Okay, there probably are a couple of HN readers wandering around feeling inadequate about their lack of degrees. I, for one, have a different motive when I upv

Okay, there probably are a couple of HN readers wandering around feeling inadequate about their lack of degrees. I, for one, have a different motive when I upvote the "college is broken" posts (well, the ones I like enough to upvote). I'm tired of meeting smart people who completely lack useful skills (and have been "educated" out of the ability to acquire them on the fly without hand-holding) and need ridiculous salaries (that they don't have the skills to justify) in order to service ridiculous college debt. It's just sad. We had another one on HN recently asking what to do with his mountain of debt and unprofitable degree. I meet about two a month, and I don't spend that much time around recent graduates. Yes, some people leave their degree program without unmanageable debt and having gained enough to make the sacrifices worth it. However, they are in the minority. In America, getting a degree is held out to all students as a panacea. It's even illegal to take a special needs child off the college track before age 16, regardless of how unlikely it is that that child can benefit from university study, or how much the child needs other types of education. For the bright, it's worse: high schools are graded on how many of their graduates go on to college, so the pressure can be incredibly intense even when college is an incredibly bad fit for the student. People who don't think that university study, as most commonly implemented in the US today, is the One Right Way for all individuals, are usually shouted down as unambitious or not contributing to the economy. Entrepreneurship communities are among the few places that students can find an attitude of "do what has the most value to you, and be skeptical of anything that involves mountains of debt -- it takes a lot of earning power to service that debt and live at the same time" from a group of people whom no one can rightly call unambitious.