[yummyfajitas]

I don't think (2) is correct:

You don't like to learn, and you need more money...Don't do it. Why? Because that stuff you learn you will need later on, and you will need it badly.

Of all the stuff I learned in college, I needed very little of it. This includes many classes I enjoyed. Most of it I've forgotten already. Not only that, I didn't even take the traditional college -> job route - I stayed in academia for 8 years after college.

Some of the many classes I took: medieval literature, women's studies, chemistry (3 semesters), population dynamics for environmental engineering, 2 semesters of economics, optics, and all of this is just the stuff I can think of. Most of my college experience was spent learning stuff I don't need to know and have now forgotten.

Stay in school for the sheepskin so that you can signal conscientiousness to the world. But focus on networking, not learning. Most of what you learn is a waste of time.

[conductrics]

Isn't this kinda like looking back after running a search algorithm and saying "look at all of those branches that were explored that had nothing of value in them, what a useless waste." You have to explore in order to learn. College helps one learn both how your actions affect the external environment but also the internal one - your goals, utility function whatever you want to call it. What is 'needed' will be a function of what you decide will be needed.

[yummyfajitas]

No, because there is no reason to search through all the branches beforehand. A lot of things can be learned later on, as you need them.

Even if there was a need to search through the branches early on, I could reasonably predict that medieval literature was a waste of time. But 9 semesters of humanities were required by my college, so I crammed for exams and forgot about it after the fact.

[conductrics]

I guess it all depends on one's discount rate. Now that I am older I wish I had taken a few more 'waste of time' classes - esp in the arts.

[alexholehouse]

You may not use "what" you learn, but the skills you developed to help get through exams, hit deadlines, learn complicated concepts and work in groups are invaluable.

[ohashi]

I absolutely agree. I studied economics and people have asked about it - what do you actually learn? You learn maybe a couple actual skills (regressions being the big one) but more importantly, it was learning about how to think like an economist. The sciences had more practical skills I can say I learned about data structures, theoretical performance, etc, but the biggest thing I learned taking CS courses was how to solve problems and then how to solve them faster, more efficiently, planning my time, and other skills which aren't listed in a course description.

[conductrics]

You don't think that economics helped you understand intelligent agents in AI? Or markets as a mechanism for efficient information exchange? Or constrained optimization - if you studied economics, it is intuitive for you to see the Lagrange multiplier as price/cost (shadow) in convex optimization. Whether or not it helped in implementation, that is another thing, but in interpretation and thinking about a problem I can't see how it couldn't be of value.