I don't disagree that degrees and college education are important, but I don't think pointing to wealthy people is good evidence. Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education.
The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.
> Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school
It's of course a very nice story that they "dropped out of school", but the truth is more nuanced than that. For example Bill Gates and Elon Musk had school as a backup plan in case their business would fail.
So it's not that they dropped out of school to pursue their business, they suspended their school for their business, and still had it as a backup plan. Very different! If their business wouldn't have worked, they would continue their school (which at that point was already an investment, 3 years for Bill Gates if I remember correctly).
Agree completely, but just wanted to point out that Elon Musk has an ivy league bachelor's degree. What he dropped out of was his Ph.D. program, which is more akin to quitting a job than "dropping out of school".
Also, Bill Gates took really intense courses at Harvard. For example, he took Math 55, which appears to cover more in a single semester than a lot of applied mathematics programs cover in four years.
> Many of the wealthiest billionaires dropped out of school, didn't even go, or didn't consider it important. There are also many wealthy via inheritance. So, looking at the wealthy is not the demographic cohort that reveals the value of higher education.
Yeah there is some serious selection bias there -- Bill Gates' dad was a wealthy lawyer who sent his kid to a private school that had it's own computer systems in the 70s; Jobs lived down the street from one of the founders of HP, etc.
The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.