The Dropout Fallacy

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/how_failure_breeds_success/2014/05/peter_thiel_drop_out_grant_encouraging_students_to_stop_out_of_college.html

by ForHackernews • 12 years ago

36 49 12 years ago

slate.com

mikemarsh• 12 years ago

As a college dropout myself, I don't think I've ever used this ridiculous "argument" to justify my decision. Are there seriously people out there who fancy themselves "The next Mark Zuckerberg", simply because they don't have a degree?

VonGuard• 12 years ago

I dropped out too, and while I was perhaps reassured by the fact that successful people had been able to make it without college, really I just fucking hated sitting in school all day.

There are plenty of reasons to drop out beyond "wanting to be Zuckerberg." How about "not wanting $100,000 of debt?" or "Prefering to be paid for my work?"

College just isn't for some people. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing.

fernandotakai• 12 years ago

disclosure: i'm not american

i dropped out because i started college when i was 22. i was already working as a developer for 4 years.

when i got to college, it was more of the same and i was basically learning a lot of things that i already knew -- so for me, it was better to focus on working than working + going to college.

it worked quite well in my case.

sosborn2• 12 years ago

College just isn't for some people. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing.

This is really the best way to look at this.

pydanny• 12 years ago

Yes. I've encountered them. My anecdotal evidence is that all who dropped out because of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill gates, or Peter Thiel showed them 'a different way' have completely stagnated.

On the other hand, anecdotally, those dropouts who put their heads down and got stuff done, some of them did pretty well.

Finally, anecdotally, in my experience, people with college degrees got hired faster and in times of woe, are the last to be let go. In fact, many SV companies (Google, for example, but funded startups often work the same way), won't hire you without a college degree unless you've done something notable. Being notable, by definition, means you are in the minority of any group. making dropping out to achieve success a risky proposition.

Of course, your mileage may vary. ;-)

opendais2• 12 years ago

Anecdotally, the only people that have been laid off/fired in IT at my current $DAY_JOB are people with degrees.

I think the fundamental issue is perception matters. The perception of having a degree matters to some people. To some people, its about performance metric X instead, etc.

opendais2• 12 years ago

Same. I didn't it because as far as I could tell at the time it would have 0 impact on my income one way or the other so why spend the money & time at a rate of lost salary + tuition.

TillE• 12 years ago

It always comes up at some point in discussions about education. Zuckerberg is a particularly poor example because he really doesn't strike me as a transcendent genius like Gates or Wozniak or Jobs, just a guy who built the right thing at the right time.

I think for the vast majority of people, self-education is really, really hard. Even now in 2014, the material available online is very limited in scope and depth. Maybe some people could grab a college curriculum, get the lecture notes, buy all the books, and then sit down and truly learn all that material by themselves. I certainly couldn't.

general_failure• 12 years ago

Oh, these kinds are everywhere. I am surprised you haven't met them.

People think having ruffled hair makes one like einstein, being highly assertive makes you like bezos, wearing jeans and polo shirt like job and so on.

Zikes• 12 years ago

Isn't it a fallacy to say that the correlation between dropouts and decreased success means there's a definitive link between them specifically? It's easy to imagine that people going through a very rough period wound up dropping out as a result, but that the dropping out is not what put them into a bad spot in the first place.

jakozaur• 12 years ago

I would say a lot depends on reason why you dropped out of colleague. Even Zuckerberg was very reluctant to do that, but Facebook growth took too much of his attention. That much different than lack of self discipline/just getting bored.

loup-vaillant• 12 years ago

While correlation isn't causation, it is certainly evidence for causation.

Plus, in many cases, careful analysis alone can reveal the presence (or absence) of causation with great certainty.

alexeisadeski3• 12 years ago

Correlation is not evidence for causation.

stox• 12 years ago

The whole point of an "education" is to learn how to learn. Some master that without coursework. More power to them. These days, a college degree has become more a certificate in training of specific domains of knowledge. If you can do it yourself, you probably will get a broader and potentially deeper understanding of the subject than you would in a structured course. Getting an employer to recognize that is another story. Since there are not concrete metrics to measure such accomplishment, degrees act as a proxy for potential worth to an organization. This is a unfortunate situation, and wastes a great deal of potential.

lucideer• 12 years ago

This is a beautifully succintly put.

typicalrunt2• 12 years ago

This. Education should teach you to become an autodidact [1]. Otherwise, you are really only being trained for a narrow set of skills, and those skills may not last when new technology is invented.

I was always curious and hungry for knowledge as a kid, but what I lacked was the knowledge of where I can find more knowledge (the libraries in my childhood were crap; the most complex computer book was how to use Office). It wasn't until university that I realized how to research things and find the best resources to learn that I truly was able to teach myself. That happened at the end of my 3rd year of university, and my 4th year was spent barely attending class and instead teaching myself the required material on my own time, while I was also learning about things not taught in class.

edit: Argh, clicked submit too soon. added second paragraph.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism

vinceguidry2• 12 years ago

I don't think autodidactism can be taught. You either have it or you don't. I like to think I have it, I taught myself software development and now have a career in it despite dropping of college after a year. I'm constantly reading books and improving the quality of my thought. College was interminably boring to me, I did not consider anything I did there to be learning. That's why I dropped out.

I don't know very many people who can do this. Most people I know, once they're out of school, learning stops. It's not that they can't learn anymore, it's that the impetus to do so ceases once they're outside an environment designed to facilitate it. I, and I suspect most autodidacts, have to leave said environment before I can really get engaged.

cabinpark3• 12 years ago

I agree completely. I am very fortunate to have been taught a young age on the importance of learning how to learn and is something I was able to work out in my early teens when life is a lot simpler. I absolutely ate up university because I discovered that I loved reading textbooks and would go to the library all the time and pickup advanced books in my field and read them. Going to lectures was then a nice way to fill in the missing gaps.

I have found that all the successful people I know had a similar approach to learning. Instead of being complacent with education, they made it work for them, whatever approach that may be. A crappy professor would be fixed by either going to a different lecturer, seeing the professor after hours, discussing the subjects with upper years, going to the library, and so on. Basically, they took control of their education and made it work. Reading the biographies of all the people mentioned in the article, I get the feeling they were like that as well. The fact they dropped out is almost completely irrelevant to their success.

squozzer• 12 years ago

Maybe a better question to ask is, "What is success?" We tend to focus on the trappings / assets of success - title, salary, neighborhood, spouse - while neglecting the liabilities - stress, debts, time demands.

And granted, we fetishize outliers such as Gates, but we also fetishize by an order of magnitude greater the "American Dream Death March" that begins once some authority figure identifies an aptitude which might become a prestigious / high-paying job in the future.

Slate, here's a clue - if the education racket weren't so predatory, the Dropout Fallacy wouldn't have so many fans.

bindley• 12 years ago

I dropped out, not to avoid education, but to seek it out in different ways. It's been a year since and I've found employment that is as good, or better, than I would have coming out of a traditional university.

It wasn't about becoming the next Gates, it was about getting educated in a way that made me a more valuable team member. I just felt like I could do it better than the universities could.

stackcollision2• 12 years ago

If college really isn't for you then so be it, it's your decision. But dropping out because these famous people did it is really stupid. For every one dropout who turns into Gates, there are thousands who go hungry every night (anecdotal, yes, but I know at least two).

Dropping out != a path to success in its own right. The reason these famous dropouts are successful is because they were either intelligent and worked hard, or they got lucky (iirc, Zuckerberg only dropped out after he had a viable product, so that should hardly count).

It seems to me that the media is pitching dropping out of college as a magic pill. If you're ready to put your head down and work your butt off then more power to you, but getting out of school isn't even half of step one.

maratd• 12 years ago

there are thousands who go hungry every night.

Hyperbole much? I don't think a single person ever went hungry because they didn't get a piece of paper that says they're super duper smart.

stackcollision2• 12 years ago

As I said in my post, it's anecdotal yes, but I know at least two people who are in this situation.

Take one of them for example: She can't afford to eat every night. She can't get a good job in this economy, and she's got debts from the portion of college she did attend that are weighing her down. The loan providers aren't going to forgive those debts just because she didn't finish.

But yes, I knew someone was going to call me out on hyperbole as soon as I posted that. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the vast majority certainly don't become humongously successful like we are being led to believe they will.

mikeash3• 12 years ago

I love the irony of calling someone out for hyperbole and then saying there isn't "a single person ever" who went hungry because they don't have a degree. Really, there's not a single person in the history of the world who ended up starving but would have succeeded with a degree?

_random_• 12 years ago

Zuckerberg and Gates would not be hungry, not with their family background.

mikeash3• 12 years ago

It's odd that the article just drops this figure and then moves on:

In 2011, Forbes reported that 63 of the 400 richest people in the world never got further than high school.

That's a really interesting number! Of the richest of the rich, all but 16% have a college degree. Among the general population of adults, 40% have a college degree in the US, and under 7% worldwide. If the richest of the rich followed the same proportion, we'd expect 240 of those 400 to have stopped at high school for the US number, or 372 for the worldwide number.

Clearly there is an extremely strong link between extreme wealth and higher education. We can argue causality and necessity, but it's weird to blow right past such a number.

cabinpark3• 12 years ago

Another interesting point is looking at the time of graduation. There is a big difference between a high school diploma in the 1960s vs the 2000s thus making it an unfair comparison. Back then it was much easier to go places without a diploma whereas nowadays, it is certainly possible, but much much harder.

minikites• 12 years ago

I thought this was a weird omission too, it means that 337/400 of the richest people have gone further than high school and presented that way, it makes a strong argument for higher education.

jfasi• 12 years ago

Hm. That's actually a good point.

strlen• 12 years ago

Conjecture: the point of Thiel Fellowships isn't to bribe everyone to stop attending universities, it is to combat elitism and education-based stratification of society.

Thiel specifically picked "safe bets" from elite universities (most of which are extremely flexible when it comes to students returning to finish their degrees after the fellowship) to demonstrate that elite university graduates' success is not due to the fact that they've graduated from said universities, but due to other factors (intelligence, grit, curiosity, etc..)

That in turn will make traditional employers think twice before turning someone away because at 17 years of age an admission officer (who, of course, knows nothing about the employer's industry or the position the candidate is applying for) looked at myriads of factors on their application (most of them irrelevant to the employer's industry) and decided -- with a very different acceptable margin of error and optimizing for very different goals -- that they should attend their state's flag-ship public university as opposed to Stanford. Most startups and younger established technology firms already know this: while they may only send recruiters to specific campuses, as well as form partnership with only a handful programs (like the Waterloo co-op program, for example), once one has been in the industry for a few years, all else being equal, the university they've attended matters very little. The _quality_ of education they've received matters -- but how they've received it doesn't; this may be obvious to many of us, yet if you speak to someone in another field or industry and a different picture emerges.

I see messaging as fairly clear in that Thiel isn't telling a 20 year old me (a first generation immigrant working on BS degree in CS/Math without taking any loans) or a 23 year old me (having an employer pay part of my tuition for an MS degree in CSE, again, without any loans on my part) to drop out: I was seeking a degree for the purpose of (wait for it...!) education and not signalling, I chose a field of study I both love and that had great career prospects, and I did not go into debt. On the other hand, he is telling society that "attending an elite school for the purpose of signalling" should not be considered an investment that can never lose its value.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

I don't think it succeeds in that goal at all. All it does is replace elite-university signalling with fellowship-winning signalling.

(And since most of the Thiel kids are from elite universities anyways, it's not even really removing that factor.)

YCombinator does the same thing, incidentally. It's more valuable as a stamp of approval that somebody influential is impressed by you than it is for the actual money or support.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

It is sad when people latch on to a narrative and then try to visualize themselves as part of it without asking the really difficult questions.

College is a great tool. You get to mix with other really smart people in a much higher density than you were exposed to in high school. If you visited a number of colleges you may have been recruited by a college that seeks your particular flavor of intelligence and in that you might find many more people like "you" there.

Mostly though college is a great place where you can do something (get a degree) without really anyone except your own desire to finish forcing you through it, and in the presence of numerous temptations to not finish it. Its like the final walk over coals at a volunteer self awareness session.

"Can you do what you set out to do, in the face of other people trying to tell you it isn't important or dangling other more tempting activities in front of you?"

A college degree is a reasonably objective and authenticated 'yes you can' to that question. And anyone who can answer that question in the affirmative will be better off than someone who cannot.

It isn't college that makes you employable, its knowing you can finish what you start does. If you already are doing that for large things you will be successful with our without a degree.

jamielee3• 12 years ago

I think that college is great. But also, I think it can also be somewhat dangerous to one's ability to think for oneself. There is always one and only correct answer, and there is an authority figure who knows what it is. University culture promotes reading and learning without taking action and making real impact. It also encourages that you seek to be told what is right and what is wrong, instead of endeavoring to figure it out for yourself.

But I guess being a good employee requires a lot of those qualities that I mentioned above. You have to be a good follower.

No one is telling you college isn't important. The majority of the population actually thinks the opposite.

I don't think education is (or should be) about finishing and getting that degree. It should not even be about employability. Why does success equate to employability?

College is valuable, but I think society would be better off if we did not focus so much on jobs, status, success, failure, etc. Why not focus on how to create value or make the world a better place? These are things that a college education alone cannot teach you how to do.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I have to disagree with much of this comment

   > I think that college is great. But also, I think it
   > can also be somewhat dangerous to one's ability to think for oneself.
   > There is always one and only correct answer, and there is an authority
   > figure who knows what it is.

I find this assertion to be very surprising. In my experience college, unlike high school, the entire point was to get students thinking for themselves, rather than accepting that there was a single correct answer. In my freshman year, and in the freahman year of each of my three daughters, there was always a required class which included a "colloquium" or "discussion" component. These classes were designed to break students of the habit of treating what was said, or read, as 'the answer' and to instead think critically about the facts being tossed about.

   > University culture promotes reading and learning without 
   > taking action and making real impact. It also encourages 
   > that you seek to be told what is right and what is wrong, 
   > instead of endeavoring to figure it out for yourself.

Again, my experience differs. Were I or my kids to discover that the University they were attending felt that way I would immediately withdraw into a more traditional institution of higher learning, which starts with the premise "everything we know may be false, here are the tools we use to understand truth in the world around us."

   > But I guess being a good employee requires a lot of those qualities 
   > that I mentioned above. You have to be a good follower.

Again, I would disagree. As an employer I value employees who think over those to simply follow orders. One of the things I try to ascertain in interviewing folks is whether or they do think. Can they reason to their opinion on a topic or do they hold it simply because someone else shared it with them? My experience in high school was that many people held opinions because they were "cool" or "expected" rather than holding them because they believed in them. It was one of the most depressing parts of that period of my life and I was so relieved when I got to college that people weren't like that really.

   > College is valuable, but I think society would be better off if we did not 
   > focus so much on jobs, status, success, failure, etc. Why not focus on how 
   > to create value or make the world a better place? These are things that a 
   > college education alone cannot teach you how to do.

One of the interesting statistics is we passed 30% of the US having a college degree in early 2012 [1]. So if 70% of the people in a group don't have college degrees, it is difficult to reason about whether or not 'society' would be better off or not. You could ask the 30% of degree holders how they evaluate creating value in society, you could ask the 70% the same question, and then you could ask which of those two groups has a better idea of what kinds of things make the world a better place.

But a different approach might give better answer. Ask those two groups this question, "How would you go about figuring out if what you were doing was helping the world be a better place?"

College prepares people to answer questions of that form, ones that require the student to not only come up with an answer, but to construct a process for arriving at the answer that gives them confidence in the result. No pre-made formula, no quick peek at Wikipedia, but basic reasoning from first principles.

I know several people who have that skill and did not go to college, but pretty much everyone who graduated from college had that skill tested many times and had to pass that test in order to graduate.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bac...

haomiao• 12 years ago

This whole conversation is so stupid. Dropping out isn't the same thing for everyone. You really can't talk about dropping out without looking at context and consequences, namely why and how they dropped out and the options that are available to them afterward.

I mean, say you're a kid from an upper middle-class family who's parents are paying for your education at some top-tier college, and you drop out because you have a startup that's growing and making money or got funded by some deep-pocketed investors. Or you're a genius who's been recognized as such by one of the world's most famous and well-connected venture capitalists and given a grant to go off and do something entrepreneurial.

Then you REALLY CAN'T FAIL. Say your company goes belly-up. Who cares? The school doesn't care, you just go back to class and your parents start paying tuition again. You graduate with your degree, except now you have valuable experience and connections that help you get internships and jobs and maybe funding for your next startup.

You dropped out because you had a plan and a social and financial safety net that meant you had meaningful choices about your future. Dropping out was taking a shortcut, the life equivalent of jumping over the edge on Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64. If you make it, you're hugely ahead! And if you don't, well you get picked up and put back on your original path and maybe you're a little behind but really it's no big deal.

Now think about an alternative scenario. You're a low income kid who was the first in your family to go to college. You're working 20 hours a week because your student loans cover tuition but nothing else at the giant-ass state school you go to. Your parents (you're one of the lucky ones whose family stayed together) are cheering for you but they're also laid-off and unemployment is running out and they're not sure how they're going to pay for dad's pills and anyway they're not sure you're cut out to be in college and they're worried you'll fail. So you drop out because you're struggling in some of your classes, and the shift manager at work offered you more hours and you say why the fuck not because the extra cash can't hurt.

What do you think your options are when that company cuts back and lets you go in a year or two? Think you've saved enough after paying down the interest on your loans that you can go back to school and not work? Think that 2 years of credits and work experience at a dead end job is going to translate into a high-paying position at some solid company?

The point is, if you have a specific plan in which dropping out will advance your career and life interests and also have enough of a backup that you can recover from failure, then you should totally take a break and go do something exciting.

If you don't, if a college degree is your lifeline to a better life than your parents' and you're skating on a razor's edge to be there in the first place, then just Stay In School, kid.

And now the rest of you stop debating the value of finishing college as if it meant the same thing to everyone and get off my lawn. Go back to work.

cabinpark3• 12 years ago

Zuckerberg, Gates, Gaga, and Dell all had upper class parents and attended exclusive private high schools. Jobs was brilliantly smart but did come from a lower class family. Oprah comes from a very poor background and did make it successful. However she works in a completely different industry so I don't think it's at all fair to compare her to the tech folks.

the_watcher• 12 years ago

> The sad reality is that for every person who drops out and achieves great success, far more do not.

Also accurate: The sad reality is that for every person who finishes college and achieves great success, far more do not.

There's also a major sampling bias here, in that "all dropouts" includes those who dropped out because of laziness or similar reasons, rather than just those who dropped out because they found the cost of a degree to be far greater than it's value. Also, the cultural premium put on college degrees likely encourages many who could easily be successful as a dropout to finish anyway.

There's a false argument here: the question isn't whether everyone should drop out or go to college, but whether or not there are cases where going to college is not the best decision (which is empirically true).

prostoalex• 12 years ago

Author chooses the examples of Gates and Zuckerberg, who are both Harvard dropouts, substitutes Harvard with "any college", and then viciously attacks this straw man.

Top tier schools and rest of the schools produce different dropouts. Someone who was deemed fit to enter Harvard (or any of the top 20 school), was good enough to survive the first few year(s) and then decided to pursue an idea of their lifetime is actually taking less risk than someone who got into a local college and then decided to forego the actual degree.

Both Gates and Zuckerberg were actually on a "leave" from Harvard with option to come back in case the things don't work out. Both of them had enough of a financial cushion to focus on building the company without repo man taking their car away and kicking them out of an apartment for defaulting on a rent payment.

incision• 12 years ago

To start off on a tangent...

I often wonder if the 'Like' button and its kin subconsciously encourage thinking in terms of false dilemmas?

As several others have pointed out this question and so many others in life come down to 'It depends' yet the lobbying for one definitive stance or the other goes on endlessly.

I consider myself a high school dropout success, but I'd be hard pressed to recommend that anyone follow in my footsteps. Also, I'm now persuing a degree online, nearly 20 years later.

The Dropout Fallacy

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