Chiming my two cents in.
Go to college. The quotes about it being GPP for the brain (especially calculus) are true. I can’t begin to explain the difference working with people who can think and who can’t.
If I was hiring, I’d question anybody who hadn’t gone to college. Prejudiced? Maybe, but I would have my doubts about their ability to think, work, participate in a team, organise and everything. The percentage of people who haven’t gone to college but could perform in a higher-level job is infinitesimally smaller than that of those who have.
I’ve done a lot of technical stuff over the years, and college always stood to me. Always. I met people who were smart, intelligent, easy to get along with but didn’t have the basics of a good college education and it always worked against them.
To put it in T-Nation terms, imagine if you have a bunch of your friends helping you to move, but none of them can lift more than 20lbs. You can like them, understand them, they can try, they can want to help, but at the end of the day they won’t make much of a dent in the pile of furniture to move. They won’t be heavy hitters.
Regarding self-made people who went to college, there’s always exceptions and college is not for everyone. However, they are few and far between. Most of them have at some stage at least tried college and not succeeded, which is vastly different to not going in the first place. And, as someone said earlier, no-one ever regrets going to college but a lot of people who didn’t wish they had.
Finally, I teach a kid over here English - he starts US college in the fall. I’m so jealous of him right now, it’s eating me up inside! Of all the places in the world to go to college, I think the US provides one of the absolutely best experiences in the world with regard to independence, self-discovery, growing up in general and experience, of all sorts. And bluntly, your college chicks are just so much hotter than anywhere else on the planet. Why wouldn’t you want some of that?!