“The old “successful people never went to college” thing is way overplayed and largely untrue.”
Sorry, college always has been overplayed.
60% of the economy is small and medium sized companies. Most of them are owned and run by people who never went to college.
1/2 of the “large cap” companies on Americas stock exchanges were small cap companies fifteen and twenty years ago and 75% of them were started by people with no college.
Where does college “pay off” (outside of medicine and engineering). In academia itself, in the entire non-profit and in government sector where, frequently, the very same job, with the very same tasks and the very same responsibility will be filled with candidates that could acquire extremely different salaries - one salary for one with no degree, one salary for one with an “undergraduate” degree and one salary for one with a “graduate” degree - FOR DOING EXACTLY THE SAME JOB. US job-financial statistics are skewed by this factor (higher salary if one has a college degree) as governments in the US are those who most often do this idiocy and “government” is the largest single class of employment in the US.
Look at the way the world is moving — everything has to be quantified, even the people. The highest salaries go to those with the high level skill sets.