You are ignoring that Bill Gates had to come from an extraordinarily privileged position to even be able to incur such a large opportunity cost. Most people don't have the opportunity to not to finish a Harvard degree, because most people don't have the opportunity to go to Harvard to begin with.
You are also ignoring that even if Microsoft had failed after a 10 years, the act of founding and running it would likely have afforded him experience that would rival in value a Harvard degree. This makes it doubtful that the opportunity cost was actually very large.
Furthermore, when you talk about how large the risk was, you play fast and loose with relative and absolute sizes. It may be true that Bill Gates took a large risk in absolute terms, but because of his background, the risk was actually not that big in relative terms. Not any larger than the risk of someone else choosing one education instead of another, or one career over another.
You are ignoring that Bill Gates had to come from an extraordinarily privileged position to even be able to incur such a large opportunity cost. Most people don't have the opportunity to not to finish a Harvard degree, because most people don't have the opportunity to go to Harvard to begin with.
You are also ignoring that even if Microsoft had failed after a 10 years, the act of founding and running it would likely have afforded him experience that would rival in value a Harvard degree. This makes it doubtful that the opportunity cost was actually very large.
Furthermore, when you talk about how large the risk was, you play fast and loose with relative and absolute sizes. It may be true that Bill Gates took a large risk in absolute terms, but because of his background, the risk was actually not that big in relative terms. Not any larger than the risk of someone else choosing one education instead of another, or one career over another.