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Growing up in a Persian-Jewish family on Long Island, NY, Zach Yadegari, 18, never wanted to go to college.


After all, why would he need to? Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, blossomed into a $30 million empire before he could even submit applications, so it’s safe to say he was doing just fine.

“After Cal AI started taking off, it confirmed it. I was like, ‘Okay, clearly, you don’t need college to be successful.’ My parents finally saw the vision,” Yadegari previously told Fortune.

The coding prodigy is a longtime entrepreneur, teaching himself to code when he was just 7 years old. By age 10, he was charging $30 an hour for lessons to people who wanted to learn the skill. By the time high school arrived, he had created a gaming website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his peers to play unblocked video games online with no download or registration required. The venture brought in his first six figures.

Yadegari eventually had a change of heart about college, and decided to apply. But despite having an extensive entrepreneurial background, a 4.0 GPA, and a 34 score on the ACTs, he was rejected from the Ivy League, including Stanford, which Yadegari said “is known for start-ups.”

 Yadegari said the only schools that accepted him were Georgia Tech, University of Miami and University of Texas. He decided to attend the University of Miami, not for the prestige, but for the atmosphere.

“If I wasn’t going to optimize for the best school academically, I was going to optimize for the best school socially,” Yadegari said.

“Two weeks into school, I’ve been having a great time,” he told Fortune in late August.

That could be because he views college as a “six-figure vacation.” He throws parties and lives in a house with other like-minded app-building friends between the ages of 18-26. According to Yadegari, they are successful entrepreneurs like himself.

Yadegari is currently undeclared in his major. He dropped out of the business school and now takes classes in philosophy. He still takes one entrepreneurship class, but says he’s “not gaining much from the class material” because he already has the experience.

Even though he’s enjoying his new endeavor of parties and paychecks, he believes his Gen Z peers don’t need college to find success.

“It’s not worth it for most people, for sure, even for me, like, I mean, I’m having a lot of fun, I think it’s worth it for me, the second it becomes not worth it, I’m going to stop,” he said.

“But I feel like I have all my life to make money, but like, the few $100,000 that it’s going to cost me now, it’s going to be worth it to make the memories… rather than to just, like, save it, spend it, invest it, whatever the case,” he added.


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