But I have several friends who run their own businesses on a much smaller scale, still do quite well for themselves financially, and I don't see people running up to them for autographs.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

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.

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 might be the best thing to do.

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.

Use college. Don't let college use you. 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.)

happypeter• 15 years ago

I actually gave up my MS degree, and saved quit a bit time to learn sth useful.

3 years after that, I want to say, it was a nice decision. I do not need a degree anyway.

Eliezer• 15 years ago

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".

dkrich2• 15 years ago

I don't see why there is an inherent assumption that college and entrepreneurship are mutually exclusive.

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.

tincholio• 15 years ago

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.

Will Dropouts Save America?

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