Which is why most successful startup founders are college dropouts. Wait.

(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)

I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.

But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.

College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.

I believe most drop-outs didn't drop out because they wanted to - ie family problems, lack of funding, etc.

That's probably why the statistics favour the students.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow that logic. It might be true for some people, but probably not for most of them. It's easy to forget that the great tech success stories, the drop-outs, were in the right place at the right time (read: major city or centre of technology). For most people, growing up in ordinary towns, going to college is a way to meet new types of people and ideas that you would never have been exposed to before. It's absolutely the place to find inspiration. That doesn't mean it works for everyone, but don't be so quick to dismiss it without some good justifications.