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.
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.