College education costs more than its worth?

I've heard this before and have mixed feelings about it. The cuurent comment was made by Peter Thiel and presented in the article Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out by Jacob Weisberg featured on Slate.

exerpt from http://www.slate.com/id/2271265/: The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they're worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions of higher learning.

From The Thiel Foundation web site: "Our world needs more breakthrough technologies,” said Thiel. "From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation. This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas, either. The Thiel Fellows will change the world and call it a senior thesis.”
(http://thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14:the-thiel-fellowship-20-under-20&catid=1&Itemid=16)

Hmmm. I do personally know a few individuals who abandoned higher education and were millionaires before they were 20, and yes, they were each in the techy fields of computers and programming and so on. However, these people are not the norm. Look at Bill Gates for example, he didn't fit the mold but is now a major philanthropist of education.

Perhaps, what is different about these individuals is that they have the inate ability to be autonomous learners and have been able to apply this to real problems, much like the constructivist teaching philosophy. It will be interesting to see where these 20 individuals end up and what contribution they bring to the world and if they ever regret leaving formal education, and how education will evolve to become an institution that provides real life/work skills rather than a passing information.