Alright, I'll speak for myself as that's the path I'm still walking and the one I know best. I'm 19, matriculated into Harvard for one semester, then dropped out and took on the Thiel Fellowship. Under the Thiel Fellowship, we're granted $100k (pegged around college ed prices) for two years to pursue an entrepreneurial project.
In the past year since leaving school, I've had more opportunity for maturity than I ever did in college. I've had the freedom to explore, and I've used that to travel to all 7 continents and broaden my internal horizons of the world. I've had the freedom to discover, and now I'm fortunate enough to have found a passion I can pursue with my full attention. I never had luxury of doing that in school - there's no time to step back and wonder why you're doing what you're doing as you're too busy being pushed through the grind of 'doing'.
I've had the freedom to become personally responsible. Being devoid of extrinsic pressures (must get good grades, build resume, get job, etc.) for the first time in my life means that I've had to replace those driving forces with intrinsic drive and accountability.
I've been living on my own in SF since June, and that's been a wild ride of being liable for every aspect of my own survival and well-being :). Being an entrepreneur means I have to account for a 24 hours each day on my own, as I don't even have an employer to provide a cover story for 8-9 hours every day. I'm not saying I account for all those hours nearly as well as I could and in fact I certainly don't (case in point), but this is offering me the opportunity to learn to be accountable, and that's exactly the point.
College is a pseudo-diverse atmosphere. Sure, people might be differently colored or have exotic accents, but everyone's there for the same purpose, is the same age, and has more or less the same mindset, or at the most one of a select few mindsets. Real diversity is living in a strange juxtaposition of homeless crackheads and billionaire tech entrepreneurs (woohoo San Francisco!), or seeing firsthand definitive proof that polio has in fact not been eradicated and is still alive and well in the marginalized corners of the world.
Even if we see these things in college, chances are likely our mindsets have been so tunnel-visioned that their full impact doesn't register on us. The insular bubble of college is pretty hard to penetrate.
Challenge-wise, being an entrepreneur is far harder than being a college student. And thanks to the cost of college, so many of us might never have the opportunity to take the entrepreneurial path (or any of a number of other paths) unless we take it in lieu of the college path.
And yes - college might very well be a mold that shapes you into the person you'll be, but it's a cookie-cutter mold, and it's not unique to you. Life is a variable endeavor, and the experiences we use as a mold with which to shape ourselves should similarly be variable. College is probably a wonderful mold for some. For others like myself, there are almost certainly better molds out there waiting for us to find them.
