College Hack: Apply and Drop Out Early
Universities serve a bunch of purposes in society.
It’s hard to deny the income gap between college graduates, especially from “top schools”, and everyone else. To a degree, this reflects an actual productivity gap and is economically real.
They’re an excellent route for immigration and upward mobility — if you’re a high-scoring teenager in most of the world, one of the best ways to immigrate to the US for long-term employment involves attending a top-tier university, ideally in the US (although IITs or top European universities work well too).
Universities provide a credentialing mechanic which allows selection on IQ and other traits indirectly, combined with a measure of socioeconomic class and willingness-to-confirm, in ways which wouldn’t be permitted if performed directly by a potential employer. Griggs vs Duke Power Co is the famous case which restricted the use of IQ tests in general employment screening in the US, although work-sample tests in many technical disciplines can substitute (and, thanks to our new AI overlords, creating and grading challenges should be much easier in the near future, so great quality screening tests, performed by machines, should become very accessible.)
Universities provide some “social engineering” upward-mobility value, particularly for historically underrepresented groups in the professional workforce. Women and racial minorities, through various affirmative action programs, gained preferential entry to universities before expanding their representation in professions, and for a while before the market adjusted this was a useful distinction for women/minorities applying for a job. It still is a useful credential for someone from a class background (geographic, economic, racial, etc.) which doesn’t otherwise have access to professional job opportunities — being a Harvard student applying to an internship probably dominates over “being an applicant with no work experience from Detroit or Montana.”
Many would argue the actual purpose of universities is education, but that doesn’t seem to be particularly supported by metrics. (I’m not going to go dig up the specifics and validate them for a casual post, but I’ve seen them in enough places to be convinced overall, even if there are substantial exceptions in e.g. the sciences.)
Many students do not leave university with degrees.
Studies show many graduates do the same in tests of knowledge/skill as they did when they went in, and tests several years after graduation are even worse
Alternatives to university education exist. Technology-assisted, other institutions, etc.
A strong argument for credential vs. education is this: what’s the value of a university education one credit short of graduation, vs. completed with a diploma? The actual educational value difference is negligible, but the market rewards the diploma substantially more…
The value of “education other than for professional purposes” — making people into more critical thinkers, better voters, exposing them to new interests, etc. — is debatable even in sign, let alone magnitude, in the modern world.
There’s undeniably a social and assortative-mating value to college, but there are more efficient ways to party and meet nice girls.
Unfortunately, universities have three main drawbacks.
Cost. This is two parts — the direct cost of university, which has been increasing way faster than the rate of inflation for a long time, primarily due to administrative overhead, facilities competition (universities have gone from a somewhat monastic physical environment to a luxury resort, in competition to other students), government mandates, and infinite upward pricing potential due to government-subsidized loans, as well as the opportunity cost of taking 4 years (or more!) at the beginning of one’s career and devoting them full-time to education. That much of this is financed via loans essentially ties people to needing high incomes and defers life choices.
Social forces at universities — “send your kid to university, get back a crazy young adult” risk seems to be real now. The level of progressive activism at certain campuses (famously Evergreen College in WA, New College in Florida) is almost parodic, but this seems to be pervasive at most schools.
Societal changes.
Ossification — credentialism eliminates vitality. If you can’t even start a respectable job until you’re 22 or 26 or late 20s, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, you can’t take risks.
Credentialism generally — Requiring degrees for jobs which don’t particularly require them inherently is a problem, and then this feeds down into requiring certificates and professional licensure for even more irrelevant things.
Lower birthrate — by deferring income and the start of adult life, and pushing household formation out, it both reduces overall numbers of families formed/children, as well as reduces the numbers of children families have. The optimal time biologically to have children is early; the optimal time for income and resources is later, and it has become broadly unacceptable for high-status people to have children early.
Political and social stratification — assortative mating among college-goers only, social circles of specific types of graduates, income-based stratification, etc. all lead to political stratification to the point where the US is almost two nations and “national divorce” discussions are relatively frequent.
(This is mostly specific to undergraduate education in the US; non-US universities and graduate or professional programs have their own issues and would be addressed separately.)
All of this might be suboptimal, but for an individual young adult (or his parents), what is there to do?
For the bottom 25-50%, you’re probably doomed/fucked regardless of choices; enjoy/sorry. Welcome to America! The “below the API” jobs are probably the solution here, or prison, or joining large institutions in some role and trying to move up, or hoping you’ve got rich parents, or God knows what else.
For 25th to 75th percentile, and ~50th to 95th percentile (yes, there’s overlap), there are more difficult decisions, and possibly things where “the system defaults” are particularly bad today.
For non-white non-asian minorities in the US in this 25-95th percentile range (and especially on the upper end of that range), attending and graduating university is probably a win for two reasons. First, discrimination is real (not as pervasive and all-defining as some say it is, but not as absent as others would like to say it is), and it’s more useful to have an objective degree from as respected an institution as possible to mitigate this, at least to a degree, regardless of career. Without specific data, I’d assume a black or pacific islander NYU grad (picked randomly as #25 on the US News list just as an example) or NCSU grad (#75) gets treated better than an identical person who didn’t attend/graduate from those institutions in most contexts. Maybe not a huge effect in some settings, but non-negative and probably significant overall. Second, discrimination is real (same caveats) — it’s easier for a non-white non-asian applicant to a university, especially to the top 25 schools and especially well-resourced private schools, to both get in/graduate and to pay for the same school without substantial debt. (It may be harder to get to the point of application in the same position, but of otherwise-identical people at time of application, there is a pretty well quantified institutional bias on both issues; one is up before the Supreme Court now.) The benefit is greater, and the cost is lower, so it’s overall a better choice. “The best university one can graduate from with sufficiently high probability” is probably the right choice; there’s an argument that affirmative action in acceptance standards is taking people who would otherwise be top-25th percentile at, say, a 100-200th ranked school and putting them at jeopardy of graduating, and not in the top cohort of graduating, at a top school, but that’s a separate issue and not really something I know much about.
Desired career (if one knows it at 18) is a factor; some career paths are heavily credential dependent, so university education is more of a requirement. For others, university education seems contra-indicated for success. I’m not convinced most 18 year olds particularly know what careers they want to pursue, especially in this broad middle selection of people, and even less convinced they know what they want to do for the next 20-60 years as the world changes, so to some extent “punting” this decision could make sense — do something in the world outside university first (military? career? etc.) first. One of the harms of credentialism is preventing smart people without degrees from making this choice, even temporarily.
A way to get a name brand degree at lower cost is AP classes, community college/other college, etc. to load up on transferrable credits; this can often reduce the time in the expensive institution to 1-2 years instead of 4.
Attending but not graduating is a particularly bad choice if the costs of attending are high (both direct, and opportunity). The worst case is probably someone who goes to an expensive school, doesn’t actually learn anything, and either wants to work in a credential-dependent field, or doesn’t want to work in any specific field. Almost all of the cost, little or none of the benefit.
For the top 1-5% of ability, probably none of this matters much — success is the default no matter what, and a top university degree might help, but is certainly not necessary, massive debt is relative, etc. University’s highest cost is opportunity cost, so for some people something like the Thiel Fellowship/20 Under 20 makes a lot of sense, but going to a great school might be an expected but not particularly critical bullet point in the eventual Nobel Prize biography. (There’s probably a bigger difference between 5% and 0.1% than I’m accepting here, but there’s also not a single number for “ability and resources”, so a 95th percentile “well rounded” person from a rich family might benefit from Yale → Yale Law → Biglaw → etc., whereas a computing genius who barely gets by on other stuff, but can score participation in a hot DAO or startup, is going to pay a huge opportunity cost for spending 7 years in university/law school vs. jumping in immediately.
There are still some issues here even for the top 5%, 1%, or 0.1%, and there is One Weird Trick which might actually be worth it for them (us). The “hack” which I ended up doing, and which seems even better today, is to get the nearly full signaling value of a university acceptance with very little of the cost. Essentially, get into one of the very top universities (for me, MIT, but for my interests, I’d probably consider MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Caltech, Harvard; maybe another 10 schools based on personal preference and geography). Register. Attend for one paid semester (even if you have to put it on credit cards), at a cost of <$20k. Then drop out, either specifically to do something else, or “drop out” in the way I did, largely depending on other opportunities and economic cycle.
I did this only somewhat intentionally, and without premeditation, although I dropped out of high school to go to MIT early (so, technically, my highest level of schooling completed is middle school/8th grade; fun to answer that on surveys when trolling to throw off their metrics.) I intended to somehow magically pay for university, although since I left early I couldn’t get some of the merit-based national scholarships (which were insignificant amounts of money, or highly competitive and unpredictable). My parents made enough income to make grants largely unavailable, and they weren’t willing to provide financials/tax returns for loan applications (even those in my name would have required parental financial information) (I think at some point MIT expanded their financial aid to where I would have been fully covered at under 100k/yr family income, but too late for me.) As a white man born in the US I had no access to diversity funding, and I (maybe foolishly?) didn’t want to get up at 5am to do ROTC (which in retrospect would have been interesting as I would have been an Air Force 2LT on 9/11 in that timeline.) I worked part-time/summers and sort of scraped by a little bit not particularly well, so it was probably always inevitable.
This takes advantage of “dropped out of an elite university” being both a statement of “was accepted to the elite university the same as any graduate” and “all dropouts are the same”, broadly, from a credential basis. Rather than spending 4 years minus one day, and $200k minus $10 to complete the final step, you’re speedrunning to dropout for the lowest possible cost and time. You might even be able to lower out of pocket costs by either using limited-total-value grants/loans (I used/got none, but maybe more options exist today), or simply not paying at all ever, but I’m not sure how universities handle someone who is accepted but never enrolls, or accepted, enrolls, but doesn’t pay for any semester ever — it seems safer to attend and pay for at least one semester.
Market timing, personal interests, finances, etc. largely determine if enrolling and completing a degree as expected is optimal, vs. early-dropout to do something else, vs. “dropping out” (which apparently Steve Jobs did as well?). I discovered universities, once you’re enrolled, aren’t super efficient at registration-management. After the first paid semester (while living in off-campus university affiliated housing, Fenway House, a coed independent living group and former fraternity, so less directly governed by the university administration with respect to enrolled student status), I would register for classes and activities for the next 2-3 years, without regard to prerequisites or degree requirements. I took stuff I was intellectually/professionally interested in, even if it was graduate level, and relied on the system not catching this; it worked for me. I actually took one of the two crypto classes twice, without sufficient number theory background the first time, and spent the time between attempts to learn a lot more math (through a weird MIT program called ESG, where ~3 undergrads had a grad student directly tutor us through ~3 years of math in about a year; it was pretty based!). Sometime after finals each semester, I got email from the bursar/registrar saying I’d been retroactively de-registered for the classes I’d just taken until I paid them, which I never did. MIT never made an effort to collect, and in any case, I moved to the Caribbean, a self-declared sovereign country in the North Sea, and then Iraq until well more than 7 years after flouncing on this debt, with no accessible assets, so I was pretty safe. Given MIT’s general behavior over the past 40 years, I view not giving them any more money than absolutely necessary to be a moral good.
In retrospect, my error was in not dropping out immediately and fully and moving to Silicon Valley in 1998 to join startups. Partially this was due to not wanting “a job” where I’d have to provide my SSN/tax reporting/etc., vs. working for some cypherpunk overseas project. Partially it was because I’d never been to San Francisco and somewhat wanted to avoid doing what it seemed like everyone else was doing at the time (moving from MIT to the Bay Area to join/found startups). Partially it was that none of the companies I knew of in the Bay Area were doing the kind of pro-liberty stuff I wanted to do, and offshore cypherpunk ecash was (and, staying around MIT until I had a specific opportunity to do something was easier.)
Being a MIT (and high school!) dropout hasn’t really hurt me; almost all the work I’ve done has been in tech where no one cares at all, and/or “corp to corp” where it matters even less. It did preclude me from joining the military after 9/11, but I did contracting in war zones instead, and got to do far better stuff with more impact that way. It might be an immigration points issue someday in some context, but money solves that. I honestly would consider enrolling in a virtual-only university program, or possibly a graduate program without an undergraduate requirement (or waived), especially in econ or CS applied to infosec, but it’s not really a priority.
I’m not totally sure I’d encourage this specific course of action for any child today (I have none, so this is theoretical/future). I could cover the costs of even the most overpriced university education now, so the costs are really primarily opportunity and cultural-contagion. This may not ever be a problem I personally have to confront and if it is, it’s at least 18 (and more likely 20-30) years in the future, and the specifics of the individual matter a lot (although I’d assume top 1% for any offspring because…), and the world is likely to change a lot between now and then. However, I’d at least present it as an option worthy of consideration.