You’re in the library with too many tabs open. One is course enrollment. One is a half-finished internship application. One is a spreadsheet someone sent around with classes, median grades, workload, and whether recruiters seem to like them. Your friend is talking about which professor signals best. Someone at the next table is matching recruiting deadlines to midterms. The class you actually want is the one with the messy syllabus and too much reading, the one that might take over your week and leave you with something real at the end of it. The other class is clean, legible, useful, and easy to explain later.
This is the part nobody tells you about college. You come here because you want something larger from your life - maybe to do something great, maybe just to become more than you already are - and then you find yourself making small, reasonable decisions that slowly replace that ambition with a script. You do not stop caring about learning. You just start filtering everything through what keeps the path smooth, what keeps the options open, what sounds sensible when another ambitious person hears it.
I think that confusion is the whole problem with college.
Newton came to Cambridge in 1661 and found a curriculum built on scholastic philosophy, classical languages, and Euclidean geometry. The university was still teaching a worldview that was already aging out. Newton mostly ignored it. He went to the library and read the moderns instead - Descartes, Galileo, Kepler - and filled notebooks with his own experiments and observations. When plague closed Cambridge in 1665, he went home to Woolsthorpe and, away from the institution, did the work that would later define him: calculus, gravity, optics.
Cambridge mattered. It gave him access to the archive, time without immediate financial pressure, and eventually the institutional standing to publish. But we often tell the story as if Cambridge made Newton. That confuses access with causation.
Universities are archives. That is their real function and it is a valuable one. They store the cumulative knowledge of humanity and give you access to it. Newton needed Cambridge for that. He needed a way to reach what Galileo and Descartes had already discovered.
But the archive is not the lab. The archive teaches you what is known. The lab is where you discover what is unknown. Universities sell you the archive and market it as the lab. They train you to retrieve, synthesize, and repeat what is already legible to the institution, then call that innovation.
You can feel the gap once you’re inside. You arrive wanting to build something that matters, to understand the world, to become someone more capable. Then a quieter logic takes over. You start optimizing for grades. You aim for the internship brand names everyone else aims for. You build a resume for consulting, finance, or tech because those are the paths the institution knows how to validate. Somewhere along the way, you stop asking what you want to do and start asking what someone like you is supposed to do next.
That is a different game.
Most students are playing the credential game. This is not because they are weak or shallow. It is because the game is rational from the inside. Companies need ways to evaluate people at scale, so they use degrees and internships as filters. Ambitious people pursue those filters because the filters open doors. Then employers see that ambitious people tend to have those credentials and treat the credential as proof of capability rather than a proxy for it. The loop closes. Soon everyone needs credentials to access the same opportunities.
Once a credential becomes the target, it stops measuring what it was supposed to measure. That’s Goodhart’s Law. A degree starts as a proxy for capability. Then students optimize directly for the degree. The proxy takes over the purpose.
This is why college can feel productive while quietly making you less directed. The credential gives you relief from uncertainty. You don’t have to answer the harder questions yet. What do I actually want to do? What kind of work feels like mine? What am I willing to fail at? The institutional path gives you a cleaner answer: take the classes, get the grades, land the internship, keep the optionality alive. It feels safe because it postpones self-authorship.
But predictability and exploration pull in opposite directions.
When the credential becomes your answer to uncertainty, you end up wanting what everyone around you wants. The sequence is always the same. Prestigious school, then prestigious company, then prestigious exit. Harvard then Goldman then private equity. Stanford then OpenAI then a YC-backed startup. The names change but the structure doesn’t. You enter competition with thousands of people chasing the same symbols in the same order. And the fact of the competition is the tell. If you knew what you actually wanted, the path would narrow. It would become more specific and therefore less crowded.
This is close to Girard’s mimetic theory. You want the thing partly because other ambitious people want it, and their wanting it makes it feel validated. Peter Thiel once described Harvard faculty dynamics by saying the battles were ferocious because the stakes were small. When objective differences are tiny, people fight harder over status because status is all that’s left to differentiate them.
So I don’t think the real question is college or no college. I think the question is what game you are using college to play.
There are two paths here.
The first is the prescribed path: optimize for grades, credentials, internships, and stable prestige. For most people, this is rational. It gives you a high probability of becoming a competent specialist. The world still needs competent specialists. A society cannot run on iconoclasts alone.
The second is to use the university the way Newton did. Not by dropping out of the institution, but by refusing to confuse its metrics for your purpose. Use the library, the labs, the compute, the professors, the peers, the time, and the reputation as leverage for your own obsessions. The institution becomes infrastructure for self-directed work rather than a script for your life.
That second path is riskier socially but less risky existentially. You are less likely to wake up in three years with perfect credentials and no real sense of what you care about.
Most people should probably take more of the first path than the second. I wrote about this here. We still need labor, institutions still matter, and the old world has not disappeared. But if you came to a place like Stanford because of the resources and not just the signal, if you feel restless every time you notice yourself optimizing for what looks good instead of what feels true, then you may be playing by rules that were useful to the institution but bad for you.
Universities are excellent filters. Too excellent, maybe. They identify exceptional people, then we mistake the filtering for transformation. We say Stanford made someone brilliant when often Stanford selected someone who was already going to become brilliant. Cambridge selected Newton. It did not generate Newton from scratch.
The trap is expecting the institution to transform you into someone you are not already becoming. It won’t. At best it gives you tools, access, and a temporary shelter in which to work. The actual transformation comes from the questions you choose, the things you build, and the obsessions you follow far enough that they start changing you.
The credential is a library card. It gets you into the room where knowledge is stored. That matters. But the library is silent. The interesting part happens when you stop mistaking access for action, when you stop consuming what is already known and start using it to do something that wasn’t going to happen without you.
Knowledge matters because it becomes action. The archive helps. It cannot choose your work for you.
Inspiration: