Rethinking the College Dropout Narrative 

There is a sense of romanticism attached to counterculture—the idea of actively rejecting the dominant values, norms, and expectations of mainstream society. One of the glorified narratives is that of the college dropout, which frames leaving as an act of rebellion, a rejection of the traditional postsecondary academic path in pursuit of something riskier, freer, and potentially revolutionary. 

The stories are familiar: Steve Jobs walking away from Reed College and later founding Apple, Bill Gates leaving Harvard to build Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg coding Facebook from a dorm room before leaving for Silicon Valley. 

It is in both our highbrow and lowbrow culture, from prestige films like “The Social Network” and literary profiles to viral tweets and startup podcasts, that perpetuate the dropout narrative as one for the intellectual outliers: someone whose vision is so exceptional it outgrows the intuition meant to contain it.

This framing, however, obscures a crucial reality. Today, dropping out is no longer an anomaly but an increasingly normalized path. What is rare is not the act of leaving, but succeeding afterwards. Yet, the cultural narrative collapses these two ideas, departure and success, into one, making it seem as though dropping out itself produces innovation. That trajectory depends on conditions that are far less talked about: access to funding, networks, prior experience, and a level of certainty that most students simply do not have. As dropping out becomes more common, the gap between the myth and reality only continues to widen. 

Dropping Out

Data from the Education Data Initiative shows that, every year, the U.S. dropout rate reaches 32.9%, and nearly 39% of first-time bachelor’s degree students do not complete their degrees within eight years. Over 43.1 million Americans had left college without a degree as of July 2023. At that point, it becomes difficult to frame dropping out as countercultural when it is, in many ways, a common story. 

Financial pressure plays a significant role in why students drop out, with 53% reporting difficulty paying tuition and 50% struggling to manage everyday costs such as living expenses, food, and course materials. In addition, roughly 18% of students point to mental health challenges as a primary reason for leaving school. These figures convey that, for many, dropping out is not an act of defiance, but a response to material and structural pressures. The complex reality behind the decision to leave disrupts the romanticized image of the college dropout.

From Dot-Com Dreams to the “AI Gold Rush”

For a smaller group of students, however, dropping out is not driven by constraining circumstances but by opportunity. These are the cases that dominate headlines and shape cultural perception. During the late 1990s dot-com boom, and later the rise of social media, figures like Jack Dorsey made leaving school seem like a shortcut to innovation.

That narrative persists today, gaining a new momentum in the rise of artificial intelligence as a surge of AI startups fuels a new wave of entrepreneurial dropouts. According to the “Wall Street Journal” reporter Lindsay Ellis, the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked a sharp rise in interest in AI. As funding pours into the field, many young entrepreneurs see AI as a timely and lucrative opportunity. The decision to leave school becomes clear to the students once they secure key funding or are accepted into a startup accelerator. Also, the rapid advancement of AI creates urgency, an awareness that AI is reshaping or replacing jobs, making it critical to move quickly. The mindset is simple: “strike while the iron is hot.”

Yet even within this group, success is far from guaranteed. The stories that gain attention represent only the highest outcomes, and these highly conditional successes create the dropout narrative.

Ned Koh

People like Ned Koh are at the center of the dropout narrative—a Harvard student who left to build a rapidly growing AI company, now running a billion-dollar business. Yet, his story actually complicates that myth. His departure was not impulsive, but carefully calculated, supported by years of prior experience, an already established financial income, and a strong sense of certainty. Even Koh resists the romanticized image, conveying that the dropout narrative is not a realistic one, and chasing the idea of leaving for success is a trap for many.

Koh entered Harvard in the fall of 2024, only to leave two weeks later. He moved to New York to pursue Aaru, his rapidly growing AI prediction software company. 

“I started my company in March of 2024, so I actually took a gap year to build out another company that had started before I joined.” Originally admitted as a member of the Class of 2027, and then coming back to school as a member of the Class of 2028 after his gap year, Koh knew that he was going to leave. “We had already raised millions and millions of dollars …We were already generating revenue as a business by the time I entered Harvard.”

Koh’s story began much earlier, before his time at Harvard, with experimentation, obsession, and a long-standing inclination toward building. “I’ve been starting companies since I was like 14, right? So COVID was my freshman year of high school, and I pretty much spent that whole time messing around on computers. I ended up starting a bunch of different companies when I was in high school. A couple of which were fairly successful, and then I started Aaru.”

Aaru emerged from a specific insight about AI, not just as a tool, but as something that could model human behavior itself. “We saw these models that have more and more humanistic. We saw them being applied to a lot of simple things, like summarization … and we said, ‘Hey, these models are incredibly humanistic. What if we made them very humanistic? Let’s go see if we can make them represent humans, and apply that to politics.’ And we started by predicting elections and scaled off from them.”

From there, the company expanded rapidly. 

“If you believe that humans are the preeminent species on the planet … if you know what humans are gonna do, and you know why they’re gonna do it, then you can change that. And that is the most powerful technology on the … planet, right,” he shared. “We’ve been able to build some incredible models that deliver so much value for all of our customers that it’s been able to grow very quickly as a result.”

Now, Koh’s life has some similarities and many differences from that of a regular college student. “I wake up at 7:30 a.m. every morning, which is probably not what I would be doing if I was at school. I do go to sleep close to two to three in the morning, which is what I would be doing if I was at school.” He also acknowledged the workload behind the dropout fantasy. “We were mandated six days a week in the office … Saturdays are technically off, but most people work virtually,” Koh said. He added that the demands of building Aaru require constant travel, such as long-distance flights to Singapore multiple times a month, underscoring the intensity of his schedule.

“I’ve made sure to make culture such an important part of this. We have so many young people, so many dropouts … We get the diversity of perspective, we get the diversity of thought … we do frontier research and change the world every day. What else could you ask for?” 

Despite the hardship, Koh’s passion and love for his work leave no regrets for him dropping out. “We’ve gotten extra really cool experiences. I think, like, look, we get to work across politics, we get to work across consumers. We get to work with movie studios, every business you could possibly want to imagine.”

Yet, despite his own path, Koh is resistant to the idea that others should follow it. “I think college is great for 99% of people.” He breaks that majority into three categories: those who don’t yet know what they want to do, those who need a degree for their profession, and those who need the experience of college itself—community, identity growth, and exposure.

“If you don’t follow one of those three categories, then you shouldn’t be in school. But 99.9% of people do fall in one of those three categories. And so, no, I don’t think it’s very realistic for many people. I think a lot of people make dumb decisions.”

For Koh, dropping out is ultimately about certainty. “If you’ve done the calculation yourself, you’re not dumb … You’re clearly not coming from nowhere. If you doubt yourself for a moment, then you shouldn’t do it.”

At the same time, he resists the opposite extreme, the idea that students must choose between school and building their career. “I think people should build cool shit if they want to. I think a lot of that you can do when you’re still in school … I just think it’s all about time allocation. And don’t be stupid about it.” 

Koh’s perspective conveys the gap at the center of the cultural narrative. There is no inherent link between leaving college and achieving success; what matters are the underlying conditions, certainty, preparation, and access that make such a decision viable in the first place. The problem, then, is not whether students stay or leave, but the illusion of dropping out. 

So, What Actually is Countercultural? 

“My co-founder, Cam, is 20. My other co-founder, John, is currently 17. He dropped out of high school. That’s countercultural. Right? Dropping out of college, dropping out of Harvard? That’s not that rare for San Francisco anymore.”

The act of dropping out itself has lost its edge. Instead, Koh draws the line elsewhere. “I do think having a billion-dollar company as a teenager is very countercultured,” he said.

This reveals what the culture is actually romanticizing. Under the dropout narrative, what is framed as “counterculture” is not the act of leaving college itself, but the rare success that sometimes follows it. “There’s a lot of people who start a lot of different companies. We, thankfully, totally attribute it to our team, and the people that we have around us have been able to have some incredible growth. That’s counterculture,” Koh said.

But Koh’s story does not end in rejection of the university system. “Harvard was a dream for me, and I hope to someday be able to, to be involved with the community, to a consistent extent,” he added.

Rethinking the Narrative 

The narrative of the college dropout as counterculture feels increasingly outdated. The data shows that dropping out is no longer rare, and the reasons behind it are often shaped by financial pressure and mental health, rather than defiance against a so-called “laid-out path” of education. 

Koh’s path may appear to fit the familiar narrative, but even in his case, leaving was not an act of rebellion. It was a calculated decision built on certainty, timing, and momentum—conditions he himself acknowledges that most students do not have. 

What we claim to romanticize is the act of leaving college, but what draws our attention is something far narrower: the few who make it. By centering these exceptional outcomes, the cultural narrative obscures conditions that actually made success possible for them: access to funding, networks, prior experience, and certainty that make such trajectories possible. 

As dropping out becomes more common, the myth only grows more misleading. The act itself has lost its edge, but the narrative surrounding it refuses to let go of the dropout as a countercultural protagonist, someone whose success emerges from leaving college itself. 

Katherine Chung ’29 (katherinechung@college.harvard.edu) writes Forum for the “Independent.”