A friend told me yesterday that he was considering dropping out. I’m not surprised. Education has become a system to be gamed for many, and for a person like him, it’s a pointless game. The problem is that he’s the exact type of student Academia should be working to retain.

Let’s call my friend U. Let me tell you more about U.

U is one of the smartest people I know. And more than that he’s amazingly patient, humble, and is excellent at communicating himself.

He’s a computer science student at a large state school, not a prestigious one, and certainly a far cry away from schools like the UCs, and the Ivy League.

U ended up here because he refused to play the game. He was a decent student, took his share of AP classes, scored adequately on the SATs, made his way through the high school curriculum. What he didn’t do was optimize his life around what the Admissions Committe at Prestigious Colleges decided he should do if he wanted to be admitted.

This has cost him. He now takes CS classes filled with hundreds of students, taught by professors who profess that the Linux Kernel was written in C++ (a clearly false statement to anyone who would know anything about Linux). U has been given less resources, and it’s pretty clear to him now that the college education system will not get him what he wants.

But the loss is not his.

U is the exact type of person that Academia should be trying to keep. Academia exists to advance human knowledge, and it stands to reason that the best people to produce new understanding are those who are deeply curious and intrinsically interested. It’s a shame that the system is pushing him out.

U will be fine. He’s built up real skills that will carry him far, and they exist and have value outside of the system. But I worry for the state of Academia in time, as those who’ve played the game, who’ve curated and optimized are the ones who will be left running the system.