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A question as old as college I suppose. Colleges need to make money too! What better way to market it than to say you’re DEFINITELY make more money by attending it. Colleges have marketing departments also; they’re businesses just like Walmart and Macys. They’re in the game to make money. Do you NEED to go to one to make money? Some think you do.

But how about your specific job? Could you benefit in your current position from going to a place of higher education? Will that make you rich? I don’t know, I suppose it could, but it really depends on the person and what they’re driven by. There are several VERY wealthy people out there that didn’t need higher education and they made it, a few on the list include:

Richard Branson is an English entrepreneur, best known for his Virgin brand of over 360 companies. Branson’s first successful business venture was at age 15, when he published a magazine called Student. He then set up a record mail-order business in 1970. In 1971, he opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, now known as Virgin Megastores. At sixteen, Branson left school and moved to London, where he began his first successful business, Student magazine. When he was seventeen, he opened his first charity, the “Student Advisory Centre.”

Bill Gates is an American entrepreneur, software executive, philanthropist and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock. He enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree,^[20] but did not have a definite study plan and eventually left without his degree.

Michael Dell is an American businessman and the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc. While at the University of Texas at Austin, he started a computer company called PC’s Limited in his room in Dobie Center. The company became successful enough that, with the help of an additional loan from his grandparents, Dell dropped out of college at the age of 19 to run PC’s Limited, which later became Dell Computer Corporation, then ultimately Dell Inc.

Walt Disney dropped out of high school at 16 to join the Army, but then was rejected there because he was too young, but went on to be arguably the most influential and successful cartoonists in history.

Debbi Fields was a 20 year old housewife with no business experience when she started Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery. Try to name someone else that has a better selling recipe for chocolate chip cookies. In 1969, Oakland Athletics owner Charles O. Finley introduced “ballgirls” (young girls who would sit in foul territory near the baselines to retrieve baseballs grounded foul by batters) to major league baseball. Debbi was one of the first ones he hired. She was paid five dollars an hour and would use the money to buy ingredients for what would become her famous cookies. She began her business in 1977 in Palo Alto, California, and since it has grown into over 650 retail bakeries in the United States and over 80 in 11 different countries. Fields began franchising in 1990, and, though she sold the business to an investment group in the early 1990s, she remains as the company’s spokesperson.

At the age of 16, Henry Ford left home for the nearby city of Detroit, Michigan, to work as an apprentice machinist, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co. In 1882, he returned to Dearborn to work on the family farm and became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He later started Ford Motor Company to manufacture automobiles. Ford’s first major success, the Model T, allowed Ford to open a large factory and later start the assembly line production, revolutionalizing the auto-making industry.

One thing to note I found when crafting up this article is that my mindset changed while crafting it.  Initially I thought to myself, wow, these people that didn’t have an education really excelled; and that is a fact.  But think of the devils-advocate post on it.  How many people DID go to college and are wealthy billionaires now?  I bet that list is pages upon pages longer than this list - but nonetheless, the point of the article is that it IS possible to become wealthy by ditching the traditional school systems, so congratulations to those people that have…

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