Dropouts, renegades, mad scientists and billionaires

Only 35 percent of Americans think a college education is "very important," reports a new Gallup poll. That's a new low, down from 75 percent in 2010. The number saying college is "not very important," only 4 percent 15 years ago, is now at 24 percent.

Even among the most pro-college groups -- women, people of color, college graduates and Democrats -- less than half rate college as "very important."

Dropout entrepreneurs Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs

Quitting college has become the ultimate Silicon Valley credential, writes Sean Fischer on The Free Press. He covered a Dropout Graduation in San Francisco organized by the start-up mentorship program Z Fellows.

“College is good for people who don’t know what they want to do,” said entrepreneur Ali Debow, 23, one of the organizers. “For people who want to socialize. For people that need good structure for deep study.”

She founded swsh, an AI-powered photo album for live events, at NYU, but left for Silicon Valley without a degree. College provided community, she told Fischer. “Maybe the value isn’t in the academics at all, but it’s in the conversations, the diversity of thought, the bringing people together in one place.”

Stanford classes were useless, but the networking was valuable, said Jake Brooks, 26, who dropped out in his junior year and is now CEO of mobile-game start-up Triumph. “Almost all of my success in the start-up world today is attributed to the people that I had initially met in my freshman dorm.”

Alexander Wang dropped out of MIT and joined the start-up accelerator YCombinator. His AI company made him a billionaire at the age of 24.

At the Dropout Graduation's after-party at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, attendees took “graduation” photos, writes Fischer. They joked that "their immigrant parents would now have something on their mantels to be proud of."

Cory Levy of Z Fellows warned that dropouts don't always become zillionaires. Start-ups, he said, are “the Olympics of the tech world. Not everyone belongs in the Olympics.”

Fifteen years ago, PayPal founder Peter Thiel decided young entrepreneurs were wasting their time in college, and offered two-year $200,000 fellowships to people willing to dropout (or never start). "Some ideas can't wait," he declared.

Silicon Valley dropouts are believers in do it now, writes Fischer. Some may regret the philosophy class they never had a chance to take. But not very much. (Thiel earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a law degree at Stanford.)

The Thiel Fellowship "is gaining notoriety for producing so-called “unicorns” (billion-dollar companies) at a supposedly higher rate than top accelerators," writes Blake Dodge on Pirate Wires.

Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson, who helped launch the fellowships, went on to start the 1517 Fund, which invests in companies started by students or college dropouts. Their site promises to help dropouts, renegades, and mad scientists “escape from captivity.”

"Today, Thiel Fellow-founded companies like Figma, Ethereum, Anthropic, and OYO Rooms have created more than $750 billion in value," writes Dodge.

“Creativity is perishable and it ripens really early,” Gibson said. “There are lots of people who talk about how maybe we could unify the country by having mandatory civil service for two years or conscription. And it’s just like, to me, that would be the greatest waste because we need variance — we need people exploring different things. And those years from 18 to 23 are so prime, we’ve just seen it."