Why College Is Still Useful for Builders

Steve Jobs said you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. I think college is mostly useful because it gives you more dots.

Not all of them look useful at first. A class you took because it fit your schedule. A friend who cared way too much about some niche you had never thought about. A club you joined by accident. A professor who gave you one phrase that stayed in your head. A project that failed but left behind a habit, a taste, or one small trick you kept using.

Most of it feels random while it is happening. You are not walking around thinking, this will be useful later. You are just doing things. Taking classes, meeting people, sending emails, building ugly little projects, changing your mind every few weeks. From the outside it can look scattered. Often it is scattered. But sometimes scattered is what the early stage of becoming interesting looks like.

This feels more true now because AI is making the average version of everything easier to produce. The average landing page is better. The average piece of code is better. The average essay is more readable. But a lot of it has the same smell. It says the right things, but none of them feel found. It works, but it feels like it came from a very competent person with no particular life.

AI can help you make something. It cannot give you better things to make it from.

That is where college is still useful. It puts you around people and situations you would not have chosen on purpose. The kid building hardware in his room. The friend who is weirdly good at getting people to show up. The designer who knows something is wrong before anyone else can explain why. The person who has read far too much about a market you did not know existed. Most of these people will not become your cofounder. Most conversations will disappear. But a few of them change what you notice.

Most builders do not start with a company. They start with some repeated irritation. A tool they wish existed. A behavior in a group chat. A broken workflow in a club. A market that feels fake. A type of person nobody seems to be building for. At first it looks unserious: a side project, a rant, a long dinner conversation, a bad demo, a class assignment that got out of hand.

College is unusually forgiving of that stage. The outside world wants the answer too early. What is it? Who is it for? How big can it get? Why now? Why you? These are good questions eventually. Asked too soon, they can scare the weirdness out of an idea before it has become anything.

Being a student also lets you be underqualified in public. You can email people you should not really be emailing. You can ask basic questions. You can invite someone to speak because you are curious. You can start something with a bad name and a worse logo. You can make a rough first version and people will often read it as effort before they read it as failure.

That window closes. At some point, curiosity stops being enough of an explanation. The world wants proof. It wants a product, a customer, a reason to take you seriously. But for a few years, “I’m a student trying to learn” still opens doors.

The trap is that you can start liking the doors more than the work. Founder clubs, coffee chats, pitch competitions, panels, LinkedIn posts, being around startups the way someone might be around music without ever learning an instrument. You collect the shape of ambition without the thing itself.

But you can also take a class and have it change what bothers you. You can meet someone and inherit part of their obsession. You can build something small and bad, but have it leave a mark. You can follow an interest that makes no sense inside your story yet.

For a long time, none of it looks like much. It is just you becoming a slightly stranger, more specific person. Then eventually you start building from places other people cannot quite trace.

That is the part of college I still believe in.