"If you're an engineer, and you drop out and you work for 4-6 years, nobody is ever going to care, or probably know, that you don't have a degree."
That's simply not true. Your co-workers and colleagues may not know or care. Your boss and her boss may not know or care. (Although to be candid I suspect more of them both know and are at least a little influenced by it than you seem to think.) But if you're working in a large enough organization (and "large enough" is getting smaller all the time), at the very least someone in the HR department is going to both know and care. You may not qualify for a given job or promotion. You may not get paid as much as you otherwise would. You stand a moderately good chance of being caught if you try to lie about it. (Background checks-as-a-service are out there and getting cheaper just like everything else.)
You're just spreading FUD. And it simply isn't true. I'm not projecting here, I've done this very thing. I know. I've worked for several organizations with more than 10,000 employees.
I was not being silently discriminated against because I was rising faster than my peers almost all the time.
The market forces companies to do this because if they don't treat their employees well- particularly their employees with ability- then these employees will go somewhere that does.
Frankly, there's no reason to lie either. Having a college degree shows a certain timidity and inability to think for oneself, to me anyway. I'll cut someone slack for it when hiring because at that age you don't necessarily need to be that certain about yourself.
You're not seriously asserting that "nobody is ever going to care, or probably know, that you don't have a degree", are you? Literally nobody? Because the "FUD" I'm spreading is simply stating that somebody, somewhere, will both know and care.
Your sample size of one doesn't change anything. Without looking it up directly, I'm very sure that if you compared the earning power, net wealth, or pretty much any financial metric you care to name of "people with a 4-year degree" to "people that dropped out of a 4-year degree program and never earned a degree" you'll find that _on_average_, dropping out negatively impacts your earning potential.
That's not to say that that outcome is driven by an actual difference in ability or intelligence or drive or merit or what have you, nor that the outcome for people that drop out of college with the intention of creating a web startup is necessarily the same as the outcome for everyone else.
Like any statistic, that doesn't predict the outcome for any particular individual. You can drop out of college and become Steve Jobs or you can drop out of college and become an actor waiting tables in a NYC restaurant still waiting to be "discovered" at the age of 40. But in aggregate, those that earn a college degree do better (by some measures of "better") than those that do not. To state that it simply doesn't matter whether or not you have a college degree contradicts the data.
That's simply not true. Your co-workers and colleagues may not know or care. Your boss and her boss may not know or care. (Although to be candid I suspect more of them both know and are at least a little influenced by it than you seem to think.) But if you're working in a large enough organization (and "large enough" is getting smaller all the time), at the very least someone in the HR department is going to both know and care. You may not qualify for a given job or promotion. You may not get paid as much as you otherwise would. You stand a moderately good chance of being caught if you try to lie about it. (Background checks-as-a-service are out there and getting cheaper just like everything else.)