I'm a typical Silicon Valley college dropout-turned-entrepreneur. Don't follow my example.

For decades, the conventional wisdom told young Americans that they should go to college, pretty much at all costs. A degree was the ticket to the American dream.

But as the number of people enrolling in college grew, the proportion of students actually earning a degree essentially stagnated. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, of students who started four-year programs in 2000, 57.5% graduated within six years. A decade later, only 59.8% of students who started their programs in 2010 graduated within six years.

Meanwhile, student loan debt skyrocketed, and degrees weren’t translating to the stable careers they were expected to. By 2023, nearly 40 percent of borrowers may default on their student loans, according to a Brookings analysis.

Against that backdrop, Silicon Valley — where college dropouts are building companies, fortunes and reputations — became the torchbearer for a new American narrative: Degrees don’t matter.

That message gained a foothold in the public imagination during the Great Recession, and has done nothing but grow. College, the new thinking goes, is a vestige of a prior era, loosely correlated to the demands of our modern labor market. Skills, not degrees, are the new currency for the future of work. And as the shelf life of skills shrinks, the durability of the degree is waning.

Perception is not reality

As in the earlier narrative, there are elements of truth to this new story — but it’s overly simplistic and ignores the role of class, race, and privilege in the making of the degrees don’t matter fairy tale.

I should know because I am in many ways the quintessential Silicon Valley college dropout, and I know the details that are all too conveniently left out of the typical story.

I dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after my sophomore year to start a new school — now a college for computer science — with a friend from high school. We wanted to teach people the field we loved in the way we wish we had been taught — and we’re doing well. Make School is growing, we’re teaching skills that truly matter. With this business, I will get on just fine without a college degree.

Skills get sold short: Trump administration is right to push students to choose trade skills over impractical liberal arts degrees

But here’s the other part of the story: My parents were among the earliest employees on the team that built the Macintosh at Apple (Kate Winslet played my mom in the "Steve Jobs" movie), and my father has taken three tech startups to IPO.

My private high school had an engineering lab that rivaled those on university campuses and the network I built there is the kind that people get MBAs for. I implicitly understood how to navigate the valley as an entrepreneur. I could take risks and pursue my passion because I had a supportive family that could see me through financial hardship if it arose.

The average person who drops out of college, or never goes in the first place, does not have that kind of privilege, social network and financial safety net. It’s myopic to think that, because of the experiences of an elite few who dropped out of college, the degree is meaningless for everyone.

Parents, don't do this: The truth about the celebrity college scandal: Bribing admissions officials isn't worth it

I say this as someone credited with pioneering an “anti-college.” Indeed, many non-degree programs provide greater value than traditional degree programs and are a better fit for many students. Higher education should focus far more on work-relevant competencies than it generally does, but when education technology insiders say that skills, not just credentials, should be the focus of postsecondary education, too often what people hear is that degrees don’t matter anymore.

The numbers tell a different story

The truth is, the data shows otherwise. In most cases, the market still clearly rewards degrees.

According to an analysis by Temple University economics professor Douglas Webber, the net present value of a bachelor’s degree for the average student is an estimated $344,000. In a recent study, nine out of 10 new jobs went to those with college degrees. Of course, individual colleges and majors vary in their return on investment. Prospective students should be using tools like the Department of Education’s College ScoreCard to determine whether a given program is worth their time and money.

Learn to think to keeping learning forever: A college graduation season truth: Liberal arts degrees are valuable and practical

Employers, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, are requiring degrees for an increasing number of jobs. In a recent nationally-representative survey, almost half of employers said that, in the past five years, they had increased the level of education desired or required for the same job roles.

Statistics like these are part of the reason we recently decided to turn our alternative to college into an alternative college — offering a bachelor’s degree in applied computer science. This move is based on the idea that skills matter most, but the degree is a powerful reinforcement.

Tech employers are looking for not just technical know-how, but human skills like collaboration and critical thinking that are honed through the liberal arts. Rather than an “either-or,” they’re looking for a “yes-and.” To be sure, technology’s impact on the workplace means that we may very well need to reimagine higher education for a new era. We have to reduce the price of a product that costs too much, and we have to accelerate the pace of programs that take way too long.

But the transformation of higher education should not be mistaken for the obsolescence of higher education. Silicon Valley needs to shift its perspective from one of abandoning the degree — to one of rebuilding it.

We were right to fight the college-at-all-costs narrative, but let’s not replace it with another fairy tale.

Jeremy Rossmann is the co-founder of Make School, a computer science college in San Francisco. Follow his business on Twitter @MakeSchool.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I'm a typical Silicon Valley college dropout-turned-entrepreneur. Don't follow my example.