NYT says drop out

Let met start by saying that I agree that there are situations in which a person need not go to college but articles like this from the New York Times are dangerous.  The author, Alex Williams, repeatedly cites the examples of people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg but fails to note that these people did not single handedly build their multi-million dollar businesses. Facebook, for example, was co-founded with Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes who  did actually finish their degrees at Harvard.  Andrew McCollum, another founder of Facebook, did dropout for a little more than a year but quickly went back and finished a degree in computer science.  Further, I suspect that a college drop out might have difficulty getting a job at Apple or Facebook today.

What about the other people that Alex mentions?  The article starts off talking about Benjamin Goering who dropped out of college and is now working at LiveFyre.  Several of the leadership positions are filled with college graduates.

Most if not all of the people mentioned got into college and then dropped out.  Beyond that, the  big familiar names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates,  and Mark Zuckerberg were at elite schools.  As far as we know these people did not flunk out, they are drop out because they are not engaged/challenged in the classroom.  These are people that can very easily return to college if they want to.  The un-college perspective is coming from a very privileged perspective of people that have at worst postponed college and seems to be coming almost entirely from people in technology, specifically programming and social applications.  Show me the (young) engineer that is making six figures. Or any other technical field for that matter. The un-college movement would be more convincing if it had a more diverse set of role-models.  It is one thing for Mr. Ellsberg to say “I know people with dog-walking businesses who make six figures” and another to actually name and celebrate this person.

Finally, are we really going to argue about the value of a liberal arts education.

Last year, an anonymous academic who called himself Professor X, published “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” which argued that future police officers and nurses need not be force-fed Shakespeare.

This is short-sighted and obnoxious.  Art, literature, math, and science help the the aforementioned police officers and nurses understand and empathize with the people they are helping.  The liberal arts expose us to ethics and provide the means to rigorously analyze our own beliefs and understand why the world is the way it is today.

Not every person needs or should go to college.  It seems that the bulk of the argument the un-college movement is based on the debt that many students take on in order to go to school.  Perhaps the biggest issue is the number of students that take on this debt but never finish a degree or take 6 or more years to complete the degree.  This is largely a failure of the school system prior to getting to college, students enter woefully unprepared and with poor guidance as to what they are doing there.    We should not tell students that it is sufficient to just go to school, which I fear many high school teachers and guidance councilors are saying.  College does not equal a job. College is simply a means to an education.  If you have a job in mind that requires a particular education/skill set, then by all means go to college. Of course there may be other ways to get that skill set.  If you simply like learning stuff, then go to college. This is what we should be telling people.  We should not be sending people to college with the goal to "figure it out," there are cheaper ways to do that, or at least there should be a cheaper way, perhaps the next college dropout can find that for us.