Cathal Armstrong was 19 when he opened his first restaurant with his father in Dublin. "It was a disaster from the beginning," he recalls. "We never had a business licence, we never had a health permit - who knew you needed such a thing? The walls started closing in and we began running out of money.

Many companies find that skills-based pre-employment tests are better predictors of success on the job. Last month, the U.K. office of the accounting firm Ernst & Young announced that, starting next year, it will no longer require new hires to have a college degree. Candidates for jobs at EY’s U.K. office used to have to meet the grade baseline of a B average in college, but will soon be evaluated instead based on the results of a series of pre-employment tests.

Cumulative Wealth of Top 10 Wealthiest Americans WITH College Degrees: $506.2 billion Cumulative Wealth of Top 10 Wealthiest Americans WITHOUT College Degrees: $350.2 billion The cumulative wealth of the top 10 billionaires with college degrees is 44.5% more than the cumulative earnings of those without degrees. On average, a college graduate with a bachelor's degree earned about $30,000 more per year than a high school graduate, or about $500,000 more over a lifetime

Spring of my junior year, I effectively dropped out of college. I’d started working on a startup, raised some money, wanted to be able to pursue it full time, but college was in the way. I knew the heroic myths of other college dropouts pursuing starting their own companies and figured that seemed like the “thing to do” in the situation. College had never “fit” for me. I hated lectures, realized grades were meaningless, was already getting good at learning things on my own, and wanted to have the freedom to teach myself marketing among other skills.

College is the great equalizer. That's the message proudly proclaimed by many in higher education, not to mention many parents trying to urge children who may not have trust funds to prepare for college. But a new study says that the economic impact of college -- in postgraduation wages -- is very much tied to the income of students' families growing up, with students from wealthier families earning more than others. Some might assume that this difference is due to enrollment patterns...