Ask HN: Do I need College?

I was going to my local community college (over 26k students) to get an AA in Business and wanted to transfer. The college (like most in California) was impacted because of the sheer amount of students so getting the necessary classes was getting harder and harder. I am not sure about other CC's but this one (one of the biggest in Orange County) had a feeling of "high school part two" type of atmosphere. There was a feeling of its ok to take as long as I want in school....because I am in school, without getting on with your real life. I talked with other friends at other colleges and they said the same thing. It seems like our peers use college as a way to have a sense of achievement while still acting like they are in high school. That's just personally not for me.

In high school i started an ebay business which led to a fine jewelry website which i ran for a couple years. Then in college I started a skin care company, flipped the inventory and made some money. I then got another idea, taught myself some programming and got accepted into dev bootcamp. I'll be attending either the Feb 18th or March 11th cohorts once I get a small loan. I then decided to drop out because I got so fed up with the college climate. My thinking is I can always go back...college isn't going anywhere.

My suggestion would also be don't worry about companies that hire based on education. Why would you want to work there if they wouldn't even talk to you without an education? I can't personally speak for the tech world, but in general you don't "need" a degree...it's a great fall back but if you know your shit why does it matter if you have a piece of paper to prove it?

Why not continue to work where you are, save some money, and start a start up or apply to an incubator? Team up with a couple of friends and get something going.

At the end of the day, no one can tell you what to do other than you. I dropped (instead of doing the part time route) because I am a firm believer in the "burn your boat" (the boat being college) methodology. You make some great decisions when you have no other back up because your current situation has to work.

You seem like a smart dude who knows where he is going. You really just need to think about what it is you want and what is right for you. It took me a few weeks of constant, gut wrenching, inner monologue talks to finally drop but the pros of dropping out weighed the cons.

Hope some of this helped. I was (and am) in the same boat. It was a hard decision, but for me once I burned my boat and realized what I wanted it was very liberating.

Best of luck

If you're going to take over the world, skip college and do it. You can always go back later, and it's a major investment that will follow you around. Taking a couple years to follow your dreams will probably cost much less.

No, you don't need a degree to work in IT (for almost all areas). I know plenty of people who failed their degrees who are good programmers.

But, degrees are pretty good if you want to pursue a subject in some depth, or if you are interested in academia in general. You get to hang out with a lot of intelligent people of your age who are into what you're into. You get to talk to some people who are (academic) experts in their field. You get to find out a lot of things that you might never have considered that people would put thought into.

Degrees do make it easier to get a foot in the door of some of the more interesting areas of computer science (machine learning etc.).

It depends on what sort of company you want to work for. Any company large enough to have an HR department is probably going to look for a degree. Many will argue this is a bad policy, but IMO the HR department is not the most important part of a tech company!