The Graduation Paradox

What is college even for anymore?

All throughout high school, I was ready to go to college. Four years of a curated, carefully prepared application, and it worked. I got into multiple T20s and committed to the best public school in the country (no, we are not bringing up the UCLA debate).

It's barely been a year, and I can't see myself doing this for another three. Technically I'm on a gap semester right now, so it's more like three and a half if I don't graduate early. But I want to graduate early. And tbh, I don't even know why.

Somewhere along the way I got irreversibly used to the idea that school doesn't matter anymore. AI is going to be the single most important thing in our lives, and that's all you need to know. Why take Abstract Algebra or Econometrics or Optimization Models, or really anything past the basics I took freshman year? So many people skip all of it and move to SF to work, and next to them I feel stuck as a student at Cal.

But I don't think it should be that way.

At Berkeley, the people who are actually obsessed with what they love, not just optimizing for an outcome (two very, very different things), are few and far between. And I know a lot of people at this school. People with Palantir internships, people a phone call away from Anthropic. People drop out of MET, GMP, EECS. Fully funded research and PhD offers. All because chasing a VC check in SoMa looks more attractive in 2026 than writing a dissertation on stochastic processes.

I've been visiting other schools recently, because my entire bubble was Berkeley and Stanford. Brown, UIUC, Duke and Chapel Hill back home. There are people there who drop out to build, sure. But it isn't romanticized as the fashionable thing to do. Those schools lean academic, and I think I finally get why. There's a quiet understanding there that becoming the most advanced person in your field beats flopping on the basics.

I haven't fully clocked why Berkeley is different. It's an incredible research university. But put startup culture, a massive undergraduate population, and Gen Z entering college in 2026 into one place, and it makes sense why everyone wants to do their own thing. It's a competitive bloodbath at heart, and people get sick of it. At times, so have I.

I pay well over 80K a year out of state for this, and I'm grateful my parents can put me through it. And yet every semester I'm here, it starts to feel like a waste of time. You don't need Real Analysis or Thermodynamics to make it big. So many of my friends are on gap semesters like me, doing YC or a16z speedrun, co-oping in big tech (who knows what the job market looks like in a year), or something else entirely. It's easy to treat school as the blocker, when it should be a force multiplier.

Which is the paradox, and I should just say it plainly. I'm arguing that school is undervalued, that people leave too fast, that depth matters. And at the same time, I'm trying to spend as little time here as possible. I believe both of those things. I haven't figured out how to reconcile them.

From a purely financial standpoint, a two-year Berkeley degree probably makes a lot of sense. But there's so much unpredictability in AI that it's hard to tell what's worth it. For everything you think about, there's a counterargument. PhDs are getting underfunded. Software engineering might look completely different by the time we graduate. Some people genuinely love the academic route and spend another eight years in their field before working. Others are impatient. Others like me.

I could get my degree in two years and do whatever I want after. Or I could do a master's in EECS, a PhD, or go deeper on my double major to actually solidify what I know. All great options. This is UC Berkeley, probably in the conversation for the top ten school names in the world. Someone else in my shoes would probably land somewhere completely different.

Next semester I'm back in school after a stretch of working, building my own stuff, and honestly just taking a break from all of this, which I'll recap in another post. Five technical classes, because I'm catching up and still trying to graduate early. And nobody really tells you how hard it is these days to stay disciplined about coursework and only coursework. No tokenmaxxing on Claude Code at 2AM, no filming reels, no trips back and forth to SF for VC meetings. Just Wheeler, Dwinelle, and Evans, taking classes that six months ago I would have absolutely loathed.

It might not be fun. It might be lonely. It'll probably be FOMO, watching friends live life on their own terms. But I have a feeling it'll be worth it. Gamedays, parties, clubs, actually living in a college town. That's the part everyone who left traded away, and it's a different kind of play that nobody sets up for you when you get here.

Because would I really feel ahead of my peers if I dropped out and none of it worked, while they graduated from Cal and moved on to stable jobs? Or is that just short-term gratification dressed up as ambition? Dropping out feels like a status symbol. It isn't. Some people genuinely need time away to figure out what they want and reset, and that's different from treating a gap semester like a trophy.

Unlike my previous pieces, I'm still figuring this one out. What I want changes every day. Some days I want to build my own things and not think about school at all. Some days I think school is the real difference between success and failure in the next decade. And some days I just don't want to think about it.

I'm going to reread this next June and see if I still feel the same way. Not to check whether I was right. I don't think there's a right answer here. Just to see which version of me won.