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Go to College
Yeah, I know … no shit. Still, it bears repeating. If you want to be a white-
collar success in the digital age, the clearest signal is attendance at a
prestigious undergraduate school. And the distinction matters.
Yes, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs all dropped out of college. However,
you, or your son, are not Mark Zuckerberg. And while none of them
graduated, their college experiences were still instrumental in their success.
Facebook went viral among college students because it grew out of a real
need on campus. Gates spent three years intensely studying math and
programming at Harvard before he started Microsoft, and he met Steve
Ballmer there, the man to whom he’d turn over the reins of Microsoft a
quarter century later. And even Jobs, who passed through Reed College in an
adolescent daze, famously had his passion for design sparked there. All the
bullshit, cost, and stress parents endure to get, and keep, their kids on the path
to a decent four-year school is still, very much, worth it. College grads make
ten times more, over their lifetime, than people with just high school degrees.
There are precious few places in the world and times in our life when we
are put in the simultaneous presence of eager and bright young minds,
brilliant thinkers, and the luxury of time to mature and generally ponder the
opportunities set forth by the universe.
So, go to college—you may even learn something. But even if you don’t, a
brand-name college on your forehead will be your greatest asset until you
have assets, and it will never stop opening doors. HR departments, graduate
program admissions committees, and even potential mates are busy people
with lots of options. We all need filtering mechanisms and simple rules of
thumb to wade through our choices, and it’s just too easy to think “Yale =
smart; U. of Nowhere = not as smart.” And in a digital age, smart is sexy.
No one likes to admit it, but the United States has a caste system: it’s
called college. At the height of the Great Recession, unemployment among
college grads was less than 5 percent, while those with only high school
diplomas suffered unemployment rates above 15 percent. And your degree of
success is stratified based on the college you attend. The kids who get into
the top twenty schools are fine. They can pay off their student debt.
Meanwhile, everybody else incurs the same level of student debt, yet faces
nowhere near the same opportunities for an ROI on that debt.
The cost of college has skyrocketed in recent years, at a rate of 197 percent
vs. the 1.37 percent inflation rate.
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Education is ripe for disruption. There’s
a commonly believed fallacy right now that technology companies,
specifically VC-backed technology education companies, are going to disrupt
education. That’s bullshit. Instead, Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford are the
favorites to disrupt education when they fall under heavy and sustained
government pressure over the irrational and immoral hoarding of their
mammoth endowments. Harvard claims it
could
have doubled the size of its
freshman class last year with no sacrifice to its educational quality. Good. Do
it. More students, paying no tuition, at the best schools will disrupt the
system, not Massive Open Online Campuses (MOOCs) at mediocre colleges.
(See Apple chapter: hope they do it.)
At a top university, the brand isn’t the only thing that you’ll get besides
your education. The friends you make on campus can be just as valuable.
Some of those friends will drop off the face of the earth, sure, but some of
them will go on to acquire assets, or skills, or connections of their own that,
properly networked, may be just what you need to succeed in your own
future endeavors. Some of my most trusted advisors and business partners are
people I met at UCLA, and later at Haas. I know I would not have had the
success I’ve had without those experiences and friendships.
The problem with this advice, and I’ll be the first to admit it, is that it’s
unfair. The cost of college is ruinously expensive; four years’ tuition, plus
room and board, at even a second-tier school can run you a quarter million
dollars. And though many top-tier schools can offer generous financial-aid
packages—financial aid at Ivy League schools, for example, is already so
substantial that kids from average income households already get not only
free tuition, they get free room and board—it often isn’t tuition that keeps
bright poor kids out of the best schools. To take advantage of these programs,
those bright poor kids have to get admitted, and that means competing with
kids who’ve had private tutors, SAT prep classes, and every field trip
imaginable. They also have to compete against “legacies”—kids whose
parents are alumni of that school. And they have to compete against kids
whose parents have been donating money to the school for years, and who
play golf with the dean.
If you can’t get into a fancy college, what should you to do? Transfer. In
most cases, it’s a whole lot easier to get into a good school as a junior, where
dropouts have left empty slots, rather than as a freshman, where you’re up
against everybody. Get into a second-or even third-tier university … and then
work your ass off: a great GPA, honors programs, awards, service clubs, etc.
This is also a much cheaper route as well.
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