The one thing I will say for sure tho (which should prove to me much more provable) is that applied knowledge coupled with determination/motivation are the building blocks of success in both groups. A college degree is a subjective indicator at best.

One possibility would be people who actually graduated college but for whatever reason no longer have a degree. Unfortunately, I doubt you will find people in that category. Nor will you find many people who will be willing to pretend they don’t have a degree to see how much less they will be paid during their lifetime.

However, you might have a little bit more luck with the converse. People who have not gone through the effort of obtaining a real degree but pretend that they have one. Your theory predicts that they ought to achieve greater success since it is based on the status of graduating college rather than any real “drive and determination” related to completing college.

There are a few public examples of people who have been caught doing this. I believe that some of the people were quite successful too. Unfortunately, you only find out about these cases when they are caught, so statistically you may not be able to draw conclusions from these individual cases. However they provide great anecdotal support for your case and are hard to argue against.

“Levitt is right; there is a definitive, causal relationship between education and earnings, proved over and over … so what?

It’s about the knowledge. Regression only calculates a “regression to the mean” — a crude way of saying it’s a sophisticated averaging technique, holding all other things equal.

That said, there are the tails of the “bell curve” distribution. Meaning, there are plenty of rich 10th grade educated people, and plenty of poor PHDs.

Much comes down to productivity, desire, motivation, self-direction, passion, etc.

Also, not related to education, but the Goleman work on emotional intelligence which suggests that EQ [seems to be] a stronger predictor of success than IQ, which again, is not education per se.

Hence, don’t storm out of meetings pissed off and manage your emotions effectively in the moment; be empathetic; be aware of how your emotions drive you, etc.

See Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence (his first book).”

It is a fact that people with more education make more money. It is a fact that the majority of professional-level job postings state a college degree as a requirement. It is also a fact that hundreds of years of convetional wisdom can be proven wrong. Think of how we used to treat African-American people in this country.� It was conventional wisdom of those times that blacks we not human.� I think we all know how that turned out.

Even if you feel like a college degree is a total sham there are still many companies in our industry that require it. When it comes to job hunting it’s all about marketability. I’ve never been denied a job interview for having a college degree. On my resume it makes me more attractive. Even more attractive is that my degree is in something different then Computer Science which implies that I also have enough drive to be a successful self-taught developer. So I’m covering both the self-taught drive and the college grad. And when it comes to unemployment you need every advantage you can get to procure employment.