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Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.
Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.
A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn (Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to give programming a go as a career.
My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them).
With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters. I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.
I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.)
Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity.
If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years.
It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else.
So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one?
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakar...
Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap, how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor thought enough of him to not send him down.
Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.
It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.