One late summer afternoon in San Francisco, some 200 people in their early 20s arrived at the Marina Theater, an old-style movie theater with musty felt seats. The group, almost entirely male, came from all over: India, New Zealand, Ohio, New York. They wore chintzy black robes bought on Amazon, sweatshirts emblazoned with hackathon logos and, occasionally, Rolexes.
They had gathered for a “Dropout Graduation” in San Francisco, a tongue-in-cheek commencement ceremony for students who chose to never have one. Unsurprisingly, it had been organized on X.
It used to be that college dropout success stories were the rarest of exceptions. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey—all were the superhuman oddballs who left Harvard and Stanford and were the better for it, going on to build billion-dollar empires while defining themselves against the traditional path college offered.
For everyone else, college was a rite of passage. A degree meant status, employability, and upward mobility.
Over the past decade, that promise has eroded.
