I have a feeling a lot of people on Hacker News went to top-ranked colleges with full scholarships--Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, etc. These universities provide com

I have a feeling a lot of people on Hacker News went to top-ranked colleges with full scholarships--Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, etc. These universities provide completely different environments and experiences than the typical college. They're also so well funded that they provide significantly better financial aid and scholarships as well. Provided you can get accepted, it's actually much, much harder to get a full ride at the University of Missouri than it is at Harvard. In short, if you're going to one of the best colleges in the nation for free and you love classroom learning, of course it's going to be a great experience. That's a no brainer. What if you don't like classroom learning? What if you went to a bad high school, you disliked it from the beginning, and weren't motivated to get the grades to get into one of the top colleges because of your prior experiences with school? Speaking as someone who started college at a state university, it was a very mixed bag. All these brilliant peers you guys are talking about? Yeah, they weren't there. I was taking classes as a freshman with seniors who were barely passing and bad-mouthed the professors whenever they could. When I mentioned functional programming to my advisor in the CS department, she didn't really even know what I was talking about. They had a theory of programming languages, which she "thought" would talk about them, but I wasn't allowed to take it for another three years because of all these requirements on how you progress through the courses. So instead I got to take a class on Java where you'd have a three hour lab with TAs there to assist you, and your only task would be to write FizzBuzz. Now I eventually transferred to a much better school, and I had a much more enriching experience. Suddenly I had peers who were interning at Google, Facebook, etc. Suddenly I had an academic advisor who wanted me to push myself rather than hold myself back. Suddenly I had really interesting homework projects rather than a week to do FizzBuzz. And at that point I started to get a lot more out of college.