Skipping college and 'hacking your education'

Is college worth it?

The cost of college can range from $60,000 for a state university to four times as much at some private colleges, and total US student debt has now overtaken credit card debt. So a lot of people are asking: is college really worth it?

The dropouts everyone names — Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison — are outliers with fat wallets. Dale Stephens offers a more grounded proposition. Stephens, the founder of UnCollege.org and author of the 2013 book Hacking Your Education, argues that people can build a real education for themselves, away from a campus — and that college simply isn't for everyone.

"When you think about education as an investment, you have to think about what the return is going to be," Stephens told NPR's Renee Montagne.

What "hacking your education" means

For Stephens, hacking your education is "figuring out how to create an education for yourself": finding mentors, building a network, finding the content, and assembling the package yourself. "One of the great myths of the school system is that we tell people that everyone should learn exactly the same thing and exactly the same way, at roughly exactly the same speed. And that's just not true."

His argument isn't really about dropping out — it's about ownership. "Whether you go to college or not, it's your responsibility to figure out what it is that you need to learn, and how you can learn those things so that you can get a job after school." The competition for jobs, he notes, is "insanely furious," and there's a persistent gap between what schools teach and what companies hire for.

The debt math

The heart of his case is financial: "The average student graduates with $27,000 in debt, which is an astronomical amount of debt to be saddled with, as you're coming out and trying to find an entry-level job." Committing four years to an institution at that price, he argues, is the real gamble. "If college were free, this would be an entirely different question."

And college isn't going anywhere: "If you want to go back, it will always be there. But the cost of taking a year to learn for yourself is nothing."

Stephens dropped out himself: "I left school because I didn't feel like school was an environment that left me free to learn."

Archive summary, March 2013, based on NPR's interview with Dale Stephens.