It is NOT socially acceptable to not attend college. It IS socially acceptable to not get funding for your startup. So what happens when someone wants to go to college but they don't have the money? They get loans, they work two jobs, they do what they have to do to make it happen b/c they will be socially rejected if they fail. The same is not the case for funding. If you are committed to your idea, treat funding like a college loan: Not optional. Once you get in this mindset you'll figure it out. You may not get a full ride at MIT (YC) but in state tuition + a TA job at U Mich isn't so bad either.
As of now nobody has commented on a sucessful YC reject. I think that is b/c YC applicants tend to be straight A students (blind generalization based on instinct.) Straight A students have other options that involve less social risk. I know of a number of successful entrepreneurs who were thrown out of / barely made it through college. Since they didn't have other options, they HAD to make it work. And since they had been failing their whole lives they've realized that failure is just someone else's or some organizations opionion about them. For good or for bad, they tuned those opionions out.
People need to realize that the currency of "failure" is just a bit of social rejection. Running your startup into the ground will not give you cancer. And a big fat 'F' on life's report card is just a sign that at least once, you weren't afraid to push the limits...
College is so aversive to me because all it does is prepare me to work for someone else, at a guaranteed salary of 55k per year (sixty by the time I graduate?). True failure for me will be taking a job as an Industrial Engineer. I can't think of anything I want to do less. But if I haven't become successful by the time I graduate from college and no one is funding me, I won't have much of a choice.
I'm running my current startup like a business. We're not seeking funding and we're growing very slowly. We have no costs so everything we make is profit. We haven't made any profit because we haven't actually sold anything but we'll get there eventually.
When I applied to Y Combinator, and was not accepted, I considered it an objective not met. I didn't think of it as failure, I didn't think of it as rejection. I simply made a decision about what I was going to do next.
If you think in terms of rejection and failure, it will be difficult to pick yourself up and try again, unless the semantics you attach to those words do not include notions of finality and personal worth.