General Wellington said The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

And Director Aaron Sorkin implied The facebook social network was coded during fraternity rush week.

What I recall most positively about college was the gentle and most open-ended call to develop agency. It was a world where you could, indeed, just do things. Spend $190 on throwing a party and try to feed yourself for the rest of the week on $10. Sleep fourteen hours. Sleep zero hours. Burn out on cheap weed, or wage-max with three part time jobs.

The credits, the grades, your major and minor gave the adults a rationalization for what you were doing. But really you were like kids playing house or dress up. There was a vague recognition that your were in a temporary developmental stage, but what you could become was an open path that wasn't just decided by "the system" anymore, that you could have a say in.

I think these increasingly common cases of 18 year olds foregoing college to do a "tech startup" are going into the one of the harshest agency training programs - a triple black diamon if you will - and are likely to emerge more jaded, more cynical, and less filled with hope than they could have if they tried a few years on the bunny hill first.

Just as General Wellington credited his officers discipline and teamwork inclulcated at college as the deciding factor in his military success, I think a generally whimsical and agentic nature is the critical ingredient which powers much of today's success in innovation. I think this will be difficult to create outside the dorms for now.