Ask HN: Friend's 15 year old wants to drop out, I've been asked to intervene

No. Not because "practical learning" is bad - indeed, it's as great as you say - but because the "practical learning" that you can find for yourself is available forever. Especially if you're naturally good at it. At this point, or at any other point in your life, all you need is Ramen noodles, a cheap laptop, a solid Internet connection and a credit card.

Indeed, self-administered practical learning just gets easier with time, because you can move around and buy hardware and rent machine shops and own your own garage.

But there are things you can't easily replicate outside school, or that are a lot easier to enjoy if you have credentials and go through channels. My personal favorite example is: Science labs. Colleges have real science labs! Which are really fun for practical learning! And which you can use as a student. I mean, I won't go so far as to argue that you should spend twelve years doing a Ph.D. and a postdoc just to get your hands on the femtosecond-pulsed UV lasers, the bounteous supplies of liquid nitrogen, the fully-equipped biochemistry labs, the cell-culture hoods and incubators, the specially-bred laboratory mice, they mysterious bottles of colorful liquids, the nanotechnology laboratory, the electron microscopes, or the particle accelerators. But I did. And I don't regret any of that!

Yeah, I don't "use" my little pile of academic credentials at the moment. But there is more to life than just being "useful". Otherwise nobody would ever bother to, say, play Minecraft.

I can learn math all I want through doing complex programming and creation of algorithms...

So, are you one of those geniuses who has already aced the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad and then gotten bored with it? I have to ask, because such people exist, and if you are one I can't help you. But otherwise: Please tell me you've taken a serious high-school mathematics competition and been bored by it, because otherwise I'm not yet convinced that you know what you're missing. There is a lot of math that is not encompassed by "complex programming" or "creation of algorithms". A whole lot. More than I can understand. Not to mention the physics. Physics! In the hands of the right teacher, who is admittedly not easy to find, it's really a lot of fun.

I'd also like to note that I currently can program well in the following languages: PHP, JavaScript, Java, C#, Python, Lua, etc... and I most certainly enjoy doing so.

Thank you for your input.

Risk management is something that doesn't really correlate with being 15 year old. But you are at the point where you are about to discard conventional arrangements for advancing through life and try and do something very unique. The more unique it is, the higher the chances of it not working out (because otherwise everyone would've been doing it), so do not burn any bridges and do think through your plan B for the shittiest circuimstances moving forward (like the economy receeding, people not having money to pay for Minecraft servers, inflation eating up your profits, etc).

Lastly, on a more general note, the benefits of fundamental education are hard to distill in a concise form, but they are significant. Knowing how things work outside of the circle of your immediate interests, what people tried, explored and what mistakes they made... all this makes you a person who is smarter than the rest, and in the fastest way possible. You can, for example, re-invent calculus (and it's been done on more the one occassion), but that's highly inefficient way to go about it. Learning from others is the only way to get in a territory where you can truly innovate. But again if you don't see yourself ever desiring to do that, then it's hard to persuade you otherwise.

All in all - don't drop out. There's always another 350k to be earned, but there's no better time to absorb the knowledge than while you are young. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, don't waste it.

I was in a very similar position as you and looking back what got me those breaks were the teachers that liked me, that liked what they saw in me and who wanted to support me.

Everything I got, I was granted. Just like in real life.