Now I understand why Google guys are conquering the World: it is so easy to compete with those folks. ;-) They did not drop out, in fact they developed Google when they were Ph. D. candidates. They built the first search engine that just worked. They just realised that it was nonsense having millions of results without sorting them by importante. To get that done, they just applied Informetrics (I also studied that in my first Ph D Courses). Linus Torvals also did not drop out, and he developed Linux.

Anyway, I do agree with you: there are things much more important than to be a drop out or not. In fact, as Bruce Springsteen said "We learned more from a 3 minute record than we ever learned in school". To have "official" higher education just brings you more resources you can work with. The imporant thing, however, is not the number of resources you have, but how do you use those resources. :-)