> do not go to college just to earn more money. You need to have better reasons than that.
> Now, that being said, the reasons I'm attending college instead of dropping out (I did take a year off to work at a YC startup): I value the unique social experience of college
Connections are overrated in SV. As a software engineer it is extremely easy to network, since everyone wants to have coffee with you (cough recruit cough). From my year at a YC startup, I made more valuable connections than I've made in college - angel investors (trying to recruit me for their portfolio companies), startup founders, etc. I still see these people, though I do have to make an effort to keep the connections warm. Friendships are a different matter; see the beginning of my post.
Steve Jobs dropped out of college and audited those calligraphy classes for fun as a non-student. So that's kind of a bad example, since if you really wanted to follow in his footsteps, you should drop out and then audit classes at Stanford or something.
Let me give you my experience with "learning to learn:" Most students at top-tier colleges do not really care to "learn to learn." Students are more concerned with taking easy classes to fulfill their requirements than actually learning about subjects they have no interest in. If anything, it is people who are self-taught who have truly learned how to adapt. Who is going to have more developed autodidactic skills? A college grad or someone who had to teach themselves for 4 years?
