I felt the same way during my business undergrad -- everything I was learning, from CAPM to Deming's management ideas to queue theory and operations management, has a wiki page and at least a dozen very good blog posts. Essentially all we're paying for is someone with domain experience to tell us what's relevant to learn, and help us learn it.

How expensive is college if we take away tuition? Is a college really more than just an employment agency for professors, an agency that provides its own classrooms and spaces?

~10k/year in housing

but you'd have to pay that whether you did college or not - unless you are saying you can live on the streets if you decide to not to go to college?

At least 95% of the time, you'll be better served by finishing the degree. It's a low-risk high-reward choice. Unless you have a huge appetite for risk, I don't see the upside in dropping out. Work on your startup while you're in school, it's not like homework should be taking up a significant portion of your time (if you're really good enough to be dropping out anyway).

If you can afford it then do it. Those social lessons you are learning are no doubt invaluable. The issue is that for a lot of people it's just not affordable. And it's getting less so every year. If you're well-to-do and have the money then have fun and enjoy yourself.

It all depends on how good of a HS education you got. It also depends on the fun and relationships you are having outside of your school work. For me that was the best part

Regardless, you can just audit classes without paying tuition and all you miss out on is a grade and a piece of paper, called a degree.

Unless you have a revolutionary and marketable idea and are 110% confident about executing it with the utmost discipline that will guarantee something that you can call "success", please stay in school. Sorry if my tone is dick-ish - I'm just sick and tired of these debates about the value of college.

>Unless you have a revolutionary and marketable idea and are 110% confident about executing it with the utmost discipline that will guarantee something that you can call "success", please stay in school.

I'm really not sure what that has to do with it; proportionally, I know more people that didn't go to college that got individual contributor programming or sysadmin jobs than who started companies. The things that school gets you can be as important (and sometimes more important) in a management/owner role than in an individual contributor role.

I know for me, it wasn't hard to get myself up to the minimum technical level for a Programmer/SysAdmin gig... but my social skills are, well, lacking. I don't know that you learn those in college, but I always thought that college was an important part of the social development of the 'middle-class adult' that I was missing.

You'll never have that level idea unless you make it happen, and staying in school is not the way to do that.

Which is why most successful startup founders are college dropouts. Wait.

(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)

I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.

But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.

College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.

I believe most drop-outs didn't drop out because they wanted to - ie family problems, lack of funding, etc.

That's probably why the statistics favour the students.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow that logic. It might be true for some people, but probably not for most of them. It's easy to forget that the great tech success stories, the drop-outs, were in the right place at the right time (read: major city or centre of technology). For most people, growing up in ordinary towns, going to college is a way to meet new types of people and ideas that you would never have been exposed to before. It's absolutely the place to find inspiration. That doesn't mean it works for everyone, but don't be so quick to dismiss it without some good justifications.

It's not a debate if you just tell people off and offer no rational.

I went through gen-ed classes that I literally never attended. I sometimes read the books and got A+s in the courses. I went through a high-level technical communications class that was to re-teach basic English mechanics that a proficient high school student ought to be able to master. I was retaught the primitive basics of C, Java, and C++; nothing that couldn't be learned through a few online tutorials and nothing advanced enough to prepare someone for an embedded job without prior internship experiences.

On the other hand, I got instruction on advanced algorithms and had two year long projects where we worked for actual clients (Microsoft, others) for actual money with deliverables and accountability. But that wasn't worth the $200K it would have cost if I didn't have scholarships.