I'm surrounded by this, and I can't help but feel like I'm part of the cause for people I'm close to. About the time I was beginning my CS degree I got a job do

I'm surrounded by this, and I can't help but feel like I'm part of the cause for people I'm close to. About the time I was beginning my CS degree I got a job doing tech support at a web hosting company. Within one semester the skills I'd gained on the job had far outpaced my university classes as far as providing me with real world problem solving abilities. Debugging shared webhosting servers was a far better learning exercise than writing sudoku solvers. Maybe it's not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they're learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They're vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them. Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I've tried to teach some of them programming but I've given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can't change that. I know I'm far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn't exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.