For me going to college was just an assumption that was made and there was no challenging
whether – if you're smart and you do well in school you go to college because that's
how you're successful life.
And I think that's true for a lot of people.
And I really liked collage.
The decision to drop out was not one that I took lightly and I don't think it's necessarily
– I didn't drop out and then figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I had a
job offer to be a research assistant to work at a talent agency in Hollywood.
I had these offers and I did the math and I said hey if these were my offers the day
after graduation I would have considered college a success.
So that's why I personally dropped out.
And a few years ago I wrote an article about dropping out of college and sort of what that
experience was like and how it shaped my life.
And the funny or scary thing is that it now ranks really well on Google if you search
the phrase dropping out of college.
And so I get a lot of emails almost every day at like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning some
kid who's not happy with college comes back to his dorm room, they Google that phrase
and then they email me.
And a lot of times they want me to tell them that it's okay to drop out of college.
And I usually don't, one, because it was such a terrifying decision to make and it was so
unpleasant.
I mean my parents didn't take it well and it was so hard that I'm not glib about recommending
it to other people.
But also I think Mark Zuckerberg, again, didn't drop out of college to create Facebook, he
created Facebook in college and then he moved to California for the summer and it was doing
so well that he decided not to go back.
I think Bill Gates' story is similar.
Most of the really successful college dropouts used the platform that is going to a university,
it's using the status of being a student.
They started something and it got going quickly enough that it didn't make sense to continue
going to school.
So I think college is a great default.
It's not a great default if you're going to be $200,000 in debt at the end of it, but
it's a great default to sort of figure out what you're doing.
It's a safe place to experiment and learn things.
I don't know what I would tell my own kids.
It seems crazy to me that I need to do 18 plus years of savings to pay for this for
them.
But I do think that quitting college and dropping out of college to do something different are
inherently different things.
If I get an email from someone and they say I'm failing all my classes; I want to dropout
just like you did, I say no you need to figure out why you were not successful in school
and solve that problem before you strike out on your own where you have even less of a
safety net.
I do think though, and people have made this argument about Peter Thiel's foundation, which
creates fellowships that encourages kids to drop out of college, I do think questioning
whether college is the right choice for you is worth doing and I do think the stigma about
dropping out is worth reducing as well.
When you drop out of college and your parents go you're throwing your life away; how can
you do this?
You can't say it worked out for Bill Gates because the response is you're not Bill Gates.
And really you can be successful without a college degree and it's not as hard as people
think and we shouldn't make it incredibly hard for a 20-year-old to bet on themselves
and to make them feel like they're throwing their life away for trying something different.