Every generation has its college dropout heroes.
The Baby Boom had Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Michael Dell.
Generation X had people like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Napster's Shawn Fanning, and Blogger creator and former Twitter CEO Evan Williams.
Generation Y (i.e. people under 30) has plenty of stars too, including that guy who started Facebook.
High profile people like Peter Thiel are starting programs to encourage them, offering money and support for those who want to skip higher education and get right down to business. Nonetheless, most dropouts actually end up worse off, earning 80 percent less than a college grad and significantly more likely to be unemployed.
In the end it takes an special breed of person to make it big without a degree (and some of these "dropouts" never even made it to college.)
Matt Mullenweg started WordPress, which now powers 16 percent 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 percent 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.
Ferdowski dropped out of MIT 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 multimillionaire at the age of 27.
Aaron Levie started enterprise software company Box, and the company could IPO at a $3 billion valuation.
When Levie was a sophomore at USC, 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