Rethinking the “College or Nothing” Script in an AI-Driven Economy

The story of Eric Simons, founder of Bolt.new, who skipped college and went on to build a venture-backed startup valued in the hundreds of millions, is compelling and culturally resonant. It reflects a broader shift among Gen Z: a growing willingness to question whether college should still be treated as the default route to meaningful work and impact.

But for parents of gifted and high-achieving teens, the question isn’t simply “Should my child go to college?” anymore. It should be:

What kind of learning, signal, and optionality will best serve them in a world shaped by AI, startups, and fast-moving careers?

This is not a debate between college vs. dropout. It’s a conversation about how families manage risk, build resilience, and steward long-term opportunity—without collapsing into ideologies that either romanticize disruption or blindly defend tradition.

The founder narrative: opportunity without orthodoxy

A growing number of high-profile founders demonstrate that non-traditional pathways can work (sometimes spectacularly well) when young people embed themselves in environments rich with opportunity, mentors, and real-world problems.

In these cases, skipping college is not a rejection of learning itself, but a strategic choice to pursue intense, applied experience: learning how to learn, building judgment under pressure, and creating leverage through product, community, and iteration rather than formal credentials.

This narrative matters. It offers permission to question inherited scripts and validates the experience of teens who feel constrained by linear, one-size-fits-all pathways.

But prominence does not imply typicality.

Exceptional outcomes tend to arise from exceptional context: access to high-density networks, unusual risk tolerance, years of compounding effort, and a willingness to endure prolonged uncertainty. For every visible success, there are many quieter stories of stalled progress, financial stress, or delayed re-entry into structured learning environments.

For families, the lesson is not to dismiss non-traditional paths (nor to romanticize them) but to evaluate carefully what conditions make them viable, and for whom.

Parents don’t raise children for edge cases

As I’ve written in Unicorn Parents, founders and investors can reasonably embrace upside risk—even bet on moonshots like Bitcoin or early startup careers—because they are wagering on themselves. Parents, by contrast, are tasked with managing downside risk and preserving long-term optionality for their children.

That’s why the loudest college-skeptical stories (the dropouts who “made it”) can be misleading. When you zoom out from mythology to median outcomes:

• Most successful founders still have degrees
• Many attended strong universities
• Many benefited from the signal, networks, and structured environments those institutions provide—whether they finished or not.

In other words: the hype around disruption is real, but the quiet power of scaffolding remains real too.

College is no longer mandatory — but it’s far from useless

One of the clearest ways to see this is in how we mentally frame the choice.

Assets compound financially; environments compound people.
Bitcoin might be a powerful financial asset; college is an environment that compounds social signal, networks, range, and time to mature judgment.

That doesn’t mean every child should go to college, nor that degrees are the only source of credibility. But it does mean college remains instrumentally valuable for many:

• It provides structured time to explore disciplinary breadth and depth,
• It surrounds young people with peers and mentors who already care about growth, and
• It anchors optionality when initial plans change (as they almost always do).

The real divide isn’t whether college is inherently good or bad — it’s whether college is treated as a default pipeline rather than a strategic platform.

Toward a more nuanced conversation about pathways

For families raising gifted and driven teens, the takeaway from both the founder’s journey and broader labor realities should be:

👉 College is no longer the only path to success.
👉 But neither is skipping it an automatic advantage.
👉 The emphasis should be on building durable capacities that matter wherever they go.

Those capacities include:

• How to learn and relearn,
• How to build useful networks,
• Resilience in the face of volatility, and
• Judgment about leverage versus hustle.

A better question for families

If the young person in your life is weighing college against a non-traditional path, don’t ask:

“Should they go to college or not?”

Instead, ask:

• What will this path actually teach them in the next 3–5 years?
• Who are the people they’ll be surrounded by?
• How will this choice preserve or expand optionality later?
• Is this path chosen because of data and intention — or because it is socially expected?

This framing moves the conversation away from ideology—college is good vs. college is obsolete—and toward strategic decision-making grounded in both reality and child-specific context.

Conclusion: optionality over ideology

In an age where startups, AI, and portfolio careers grow in cultural cachet, it’s easy to be pulled into polarized narratives about education. But for parents, especially of high-potential teens, the wisest stance isn’t radical or conservative. It’s responsible:

Cultivate skills, preserve optionality, and define success as capacity, not credential.

Because in the long run, the shape of opportunity matters far more than the myth around where it begins.