Alt-College Experiment

Who is this post for?

This is a true chronicle of an experiment for my youngest son to skip college and directly enter the workforce. If you know a young person who is considering skipping college, this may be helpful to see what someone else did. Fair warning: It’s long. I tried to be as concise as I could.

My education experience was pretty awful. I did not get a single thing out of k-12 and ended up with a 2.2 GPA. I read voraciously on my own, but hated required reading in school. Other than two great teachers in community college, I despised every second of college. I learned nothing, and ultimately wasted time and money. Thankfully I did not take out huge loans.

There has never been a single instance where the existence of my degree has made any difference in my career. I am positive of this fact.

So when one of my children had a similar experience in k-12, I asked him if he wanted to try an alternative to college. Here was the outline of the plan:

We would support him for 4 years using the money otherwise earmarked for tuition.
I would personally help him and teach him during that period.
The goal was to get 4 years of experience working in a fruitful field that he didn’t hate.

Once he accepted the premise, his 4 year education journey began.

Freshman Year

Career Audit

We started by examining as many different jobs as I was aware of. In tech, there are a myriad of good jobs in departments such as sales, marketing, IT, product management, design, engineering, QA, customer success, support, finance, data analysis, and more. I explained what each job does and we narrowed it down based on his loose interest. In design, we would call this doing an “audit”.

Informational Interviews

Info interviews are a wonderful tool to learn about a field. (see post for more details on how they work) I opened up my LinkedIn and sent a basic message to people in my network who worked in specific fields we chose:

“Hi, my son is interested in [field]. Since you have so much experience, I was hoping you could let him interview you for 20-30m. Would this be ok? – Glen”

I thankfully got about a roughly 20% success rate. If they said yes, I would send a basic intro email to the two of them. We established a standard response and scheduling process together.

Quick Acknowledgement of Privilege

I happen to know many people in tech. This is an unfair advantage to be sure. I also have enough money to pay for this experiment without school loans. This is also a major privilege. This experiment is not viable for many people. I fully acknowledge this, but still feel it may be beneficial to some readers.

I do believe that this experiment may be viable for many young folks out there, even if they have to bootstrap the informational interviews themselves. However, my privileged position makes all of this much easier.

A few of the people he met turned into recurring mentors. These mentors would spend time with him on zoom and review what he was learning. They suggested books to read and videos to watch. He would read them and follow-up with learnings back to the mentors.

Target Field – Sales

After interviewing many people in my network, my son narrowed down the field of interest to the sales department. This department did not overvalue college degrees and had a clear path for the first job. (e.g. SDR/BDR)

An interesting thing about tech sales… It’s not that important to be a “people person”. It’s more important to be diligent and willing to say the same thing a thousand times in a row. In the tech sector, sales is often a slog through bureaucratic procurement processes. You can be an introvert and also be a successful sales person. My son had experience in the high school drama club. This is excellent training for a job in tech sales. My son likened cold-calling to voice acting. Good analogy.

You might be surprised how many jobs are not what you think they are. Product design is often an uncreative process, for example. This is why informational interviews are so important. You get to see first hand the people who do the job.

Internship

Thanks to some lucky coincidences, my son was invited to be an intern in a 10-person startup. (I had done some work for them previously.) He would do random tasks including organizing the CEOs inbox and calendar. The time spent interning was valuable for many basic areas including:

How to communicate and work in a professional environment
How time off works
How products get made

The questions he would ask me ranged in complexity, but helped him gain a sense of normalcy of what adult work is like. Working in any real company is a major benefit and I strongly encourage it. If you don’t have that opportunity, working retail is a close alternative.

Interviewing for his first SDR job

Once he had some experience from the internship, we crafted his resume and started applying to SDR positions. His first interviews were terrible. He didn’t know how to answer most questions and panicked much of the time. I tried to give him the long view that this was all training. Interviewing would help him get better at interviewing. Thankfully, he kept a positive attitude.

He wrote down the questions he was asked in each interview and we workshopped different ways of answering them. Slowly, he got better and more confident at answering questions. After 6 months (yes it took a long time) he was a very confident interviewer. He exuded the right attitude and was able to answer all of the questions smoothly.

Sophmore Year

First Job: SDR

He landed his first full time SDR job at a small tech startup in Denver. The job of an SDR is to source and qualify leads for sales to engage with. Two techniques to do this include:

Send email threads to prospects using a emailing tool
Cold-call prospects on the phone and try to get them interested

The work of an SDR is repetitive, but honestly, what job is not repetitive at some level? He did the job and slowly got better at it. He learned specifically about cold calling which was a particular emphasis of his manager.

Additionally, he moved into an apartment in a new city and opened up a bank account. He got a personal investment app and started putting money into his retirement fund. (The magic of compound interest!) In other words, he was adulting! Of course, as stated earlier, the rent and other bills were paid for with his unused tuition money.

Unfortunately, this particular company had a culture that was not a great fit for him. It was pretty clear early on that there were issues. Ultimately, he was laid off after 8 months. Honestly, this was a good lesson for him. Better to have a bad experience early so you can recognize a good place later. I was super proud of how he dusted himself off and got back to work.

To find his next position, I was almost completely uninvolved. He sourced the jobs himself and I did not reach out to my network at all. He interviewed and landed his position completely by himself. His confidence level was a key factor in securing the position.

Junior Year

Second Job

The process took 3 months and landed in a solid position with a better culture fit at the beginning of his junior year. His experience with cold calling helped him stand out from the other candidates.

The new position is remote (compared to the Denver position), so he decided to move back to the Bay Area. He researched apartments and landed in a fairly upscale building nearby. It’s much fancier than my first Manhattan apartment. There is even a nice gym and pool table in the building!

He has made quota each quarter and successfully integrated work into his life. He wakes up on time, works diligently, understands the mission, and focuses his energies properly. In short, he is adulting well. He visits us frequently.

Senior Year

Present day: June 2025 – This would have been the start of his senior year of “alt-college”. He has progressed tremendously and is successfully achieving business goals each day. He is one of the top people in his group. So what’s next?

I thought one of two things would happen leading into his graduation year. Either he would realize he doesn’t like sales and want to transfer to another department or he would want to continue and get a position as an account executive (AE). AEs are the natural next step for SDR/BDRs. He has chosen this latter path to become an AE.

Having been in the SDR position for a year, he is eligible to train to be an AE in his company. In addition to his current workload, he is learning the ropes for that next step. So far, so good.

The hope is that his senior year is spent as a quota carrying AE. This will bring new learnings and development. He continues to meet regularly with his mentors and keeps them abreast of his progress or if he encounters any complicated situations.

Because of the money he is making, he has graciously opted to take less from us for rent and other costs. He is also investing heavily for his future. This, more than anything, is setting him up for financial independence at a much younger age than his peers.

Post Graduation

I’ll likely do an update 2 years from now. Who knows what the future may bring? All I can say is that he is debt-free, building a solid work history, learning important skills, and managing his life. As an experiment, I think it has worked out wonderfully so far.

Is this experiment right for everyone? Absolutely not. However, it is worth sharing for people who are looking for a different path than huge student loans for a degree they may never need. Maybe there is a parent of a 17 year old out there who may try this experience themselves.