Should You Be Pushing Your High School Student To College?
When The Social Network hit the big screen back in 2010, the success story of college dropout turned Facebook creator Mark Zuckerburg was told to the world. His story started a trend where more and more college students slash internet technology gurus are dropping out of college, moving to the San Francisco area (the emergent IT metropolis) and getting jobs as engineers for software internet companies or creating their own tech start-ups.
Mark Zuckerburg wasn’t the first one to pursue a “think different” approach to education, and he isn’t the last. Before Facebook, Bill Gates dropped out of college. So did Michael Dell. Steve Jobs left of Reed College to backpack through India, dine with Hare Krishnas, and start his own computer company out of a garage. The cofounders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsney, are both college dropouts. David Karp of Tumblr never finished high school.
With the demonstrated success of these technology geniuses, students with similar aspirations of designing the next hit mobile app are following suit and either dropping out of college or not bothering to go in the first place. Advocate groups and networks like Uncollege and Zero Tuition College are popping up in a push for this movement. The group Enstitute offers two-year apprenticeship with an entrepreneur instead of a college education. A high school senior who works as a web editor for one of the groups, Uncollege, says she wants to inspire students to move “from passive to active learners.”
Some tech-moguls who have basked in success are promoting the non-college education even further. Billionaire co-founder of PayPal Peter Thiel started the Thiel Fellowship two years ago, a program that offers $100,000 each to students who abandon college and pursue their dream ventures. Thiel’s outspokenness against a college education has not been met with accolades from everyone—Jacon Weisberg, writer for Slate.com, believes such ideas are “diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.” The anti-college argument can be broken down to this: why pay—and possibly go into heavy debt—to binge drink for four years and be taught under the constraints of an exacting university curriculum when you can create an app that nets you all the money you’ll ever need?
On the pro-college side of the argument, what about the ‘well-rounded’ education that liberal arts schools offer? Surely there’s something to be said about spending four years among overly educated professors and like-minded intellectuals, discussing Kant’s critical philosophy and debating over contemporary issues in biomedical ethics. Even with the recent proliferation of online university courses in which anyone with a computer can watch video lectures of Yale, Harvard, and other college professors for free on iTunes, the experience is incomparable to physically being in the lecture hall and actively participating in a discussion. I mean, wouldn’t that in fact be ‘active learning’ as opposed to ‘passively’ streaming a video on your laptop while you’re making dinner?
It comes down to this: If you’re extraordinarily talented and creative and you have the perseverance to self-teach, you may not need a college degree to guarantee success. Unfortunately, most people are not in this category, in which case that college diploma really is necessary to potentially lead to a well-paid career.
Another good rule of thumb in deciding on a college education versus “the world is your classroom” alternative method of education: someone (whether a high school senior or a middle-aged person considering a 4-year degree) who does not value knowledge will unlikely value a college degree at any point in one’s life.
Dr. Mike Malone and his team practice expert cosmetic dentistry in Lafayette, LA. Dr. Malone is the former president and current accredited member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.
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