A different perspective: Colleges very, very badly want you to graduate—especially if you look like you have been doing something other than playing videogames high on weed in your apartment for four years. The upshot of this is that in the case suggested (top 1% IQ, top 50% conscientiousness) after a threshold of maybe 5 hours a week, any effort put specifically towards graduating is basically wasted- going to college with the goal of graduating is severely, severely under-determined. Take chemistry classes! Take physics classes! Take graduate math classes without the prerequisites and fail them! Calculate which essays you don’t strictly have to turn in! Build a rocket ship or a race car! Found a startup! Practice bullying administrators into giving you class credit for all of the above!
What college is providing you is 35 hours a week of working time to do with as you please, access to 3-D printers, a machine shop, math classes, the local supercomputer, a chemistry lab, oscilloscopes and signal generators, and zero unemployment stigma. The marginal cost of also getting the credentials while you are there is tiny.
When push comes to shove, you cannot spend 4 years on the goal “graduate from college.” There are very few tasks that you can achieve without a college degree that would be significantly more difficult to achieve while getting a college degree.
(There are also degrees which you absolutely can’t get with 5 hours a week of effort. Selecting one of them is a choice, and frankly, these are not degrees that you are going to successfully self teach.)
Thanks for the comment! I think this is a good attitude, and if you can sustain this attitude this then I think it’s a pretty great deal. I suspect that many cannot hold this attitude, and will feel much more constrained in their choices or the narratives they tell themselves and people in their lives about their time at college, and think more like they’re primarily supposed to do something that other people tell them or expect of them with their time at college.
I myself just barely graduated, in substantial part because of this reason that you mentioned, that my college definitely wanted me to graduate, and so I was able to spend a lot of my time on side-projects. (But I found the experience of pretending to be a proper college student very stressful.)
A different perspective: Colleges very, very badly want you to graduate—especially if you look like you have been doing something other than playing videogames high on weed in your apartment for four years. The upshot of this is that in the case suggested (top 1% IQ, top 50% conscientiousness) after a threshold of maybe 5 hours a week, any effort put specifically towards graduating is basically wasted- going to college with the goal of graduating is severely, severely under-determined. Take chemistry classes! Take physics classes! Take graduate math classes without the prerequisites and fail them! Calculate which essays you don’t strictly have to turn in! Build a rocket ship or a race car! Found a startup! Practice bullying administrators into giving you class credit for all of the above!
What college is providing you is 35 hours a week of working time to do with as you please, access to 3-D printers, a machine shop, math classes, the local supercomputer, a chemistry lab, oscilloscopes and signal generators, and zero unemployment stigma. The marginal cost of also getting the credentials while you are there is tiny.
When push comes to shove, you cannot spend 4 years on the goal “graduate from college.” There are very few tasks that you can achieve without a college degree that would be significantly more difficult to achieve while getting a college degree.
(There are also degrees which you absolutely can’t get with 5 hours a week of effort. Selecting one of them is a choice, and frankly, these are not degrees that you are going to successfully self teach.)
Thanks for the comment! I think this is a good attitude, and if you can sustain this attitude this then I think it’s a pretty great deal. I suspect that many cannot hold this attitude, and will feel much more constrained in their choices or the narratives they tell themselves and people in their lives about their time at college, and think more like they’re primarily supposed to do something that other people tell them or expect of them with their time at college.
I myself just barely graduated, in substantial part because of this reason that you mentioned, that my college definitely wanted me to graduate, and so I was able to spend a lot of my time on side-projects. (But I found the experience of pretending to be a proper college student very stressful.)