How important is a college degree to entrepreneurial success?

I ran across a discussion where a young guy was asking for opinions about how having a college degree influenced career success. This was my response: I am a high school dropout. I’m also a very successful entrepreneur who earns enough to make San Francisco (the most expensive city in the United States) my home and to travel the world throughout the year. Along the way (after achieving some measure of success), I earned a Bachelor’s Degree, a Master’s and then a Doctorate (all in business). I don’t feel that the degrees themselves contributed to my success (in my opinion, most of what I learned in the courses was not particularly valuable to the real world of entrepreneurship). However, I do believe the process and experience was well worthwhile. It takes commitment to succeed in college and that has a lot of value. And depending on the college or university, you can also build valuable networks, access resources and participate in skill-building experiences such as business plan competitions and startup competitions. From my perspective, you should approach it from two perspectives, with two different sets of expectations: 1) the degree itself (with the expectation that the degree itself has limited value, depending on the field); 2) the experience (with the expectation that the experience will be what you make of it — either no value or incredibly valuable). Either way, it’s up to you to make the degree and the college experience valuable.