The reason Obama, Bill Gates, et all promote college is because there's a huge difference between a Google and a Facebook--not to underestimate the latter. And notice that they more likely usually promote STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math), not just any college.

Could Brin/Page or anyone, for that matter, have come up with a Google without finishing an undergrad degree in CS and some graduate Studies at a school like Stanford? Very unlikely. Google required a bit more than creativity. It required great hacking and also knowledge of the complexity in information retrieval problems which you didn't get back then with online lectures (what lectures?) on dial-up, etc.

Meanwhile, Facebook as great as a company that it is, mostly borrowed ideas and tweaked them a bit with "exclusivity," a clean design, etc. Not saying that isn't admirable, but yes, it doesn't require graduate level work, just creativity and a lot of hard work to get jumpstarted. And I bet Zuckerberg didn't start hiring high school dropouts/grads to help him scale his site, etc. Surely there were a few, but I doubt they accounted for many.

So if you want to build the next Facebook, you better be hard-working, smart, and creative.

If you want to build the next Google, you better be that and learn about the next challenges in machine learning, information retrieval, data parallelism, etc. And that more than likely requires that you learn it from the experts--ie, more than likely not your average college/high school dropout.