For an additional fee I'll let you live on your own, in your very own apartment, and give you the valuable life experience of earning your own rent money.
I can also direct you to places where you will meet lots of college students and programmers -- I live in Boston, so this is so easy that I'll throw it in for free.
On the other hand, I'm going back to grad school in the fall. It's not for the money, or even to meet co-founders. Rather, it's just something that I feel I have to do for me, to sate my curiosity. I'm young and life is long. As long as I can find a nice young lass that will stick with me and be poor for a few years, there's really no drawback to extending my education and waiting to get rich.
One thing I disagree with you about college is teaching you how to think. At mine anyway, I'm assaulted every day with worthless crap that makes me want to shut off my ears. Mostly liberal crap like 'diversity,' 'cultural appreciation,' and 'the bees are being killed by cell phone waves.'
On the other hand, I do learn all kinds of wonderful things from fellow Computer Science students. It may be worth it.
Overrall it was an exellent experience. If I was 18 again, I'd do it again in a heart-beat.
However, this makes the mistaken assumption that college's only role is to prepare you for a career. I majored in Philosophy at a Jesuit college in Chicago. Currently, I'm a software developer. College was about getting introduced to new ideas and read books I would have never sought out on my own. Really... who reads Augustine or Kierkegaard anymore? I learned how to live on my own in college; how I wanted to spend my time and my money, how to survive in my first apartment and make rent money. I also met a great bunch of friends I still keep in contact with.
Bottom line: college should never be treated like a trade school. It's not designed for job training. If you consider it so, it never makes economic sense. College, and liberal arts degrees in particular, teach you how to think.