mkbrody

As someone who dropped out of college and had to cope with the consequences, I often think if college is worth it for the typical use-case in HN discussions: an ambitious & hard-working American citizen < 24.

While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:

1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and ultimately run PayPal.

The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating. Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any metric.

2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years? Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is literally $500k (just for undergrad).

I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who win wars, not soldiers.

I took a course on DesignLab, a platform for learning how to design as a hacker, and it was really good. Learned all the basics of how to MVP my own sites with some polish. www.trydesignlab.com

Does this package include priority SEO placement?

That would be a real value add ;)

I'm sure I still would have had plenty of hurdles even with a degree, and I don't mean to discount that starting a career is hard for anyone, but the matter at stake here is whether it's optimal for smart, young people to go to college or skip it/drop out.

My personal experience is full of rejection, stress, and closed doors (I still can't go to grad school to get a higher paying job such as an MBA or Law Degree in my 30's, and finishing my bachelors has a huge opportunity cost).

Compare that to liberal arts students at Ivy League colleges who a few years ago were getting handed $100 bills to attend a 1 hour on-campus recruitment session with the hedge fund Bridgewater. That path for capable people seems much better to me than what I had to go through.

If you're a smart, talented young person, I advocate studying hard and going to a top college rather than dropping out. You might just end up becoming a billionaire and paying people to skip college as part of a personal experiment :)

As someone who was influenced by Peter Thiel to drop out of college and do a startup with my room mate, I can say it was a mistake in hindsight. Even though I was able to land on my feet (I'm now 25 and making 6 figures), I had to go through a lot of extra hurdles, stress, and doubt to prove my worth to the world and employers when starting out my career.

The odds were greatly against it working out favorably in my circumstances (I went to a tier 3 school, didn't get my startup funded, etc) and I had to possess serious hustle and grit to make it to where I am. I see people who simply studied hard, followed a plan, and graduated from an Ivy or similar college coasting by much easier - that's the path I would take if I could do it over again.

Because Peter Thiel was a big influence on my decision 4-5 years ago to drop out, I look back in hindsight on my experience and think he is wrong to advocate a path he didn't take. He went to Stanford, then got a JD, worked at a hedge fund (try getting that job as a college dropout), and then became a monstrous success at PayPal & Founders Fund after building credibility & success. To think he could have replicated his career path as a college dropout is incredulous. The odds are 10x more against you, and many more doors are closed than open (finance, grad school, etc).

If you want to be successful there is a very easy path if you're mature enough to work hard during high school: goto the best school you can, study a science, engineering, or finance major, and you will have >50% chance of becoming rich enough to live comfortably and retire if you continue to work hard and hustle after you graduate.

Thanks Nick, I just emailed you with more details.

It appears to be working now!

All teams who applied by the application deadline have been, but YC's homepage states they'll review late applications that are submitted on a rolling basis until June, before S14 actually starts.

Amazon's UI will never be considered beautiful, but it's core strategy of focusing on the numbers has allowed it to accomplish more than 99.9% of companies ever formed.

I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to where they are.

FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press & on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.

To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on the subject.

Culture is internal marketing. The numbers are what really matters.

Would it be easy to sell a more advance EHR to hospitals if you could show it would cut down on malpractice? Sounds like all the comments are saying penetrating the hospital market has huge barriers. But if this is obviously better, and could save time & lives, they should use it.