I dropped out after a year, but it wasn't to go "big," merely to go (work) at all. The reason I never went back is simply that the cost grossly outweighed the

I dropped out after a year, but it wasn't to go "big," merely to go (work) at all. The reason I never went back is simply that the cost grossly outweighed the benefit. Strictly from a quantifiable/money perspective, the loss would have been huge. After 7 years, for example, I'd have been giving up around $85k annually in salary and spending $15k or so on tuition and books. I'm ignoring living expenses, since I expect those would have been close enough to comparable. I'd also be trading 3 additional years of industry experience in addition to the $300k for a diploma. Each of those years turned out to be worth $5k-$10k of additional salary in the short term, though it's tough to say what they've been worth in the long term. As for the intangible benefits, that was an even easier decision, since neither the process nor the "rounding" subjects outside computer science appealed to me. These were all more difficult than high school, but in the wrong ways. That is, the was just as tedious[2], more voluminous, and no more intrinsically rewarding. Writing an essay about literature that parrots the instructor's opinion is something I already knew how to do, but making it appear as if I'm not was a college-level skill I couldn't be bothered to practice, let alone master. Had I dropped out to do a startup, even having failed, I can't imagine undergraduate academia as being anything but stifling and insulting.