THE CASE FOR STAYING
Universities were never meant for everyone.
The first ones were built for clergy and elites as a way to train the people who would shape ideas and lead others.
America founders decided this knowledge and potential should belong to all citizens. College became a place to learn how to think, to build, and to take responsibility for the world you inherit.
We believe the idea still matters.
The Manufactured Narrative
Dropout mythology is everywhere. The 19-year-old who raised a seed round. The fellowship that pays you to leave. The viral essay about why college is a complete scam.
There's a real seduction to it. If you're honest, you've felt that creeping suspicion that maybe you're on the wrong side of history. That everyone who matters is already out there building, and you're stuck taking requirements you don't care about.
You are stronger than this manufactured narrative.
Notice a pattern: the loudest critics of higher education are often the same people quietly advancing techno-feudalism, a system that concentrates power in the hands of a technical elite. Those ideas are connected.
Universities are one of the last places where democratic coalition-building happens at scale. Where people from different backgrounds learn together, argue with each other, and build intellectual and social power collectively. Where you develop the literacy to critique systems, to organize, to argue back. That's threatening if your goal is to concentrate power.
The best way to control people is to eliminate broad-based education. Populations educated only in narrow, technical silos or convinced to skip education entirely don't have the tools to question who holds power and why. They've been taught that citizenship is inefficient, that collective decision-making is outdated, and algorithmic control is preferable to free debate.
College is the last institution designed primarily to make you better. Every other place you go, every company, every accelerator, every "opportunity" has ulterior motives. They want your labor, your attention, your equity, your data. They're optimizing for their outcomes, not yours.
A university, especially a public one, was built with a single purpose: your development. Your ability to think critically, to build meaningfully, to lead effectively. The institution succeeds when you succeed. That alignment is rare and precious.
The Real Question
Let's stop pretending this is about credentials. Nobody's arguing over whether a piece of paper is “worth it” anymore. This is a confused debate, everybody knows it was never about the paper.
For the small, elite percentage of builders. People like you. This is about opportunity cost
The real question is: What do I gain or lose by staying versus leaving right now?
There's a classic problem in computer science called hill climbing. Imagine you're dropped in a foggy, hilly terrain where you can only see a few feet ahead. Your goal is to reach the highest hill. The simplest algorithm says: at any moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher. But if you start near a lower hill, you'll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the tallest one. Better algorithms introduce randomness early, letting you meander and explore before you commit to climbing.
Most people climb the wrong hill. They pick the one that's most visible, the one everyone else is already halfway up. The wrong hill can feel right for a long time because you're making progress, gaining altitude. It's only much later, that you realize you're on the wrong mountain entirely.
College is your chance to wander. To drop yourself in new parts of the terrain. To meet people who think differently, read things that challenge you, try building in fields you didn't know existed. You get years where you can explore without financial pressure, fail without reputational costs, and figure out what hill is actually worth climbing. This is a strategic advantage.
The Case for Patient Ambition
Being a student is choosing patience over panic and believing that years spent building depth and breadth will compound into something more powerful than anything you could sprint toward now.
Warren Buffett said: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful."
Be wary of "high signal" acts like dropping out.
In this attention economy, patience is the most underrated competitive edge. While others optimize for visibility, optimize for readiness and learning. While they build without context, you're building the context that will make everything you do now and later more valuable.
The best founders are thinkers first. They have frameworks, mental models, the ability to see patterns across disciplines. That doesn't come from grinding on a single problem at 19. It comes from wandering, from reading widely, from building the intellectual infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
School Gives You
Time to be wrong. Time to explore ideas that don't monetize. Time to develop judgment before the stakes get real. Time to change your mind without it becoming a narrative problem.
Depth and breadth. The ability to go deep on one thing while staying exposed to many things. To become technical while staying literate in history, philosophy, systems thinking. To understand not just how to build, but what's worth building and why.
A community of peers. People going through the same questions at the same time, without the power dynamics of coworkers or the transactional nature of "the real world.” Friendships and collaborations formed here have different foundations than anything you'll build later.
Institutional resources at scale. Libraries, labs, professors, research databases, legal support, funding opportunities, physical space. Try pricing out what it would cost to access equivalent resources independently. You can't. IF SCHOOLS HAD THE BRAND OF ACCELERATORS YOU WOULD NOT EVEN CONSIDER LEAVING
Protected time to build your own projects. Contrary to the narrative, you can absolutely build companies, communities, research, and meaningful work while in school. The difference is you're doing it with a safety net, with mentorship, with resources, and without the pressure to monetize immediately or die.
The opportunity to be an apprentice. College is the last place where masters will invest in you without return. Professors, researchers, and experienced founders will teach you their craft, developing you is their mission.
And hell it’s fun! Misery is not a prerequisite for success.
The Promise
Universities were built to train the people who would shape ideas and lead others. Then America decided knowledge should belong to everyone - that college should be a place to learn how to think, to build, to take responsibility for the world you inherit.
That promise is under attack. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded. Because educated populations are harder to control. Because people who can think critically and organize collectively are dangerous to systems that concentrate power.
By staying, by taking your education seriously, by treating the university as your laboratory and your foundation, you're doing something quietly radical. You're refusing to abandon one of the last institutions designed to serve you at scale. You're investing in yourself without apology. You're keeping a promise that matters.
To go to college and coast through it that's undoubtedly a waste. But to stay and dig in, to connect dots across disciplines, to build ambitious projects with institutional support, to develop both depth and literacy, to learn how systems work by working within them that's not playing it safe.
That's playing the long game. And the long game is how you win.
This is a community pledge for student entrepreneurs who are staying. Who are building companies and communities and research and art while getting their degrees. You're part of a lineage of people who believe in one of the greatest inventions and promises of all times. A place to shape people into individuals that have the tools to think, build, and lead.
That promise is still worth keeping. By staying actively involved and architecting, you're keeping it. If any part of this resonates with you,
Common objections
"You'll learn more by building than by sitting in class."
False choice. You don't build instead of learning. You build because you're learning. You're not choosing between action and learning.
"The real world moves too fast. You'll fall behind."
Nothing important disappears in four years. Any opportunity with timing that narrow probably isn't as real as it seems. The technologies, platforms, and trends that matter compound over decades, not semesters.
But your chance to live in a low-stakes environment surrounded by peers, mentors, and open-ended curiosity? That disappears the moment you leave. You can always start a company at 23, 28, 35, hell 70. You can't go back and be a naive 19-year-old student exploring freely.
"College is a credential mill that doesn't teach you to think."
This is a real danger, but only if you treat yourself as a product instead of an architect. If you show up expecting the institution to pour success into you, you'll be disappointed.
But if you take ownership, if you treat the university as your laboratory, a public university becomes the most resource-rich environment you'll ever inhabit. It's a place with systems old enough to have real wisdom, flexible enough for you to bend them, and resourced enough to support ambitious projects.
You will not be successful if you expect a handout. But if you care enough to connect the dots, to seek out the right help, to build across departments, to turn coursework into launchpads for your own projects, college is extraordinarily powerful.
The infrastructure is there if you're willing to architect your own education.
"If you were really ambitious, you'd drop out and do it yourself."
Don't confuse dropping out for conviction. Often it's impatience dressed up as courage, insecurity masked as boldness. It's people expecting more from their institution instead of asking what they can do with their institution.
Real ambition is harder than leaving. Real ambition is staying and mastering the system. Bending it. Turning it into your laboratory. Building companies and communities and research projects within a university teaches you something invaluable: how to work with people, how to navigate institutions, how to communicate ideas that last.
Every environment you enter for the rest of your life will have constraints, politics, bureaucracy, and systems you didn't design. Learning to build within and despite and because of those systems (all while you are protected and resourced) is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
Anyone can quit. Few people can transform.
"College is for people who don't know what they want."
Exactly. That's the point.
College is one of the last socially acceptable places to not have it figured out. To experiment. To change your mind. To get obsessed with something unexpected. To discover that the thing you thought you wanted isn't actually your hill.
You don't go because you know who you are. You go because you don't and you want to find out.
The people who "know what they want" at 19 are usually just climbing the most visible hill. They're following someone else's path with confidence. That's not clarity, but momentum without direction.
If you genuinely know your hill and you're already halfway up it, then yes, maybe leaving makes sense. But most people who think they know are just afraid of appearing uncertain.