Is Dropping Out of College Throwing Your Life Away? | Ryan Holiday | Big Think

For me, going to college was just an assumption that was made, and there was no challenging whether—if you're smart and you do well in school, you go to college because that's how you're successful in life. And I think that's true for a lot of people. And I really liked college. The decision to drop out was not one that I took lightly, and I don't think it's necessarily—I didn't drop out and then figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I had a job offer to be a research assistant to work at a talent agency in Hollywood. I had these offers, and I did the math, and I said, "Hey, if these were my offers the day after graduation, I would have considered college a success." So that's why I personally dropped out.

And a few years ago, I wrote an article about dropping out of college and sort of what that experience was like and how it shaped my life. And the funny or scary thing is that it now ranks really well on Google if you search the phrase "dropping out of college." And so I get a lot of emails almost every day at like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning from some kid who's not happy with college. They come back to their dorm room, they Google that phrase, and then they email me. And a lot of times, they want me to tell them that it's okay to drop out of college.

And I usually don't, one, because it was such a terrifying decision to make, and it was so unpleasant. I mean, my parents didn't take it well, and it was so hard that I'm not glib about recommending it to other people. But also, I think Mark Zuckerberg, again, didn't drop out of college to create Facebook; he created Facebook in college, and then he moved to California for the summer, and it was doing so well that he decided not to go back. I think Bill Gates' story is similar. Most of the really successful college dropouts used the platform that is going to a university. It's using the status of being a student. They started something, and it got going quickly enough that it didn't make sense to continue going to school.

So I think college is a great default. It's not a great default if you're going to be $200,000 in debt at the end of it, but it's a great default to sort of figure out what you're doing. It's a safe place to experiment and learn things. I don't know what I would tell my own kids. It seems crazy to me that I need to do 18 plus years of savings to pay for this for them. But I do think that quitting college and dropping out of college to do something different are inherently different things.

If I get an email from someone and they say, "I'm failing all my classes; I want to drop out just like you did," I say no. You need to figure out why you were not successful in school and solve that problem before you strike out on your own, where you have even less of a safety net. I do think, though—and people have made this argument about Peter Thiel's foundation, which creates fellowships that encourage kids to drop out of college—I do think questioning whether college is the right choice for you is worth doing, and I do think the stigma about dropping out is worth reducing as well.

When you drop out of college and your parents go, "You're throwing your life away; how can you do this?" you can't say it worked out for Bill Gates because the response is, "You're not Bill Gates." And really, you can be successful without a college degree, and it's not as hard as people think. We shouldn't make it incredibly hard for a 20-year-old to bet on themselves and to make them feel like they're throwing their life away for trying something different.