Linked: “Don’t Go To College”

via Marco:

My philosophy about being a C student and not needing to do 80% of the work should also be taken lightly. That strategy works well if you want to follow a path like mine after college: working for small companies that care less about your GPA, or that you can convince to hire you by other means (showing impressive personal projects, advanced skills, etc.). But my GPA was so bad that no big tech company — not Microsoft, not Apple, not Amazon, and definitely not Google — would even consider hiring me. (I tried.)

I’m trying to find a transcript from the panel I was on at Teens in Tech conference back in 2009. I did find this page which reminds me who was in the panel with me:

2:00-3:00 (Teen to Entrepreneur Panel) – Daniel Ha, Eric Kerr, Adam Jackson (Moderated by Daniel Brusilovsky)

Anyway, this panel sort of went off the rails at the time because we were coming on just after lunch and after a few speakers basically drove home the fact that college was overrated. The great thing about a weekend conference in the bay area for teens interested in technology is that most of the teens there were accompanied by their parents. By the time 2PM rolled around, the Q&A from the audience was people shouting out things like, “can you guys please stop telling my kid that going to college is unnecessary?” 

I totally agree.

Groups like Uncollege and books around hacking your education pose an interesting scenario and, with college costing as much as a house now, buying a book that gives you a different perspective to college is a good investment. I think teens should challenge their peers and mentors in their life on the social norm of going to college that we are seeing more and more. The debt, time and commitment is huge and there are a lot of reasons to not go but I would never tell anyone that college is unnecessary. 

During that panel, all of us were successful without college yet I still touted the benefits that I saw college should bring, most importantly that college is a fall-back. Even the most entrepreneurial boy genius may one day need a degree.

I echo Marco’s statement above. I also was a C student, mostly D student in high school. My GPA of 2.4 in high school and fact that I never took Algebra 2 or Calculus or even Trigonometry shows that I was truly a slacker. I cared more about blogging, traveling and making HTML sites in my spare time. When a printer went down in my school, they’d call me over the PA to come and fix it. I got out of a lot of classes being unofficial tech support for our school. 

Then I got out of school and had to work very hard to get where I am today. Having a degree would have made things much easier. I haven’t hit a salary wall yet but maybe one-day I will and will regret never doing 4 years of school. Then again, I hear 6 years of school is the minimum…a bachelor’s means nothing. Oh how times have changed. 

I will never get hired at Google or Facebook as every job there requires a BA or higher but I still ended up okay. If you don’t have the drive to do great things with what little your brain has been taught. Is college worth it? Every teen should ask themselves this. If you’re too lazy to go to college, then you’re likely too lazy to create a career for yourself and make substantial money in this lifetime.