“Top 10 Billionaires Who Dropped Out of College…” - I’m sure you have come across those kind of lists before, whether you read about it on some blog or in the media, convincing you that you don’t need a college degree to become a successful entrepreneur. Sure, there are some who succeeded without having attended college but I personally don’t buy into this whole “you don’t need college” hype.

I mean, just do the maths: what’s the ratio of great companies founded by people who didn’t go to college at all versus those who went (even for just a year or two)? As a young entrepreneur, I’ll be attending college this fall and the decision was an absolute no-brainer – even if you are an entrepreneur who wants to start a business and knows exactly what you want to do with your life . I’ll give a few reasons why I chose to go (from an entrepreneurial perspective):

Meet Like Minded People At Your Age

The media love to single out people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as examples of billionaires who didn’t need a college degree. Well, here’s the other side of the story that they usually don’t mention: they actually went to college in the first place. And the irony is that college was absolutely crucial to their business as that is how they met their business partners Dustin Moskovitz and Steve Balmer, respectively. Not to mention Sergey Brin & Larry Page of Google and David Filo & Jerry Yang of Yahoo. College offers a great networking opportunity and is truly the most fertile place to meet your future co-founders. In fact, many colleges across the United States help facilitate this with organizations (a great example being BASES at Stanford University).

But it’s not just about business co-founders. College provides the opportunity for you to meet like-minded people who you would never meet otherwise, exposing yourself to all sorts of cultures, values, opinions and views. It’s also probably the last chance you will ever have to spend time with a lot of smart people at your age.

Once-In-A-Lifetime Experience

It’s about the overall experience. You only get to be a kid once so you might as well take advantage of that. Few will ever go to college later on in their lives and if you do choose to go later, you would have missed out on all the college experiences of growing with your peer group. Many people have told me how great their experience at college was like – the parties, the connections, the professors, the events – and how it was their most memorable time of their lives. I wouldn’t want to regret spending the rest of my life having only heard about all the great things rather than living it.

To Learn

Obviously, you’re there to learn. Sure, you can self-educate and learn as you go along, but college is more about the well-rounded knowledge with its liberal arts program rather than just professional skills. It’s not just about street smart but instead a combination with book smart.

Besides, your life won’t be permanently ruined either way. You don’t have to limit yourself to just studying at college; you can still be entrepreneurial while also being scholastic. Many of the most successful business ideas evolved out of college. For example, Facebook was derived from the “Face Book” that all freshmen get on their first day; Google and Yahoo came out of a PhD thesis project related to computer science.

College and entrepreneurship can go together, so you might as well go and have fun. What do you think? Is/was college important for you?