[mml]

As a dropout, I can tell you this: if you do drop out, you are choosing the hard way. Later on, even if you're wildly successful, you will wonder how much more successful you could have been if you'd finished. You'll also suffer from the impostor syndrome, and it will likely haunt you for the rest of your life, regardless of the outcome.

Young smartasses have a way of becoming old maintenance programmers ;)

[Eliezer]

As an autodidact (I never dropped out of anything, I just didn't go to high school after 8th grade) allow me to say that I have never, ever wondered how successful I could've been if I'd gone to college, nor yet suffered from impostor syndrome.

[FD3SA]

I would go as far as to say that, to an autodidact, structured education is akin to Chinese water torture. A Steady, predictable flow of bland facts hammered into your skull, while you cannot change flow rate, the subject or the scope. Also, you cannot escape.

I avoided the natural sciences throughout my entire secondary and post-secondary career, as I feared the catastrophic effects structured learning would have on my inherent passion for those subjects. The joy of reading Darwin and Hawking, and the resultant awe of the universe, could not have been manufactured in a structured learning environment.

[spudlyo]

I dropped out over 20 years ago, and while not 'wildly' successful, I'm happily successful. I have no regrets, I never wonder how things would have been different, and I don't feel like an impostor. Your mileage may vary.

If you're passionate about the work and reasonably good at networking and selling yourself, I believe you can still make it in the industry without a college degree. You must have the passion though. Some people can choose a career in IT by spending an afternoon in their high school guidance councilor's office, and after 4 years of hard work in college actually realize that goal. For those kinds of people, college is essential.

[mml]

I should point out that all in all, it worked out great for me. I'll get around to framing my GED someday...

[steve-howard]

I work with PhDs. I assure you that nobody is immune from imposter syndrome.

[randomdata]

It is true that dropouts in the past have had to work hard to point out that college is not necessary for success. However, given how many articles we have seen about not dropping out on HN in the last week, it seems the tables have actually turned. It is the graduates now working hard to restore value to their degrees.

College has no proven track record. The best we have is some loose correlation showing people who work hard to attain a degree are also likely to work hard in industry, and thus earn more money. No surprises there. Hard working people have always earned more typically.

I don't want to diminish the value of college. It comes with a lot of great experiences for personal growth. It is a wonderful passtime. However, these articles are starting to highlight that it plays no role in business else there would be no reason to argue for going to college.

[dasil003]

If you could somehow determine the benefit of a college degree and graph it against the cost over time it would be obvious that college was a no-brainer for boomers, and is becoming quite dubious these days.

50 years ago a state college degree could be paid for by a part-time job at a gas station, and once you had it you were virtually guaranteed gainful employment. These days, easy loans are turning ignorant youth into indentured servants, and it's not even a guarantee of employment, so college could actually be harmful.

Personally I got a great deal out of my college experience, and I did it without debt thanks to 2 years of community college and 2 years of staff employment at a University that paid my remaining tuition (ironically it was my self-taught web skills that landed me this job). If I had had to take on $30k or $40k of debt the equation would have been radically different.