As the school year starts up again, the class of 2017 is heading off to college for the first time, and a whole crop of high-school seniors is beginning to consider where they'll go next year — or whether they should go at all.
College still pays off in the long run, but as tuition prices continue to climb, debt loads are higher than ever. And the first years out of school are extremely tough.
Some, like PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel, claim that college just isn't worth it in the age of startups. He's giving 20 bright young people $100,000 each to start a company instead.
Despite the fact that Thiel himself is a Stanford graduate, people who choose to follow his advice and drop out find themselves in pretty good company. Beyond Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, some of today's most successful businesspeople didn't graduate from college. Here are a few that prove a college degree isn't the only path to success.
Matt Mullenweg started WordPress, which now powers 16% of the web.
Mullenweg dropped out of the University of Houston in 2004. Even then, he was so precocious that he didn't bother with their computer classes. At 20, he had already developed the beginnings of WordPress and was fielding job offers from tech companies. He dropped out to work for CNET in San Francisco, with a promise that he could continue developing his side project 15% of the time.
He left to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress alone gets 140 million visits a year with a staff of just 140, and all of Automattic’s sites see nearly half a billion visitors.
Arash Ferdowsi is a co-founder of DropBox, which is now worth an estimated $4 billion.
Ferdowsi dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 after three years at the school. He left to found DropBox, which quickly grew from a tiny startup to a service used by hundreds of millions of people.
He's currently the company's Chief Technology Officer and became a multi-millionaire at the age of 27.
Aaron Levie started enterprise software company Box, which could IPO at a valuation as much as $3 billion.
When Levie was a sophomore at the University of Southern California, he was bouncing ideas back and forth with Dylan Smith, a friend at Duke. A marketing class helped Levie come up with the idea that became Box.net, a cloud content management system.
An unsolicited email to Mark Cuban got them $350,000 in funding, and they haven't looked back since. The company has its eye on an IPO some time this year.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider