[vladd]

Schools are designed to provide education for the masses, just like jobs are designed to reward workers' efforts with money. Such schemes remove the low / high extremes (slackers / highly gifted people) by conforming them to a pattern which is proven to increase, in time, the average performance of people participating in them.

Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the 'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.

The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth savings etc) to be addressed generally.