This postEnter NaBloPoMo. Along with Janssen and Katherine (and if you’re going to do it, too, leave a comment with a link to your blog), I’ll be posting every day in November. Granted, I pretty much do that anyway, but this month there’ll be nary a gap.
So, as the semi-official kickoff, I read Paul Graham’s recent essay on startups this morning. Now, business does not run in my veins. It’s like a foreign virus, and whenever I come in contact with it (in an entrepreneurial sense), my immune system generates antibodies which slaughter it quickly and cleanly. I don’t do business. (Except I do, with my freelance design work. Three cheers for paradoxes. ~sigh~)
Anyway, Graham’s essay was mildly interesting to me at first, being mostly about business — which I still try to read up about on the off-chance that someday my anti-business gene will flip and I’ll become some rabid entrepreneur — but it wasn’t until point 8 that my interest got caught:
8. College Will Change
If the best hackers start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. […]
One change will be in the meaning of “after college,” which will switch from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree? […]
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I’m alarmed to be saying things like this, but there’s nothing magical about a degree. There’s nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it’s hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.
As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you’re judged by users, and they don’t care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it’s a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.
The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the people you meet. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, students may start trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships at companies they want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.
What students do in their classes will change too. Instead of trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. We’re talking about some pretty dramatic changes here.
A few years ago I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but wow, I really agree. Yes, getting an education is important, but that’s different from getting a degree. One has real value; the other is only valuable because of “the administrative needs of large organizations.” What really matters is whether you can do the work. For example, as I mentioned earlier, I do freelance graphic/book design. I don’t have a degree in either, but that hasn’t stopped me from being relatively successful with it. (Yes, getting a degree in graphic design would make me a better designer, but that’s because of things I would learn, not the degree itself. And I could still learn those things outside of a degree program, were I determined enough.)
I’m not planning on dropping out of my MLS program, of course, but the idea of blazing my own path — as a designer, artist, writer, programmer — and creating a custom-fit job that fills my needs perfectly (or pretty darn close) is getting rather tasty. More and more I’m seeing myself go that route in the long run. Does that mean no more librarianship for Ben? Not necessarily. In my ideal world (at least so far as I’ve got it figured out), I’d spend the rest of my life doing half my time at a library and half on my own projects. I don’t know if I can pull that off, but we’ll see. (After all, I make two to five times as much on design projects as I do at the library. Not that I’m doing any of this for the money — if I were, I’d become a doctor :) — but money does figure into it, seeing as I have to make a living, and someday support a family.)
But maybe I just feel this way because I’ve got a looming midterm due tomorrow. :P
