Is it just me or is there a trend of reactionary posts (or just submissions?) on the same topic? A few days ago it was Go (why Go is awesome, why I'll never use Go, why Go has its pros and cons) and now it's college's turn.

What you realize later in life is that the point of all these steps by and large is simply to get you to the next step.

Go to high school and your goal is to get to college. Once you get to college nobody cares about high school, your transcript or your permanent record anymore.

Go to college and your goal is to build a network of friends and colleagues and to get to the working world or to a grad school.

Get to that and nobody cares about college anymore. And so on.

Granted you learn things along the way but learning really seems to be secondary. The ability to read, an Internet connection and a Web browser is all you really need to learn (although there is obvious value in directed instruction, course structure, tutoring/mentoring, etc). The "learning" part of education is probably the most interesting at the moment what with Stanford (and others) offering courses online, the Khan Academy and so forth.

I dropped out of university on the first try. I went through several years of "you don't need a degree". While that might be technically true it hurt my career, I didn't have the same network of contacts that others did and (for a time at least) I didn't have the same theoretical background.

In the end I got a mediocre degree from a mediocre institution studying part-time for three reasons:

1. To put me in the pile of CVs "with degree" (the "without degree" pile more often than not just ends up in the circular file);

2. As an exercise in finishing something. This is actually important, particularly for programmers. Starting things is easy, finishing is hard. There is value of sticking with college for 3-4+ years both to yourself and as a demonstration to future employers; and

3. Visa reasons. It would be near-impossible for me now to work in the US if I hadn't gotten a degree.

People like to bring up Jobs, Gates and Zuck as examples of why you don't need a degree. There are two problems with that:

1. Statistically speaking, you aren't one of these; and

2. All of them went to college.

I can't stress (2) enough. They just didn't finish. Thing is, they found their "next thing" (well, Jobs' path was a little more roundabout).

Going to college in the US involves a more complicated decision process than elsewhere because of cost and--let's face it--elitism.

Going to Stanford, MIT or CMU as a programmer is no doubt valuable and I won't question the value of the education those august institutions provide but a huge part of the value is the name. It's social proof but it's also arguably elitism.

That same social proof comes into play when you have Google or Facebook on your CV.

Going to such places might leave you with staggering debt. In CS, at least for now, that doesn't seem to be much of a problem. But there are cheaper options (eg UT Austin seems to be a well-regarded state school for CS).

Anyway, the moral of the story is that college or not you should always be looking to the next step. To put it another way: college is a means to an end not an end in itself.