Quit College, Not So Fast
College education is frown upon nowadays by the so called social media influencers who have to say something other than your mom and dad in order to attract attention and advertisement dollars.
Having a PhD in informatics and a decade long experience in industrial software development, I can testify that theoretical computer science and the scientific method made my career.
There might be college degrees that might not be worth what you pay for them, but computer science is not one of them.
The “skip the college degree” logic is based on creating a quick revenue stream with your startup using the quick and dirty approach and then selling it to a big company or investors.
After the acquisition, either the startup will implode, because the quick and dirty approach isn’t sustainable. Or you will invest that money to people with degrees that will rewrite the whole thing, but this time properly.
You might like the idea of selling your startup to a big company or investor, but be careful. This approach is not for everybody. It involves a lot of trial and error until you find and execute an idea to the point of market traction.
Startups are more like lottery tickets.
The chances of winning are slim. Losing is almost guaranteed. The price of the ticket is paid by hard work and your own hard earned cash. And there are occasional winners to keep the clueless public entering the game.
If that sounds like a good idea to you, go ahead and quit your computer science degree. If your college degree is in origami and you’re taking half a million in student loans to pay that, quitting that is probably a good idea too.
Well, seriously, there are some college degrees that don’t have any real world value to cover the time and tuition you invest in them, but computer science is not one of them.
Read Next: What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Change Your Life or sign up to the weekly newsletter.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 295,232+ people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
