Future coders: you can skip college, but please don’t

The WSJ recently published a post entitled “Here’s a thing: Coders can Skip College”, highlighting the research of Harvard fellow and Pegged CEO Michael Rosenbaum, who concluded that there was absolutely no correlation between having a college degree and being a good software engineer. Nowadays, such an opinion is not uncommon — perhaps most famously, Peter Thiel started the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, offering bright minds $100,000 to drop out of college and pursue their passion projects. Indeed, in recent years, questioning the merits of higher education and encouraging earlier leaps into industry has become editorial high fashion.

Here’s the thing: Mr. Rosenbaum is right. A college degree is by no indication alone the proof of a good software engineer. But the people who encourage talented young minds to bypass a collegiate education in favor of an earlier career are, at best, missing the point, and at worst, depriving promising young adults of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for intellectual and personal growth.

Thanks to open source and version control, great engineers today can quickly scan code repositories and determine how proficient a candidate is with a certain set of frameworks or design languages, and great companies do not hesitate in factoring in a candidate’s Github as part of their overall evaluation.

Software is also a unique field in that the amount of free, accessible resources for learning and solving complex problems in the industry are seemingly infinite. It may be surprising to purveyors outside of the field to discover that even the most seasoned veterans leverage these resources on a daily basis. I’ve heard many veteran engineers remark, only somewhat jokingly, that their considerable experience mostly makes them better googlers. With so many resources, it is not uncommon to find dedicated, self-taught developers fresh from high school who are at the same technical level, if not better, than a university graduate.

But college was never meant to simply answer the “how”s of the world. Great universities implore their students not only to explore what they perceive of the world, but also to challenge the limits of such perceptions. They offer access to opportunities, experiences and areas of research that often fall outside of a student’s breadth of knowledge. In effect, college gives the aspiring software engineer the opportunity to explore countless possibilities and seriously consider whether they even want to become software engineers in the first place.

At MIT, I spent my days leaping out of the way of (slightly buggy) self balancing unicycles, working through the dead of night on swarm algorithms for virtual armies, writing business plans and building prototypes for all-too-ambitious startups. I was awestruck on a daily basis by the creativity, passion and dedication of my peers. My colleagues’ love of engineering fueled my own, and made me the person I am today.

Nearly all of my engineering coworkers, regardless of alma mater, are bursting with similar stories to tell. The highs of academic exploration and competition form an atmosphere unique to the college experience. It builds a camaraderie that lasts deep into our careers.

Consider another benefit of a university degree — for many employers, it serves as an (admittedly expensive) FDA Approved sticker. While Pixlee is at a stage where we strive to evaluate every engineering candidate regardless of “academic pedigree”, the Googles and Facebooks of the world often don’t have such a luxury. They have massive hiring pipelines, and the truth is, funneling by a university degree is simply a matter of pragmatism.

I fully understand that there are countless universities not worth the tuition, ones that churn out empty diplomas instead of dynamic thinkers. But there are also countless universities that are worth it, and the future coders of the world deserve a chance to experience it for themselves. Because although you can choose to skip college and still land a job in software, you can also take the opportunity to go, and discover so much more.