Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School

Your statement is insulting to anyone who values knowledge, teaching it, and pursuing it. Perhaps you are not a native english speaker, but your statement is very easy to read as implying that only those who cannot do [what? research? engineering?] teach, and only those who are lousy teachers get tenure.

It is an indefensible position and your obvious hostility towards modern academia is unjustified. For one academics don't necessarily want to teach. But as a society we deemed that we will in essence force them to. Why? We need good teachers and goodness knows industry won't waste money on it, let alone have any sort of quality control. So we force these people who have devoted their lives to research to also teach.

As for tenure, it is often attacked as something protecting poor researchers. I think this notion is very much overblown. In modern times you cannot even get tenure before you are 35 or 40. If you look at those with tenure, the majority continue to do good work for the remainder of their careers. That aside, the main purpose of tenure is actually to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It exists to prevent management from dictating what people may research. It is to allow researchers to pursue risky or unpopular approaches.

Academics do what they do because they primarily enjoy research. Insinuating that they are incapable of doing this simply because they also teach and are granted the protection of tenure is very insulting.

I was able to manage before by teaching myself out of books, but there's something to be said for learning with expert guidance and a community of peers.

I am also gaining exposure to a variety of fields which lend themselves less well to self-instruction than programming does (for example, molecular biology) and in which I believe a lot of the action for the next fifty years will be happening.

So, yeah, unless you already have a product that has traction and that demands your fulltime attention to continue growing, there's no reason to drop out of school.

My advice to students is: imagine that you were forced to drop out of college against your will, and then were given a chance to go back five years later after slogging it out in the real world. Would your attitude be different than it is now? Would you perhaps go to more office hours, skip less class, explore more subjects, play less Xbox, join more clubs?