Ask HN: Does college GPA matter?

High School students, of course, have college applications to worry about while considering the value of GPA. However, once in college, is there any reason to fret over poor grades? Is employment the only justification?

Personally, I love learning, but hate having my knowledge evaluated without cause. And, as a HS student, I'm at a critical point deciding whether or not university is a good fit for me. From my perspective, it seems that I might as well design my own (free) curriculum with MOOCS, internships, and self-motivated projects. On the other hand, though, if GPA struggles aren't mandatory in college, I could simply ignore material without purpose, replacing the workload with time to pursue my own interests.

FYI: I'll be a life long learner regardless of college. As said by our beloved physicist, "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

Not as much as many would have you believe, though aiming for A/B grades in your core curricula would be a good thing generally. In many colleges with grade inflation (and this particularly includes more selective schools), anything less than a 'B' is pretty much the mark of death. In engineering or STEM programs, it's not unusual for the median grade in and early "weeder" course to be a D or F.

In many cases, what a high GPA shows is that you've got a highly developed ability to get along with the system. For positions in which that's important, you'll get higher consideration than someone with a lower GPA.

There are a lot of observations about how grades don't correlate well with innate ability. There are several well-known cases of highly successful tech entrepreneurs who'd dropped out of college (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg). Though I can also think of many who've completed undergrad or advanced-degree programs as well. Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance notes that his best students (he was a college professor for a time) got the worst grades. Of course, the worst students did as well, so don't be guided by false equivalence. My experience is that if you're actively and directly questioning material, you may well find your nominal academic performance suffers for it.

For tech in particular, execution matters far more than GPA, and having a solid project or projects under your belt will amount for far more than a high GPA. I know and have worked with many people who lack a formal college degree but who were absolutely brilliant in their work. Sadly, the lack of degree can limit opportunities and/or upward mobility in many firms, though this may change, particularly with recent trends in college costs and financing.

The answer is the following:

Yes, such that you should probably try hard enough that it doesn't accidentally hurt your chances in the future, but not as much that it should despair you from always improving yourself.

Myself and some of my friends fretted over grades in college a lot more than we should have.

You should aim for a 3.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale. If you're going for a particularly tough job, maybe 3.8. Less than a 3.5 cuts out a lot of more competitive companies, and less than a 3.0 is pretty much death unless you have a very good reason (this assumes you can get past the HR filters).

What will a 4.0/4.0 get you? Basically nothing, except for some extra bragging rights. My graduating CS semester only had about 5 or 7 people who had a 4.0, but most of us had job offers prior to leaving college. GPA will count for your first or second job out of college, then not matter as much.

Note, I went to a top 10 school for computer science. You may have to scale this somewhat if your school isn't as "rigorous" according to the biases of your interviewers.