Introduction
Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen, and I don't want to get involved with US politics. I don't have the context to understand it. Uncovering medical fraud (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/01/healthcare-fraud-schemes-us-justice-department) has been a good thing.
TL;DR the internet and especially LLMs have contributed to a huge increase in cheating to the point that modern degrees are worth absolutely nothing. In addition to that, they seem to be teaching the wrong things anyway.
There's been a trend among CEOs about a decade ago that noted that colleges graduates are useless in IT roles. The two notable figures noting the decline of higher education, at the time, were Peter Thiel and Xavier Niel. Xavier Niel founded 42.fr, which is an amazing programming school. Peter Thiel founded the Founders Fund around that time. The most profitable IT companies were either started by Standford graduates or college drop-outs, and yet, in 2025, you will be heavily discriminated against if you do not have a college degree.
To save other people the trouble, here's my experience having attended 3 colleges and 42.fr. You'd think having a wide experience would be valued (not among the narrow-minded IT folks it's not).
Should you drop out of college in 2025?
Well if you can afford attending (I couldn't) you should probably stay in school. Even though the degree is overwhelmingly worthless, it gives you legal standing in discrimination lawsuits. If you don't have a degree, you will be labeled 1) narcissistic 2) psyopathic 3) incompetent. Steve Jobs had the same problem, and he was a goddamn wizard in a lot of different areas. Created a billion dollar company. I guess most people don't want to have a billion dollar company.
The fact of the matter is that at some point, no matter how many times you have been a wizard, somebody will be envious, or another manager will be hired who 1) believes 100% in the college scam 2) Doesn't know or trust you 3) knows how to play the political game. As an individual worker, you have no chance.
Especially if you are extremely competent, there's always the option of revoking access for "[security] reasons". The real reason is that the corporate manipulators artifically need to create a position to fill with their guy.
What does work look like if you don't have a college degree?
All your ideas will be stolen, what you build will be rewritten. It doesn't matter if you got a system from Zero to One (great book btw.). You will be stuck doing things nobody else is willing to do, and when it's time to receive credit, you will be shafted.
Every day you can expect to get new work that is 1) risky, requires evaluation solutions, building something from scratch, expertise where the company doesn't have it 2) dealing with outages, working with stuff others are too cowardly to handle 3) things that are not the focus of the organisation - i.e. playing defense instead of sealing deals.
Tackling open-ended problems and converting them into manageable closed-ended problems, building something new, that takes real skill. Most engineers don't understand this - they'll look at a working system and say "ah, this is faulty, this could be improved, this isn't to my liking" - and get stuck doing nothing useful for the next 12 months while they refactor everything. Is refactoring good? Yes. But a system also has to do something useful in the early stages. And college engineers are absolutely horrible at this kind of thing. If there's any question as to how startups are able to do the things they do - it's because they prioritize the customer experience over technical masturbation that doesn't serve the customer.
If you're good at solving open-ended problems, it seems the only way forward is a project management specialization of some sort. Otherwise you'll be shoveling garbage for the rest of your life. The kind of problem-solving that engineers do in startups on a daily basis is done by project management in larger organisations. This is horrible, because project managers don't know the product or engineering, or the customers, to make meaningful improvements. A startup engineer who works in the product can knock out in a week something that would require 5 different kanban issues to solve.
Do colleges teach high-availability?
They don't. The average college graduate will cause an outage. There's a handful of people who cared about robust high-availability, and it's before UNIX was a thing. Operating systems development died due to UNIX/POSIX/Linux. Getting reliability out of a Linux system is a futile endeavour. Yes there is Real Time in Linux now and SIGs that work on it. But the worse-is-better approach that is inherited from UNIX (the panic() routine being used all over the place) limits what can be done. If you have enough redundancy Linux works, but it's not really not ideal.
Peterson's rule about carelessly denigrating institutions: I'm aware of it
And it doesn't change the fact that Jordan Peterson got kicked out of University of Toronto, and has had some choice words to say about the institution. The university system is corrupt. When higher education stops being about the pursuit of the truth and becomes a vehicle for a cushy job, it stops being higher education and becomes worthless.
Universities were/are a tool of the counter-reformation: creating authority figures to replace the truth
When Martin Luther started the Reformation, this posed a huge problem to the Church of that time. Anyone who could read could study the Bible and try to understand it. This created a problem for the Church who was used to the system of priests presiding over the people (which Christ denounces in Matthew 23 when he denounced the Pharisees). Nevertheless, the Church managed to find its bearings when it created the modern system of universities. Suddenly new authority figures could be created out of thin air to replace the priesthood and to contain the revolution. Funnily enough, the richest nations (Switzerland, Great Britain, the US) were all predominantly protestant. Benjamin Franklin when he visited France was able, with an open mind, to adopt ideas that could never get off the ground in France. These ideas were brough to the French court by the Venetian artisans who crafted the mirrors for The Hall of Mirrors. The Venetians and the Italians inherited these ideas from the Byzantine empire and from the Crusades. It seems that in modern times, California seems to be preserving the ideas that lead to such massive wealth. Some of the greatest Americans were self-taught (Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford).
And yet, today, a college degree is largely required for everything. It seems very anti-American, and very much against the American Dream.
The human body has been the same throughout history: IT changes every year
Law, medicine, accounting - all of these have stayed quite similar over the centuries. Modern Double-entry bookkeeping is from the Renaissance (or even older). These three pursuits haven't changed much since the Romans.
But IT / computer scinece is realistically a discipline since the Second World War. For a 80 year old discipline to ossify makes no sense. And since the advent of UNIX, Microsoft, and Apple, operating system development especially has stagnated. Case-in-point: IBM mainframes are still a thing. If there was real competition in the operating system arena, it would be possible to replace IBM mainframes with a different hardware + operating system combination.
I need to get back to work
So if you can, stay in school. Self-taught + certifications + equivalent experience is still not enough in 2025. You will be heavily discriminated against at every step of the way.
On the other hand, what you learn on your own will be priceless.