Correlation between taking a break from school and startup success?

If college is needed to accomplish your future then by all means run headlong into it, and make the decision to enjoy every minute of it. But I think it is a mistake to confuse a college degree with the ability to motivate yourself to do what you decide you want.

The problem with that model, however, is that a standard undergraduate education is beginning to become old-fashioned and irrelevant. How many stories do you hear about students going to four years of school only to graduate and be unable to find employment? While the problem is not nearly as bad in engineering as in other fields, it's still the case that more and more people are going to college, and as a result, a degree doesn't look nearly as great as it did 20 or 30 years ago.

I personally have started to become disenfranchised with the college model in the US. As an undergrad, I have visited some undergraduate committee meetings and talked personally with a few professors, and the bureaucracy of the whole thing is somewhat disgusting. Even if a professor wants to make a change to the curriculum (for the better), he or she must endure countless meetings and votes, even for something that is clearly a good idea. It may take a year or more just to make a minor structural change in a few core courses.

Moreover, department heads are not much worried about the success (or lack thereof) of undergrads. For whatever reason, national groups that rank colleges look mainly at entrance criteria, so as long as the college can successfully lock out those students with low ACT scores (which are largely irrelevant), they look good on paper. Meanwhile, they hire new professors based only on their research and some interviews, without much regard for teaching backgrounds.

In the end, once you go off and create your own startup and work on your own projects, you start to see that college is largely not helpful to an undergrad. The stuff that is stretched out over four years could probably be learned quite easily by most in two or less, if it was all restructured a bit. College, in effect, is just another corporation, one that is in the business of paying professors and researching new ideas. It just happens that most professors do not produce enough ideas quickly enough to justify their income, so undergraduate students make up for that by paying tuition.

Once you realize that you can be successful without completing (or even starting) your undergrad, the dedication, motivation, and finances necessary to complete college just don't look like such a good trade anymore. Most courses follow a textbook, anyways, so just buy the textbook, study it yourself, talk to people online, and you will probably do just as well. The only downside is that you'll be missing that shiny piece of paper.