I'm increasingly of the opinion that tech entrepreneurship is over-hyped as a career path. It's good for some people to do it, and it's good for society that some people do it, but there's currently too many people doing it. There are many, many other important career paths for people to take. Probably the central problem is that too many career paths are dominated by overly bureaucratized, politicized, and stagnant institutions (academia, the military, the church, the health care system, the government, Big Pharma, other big mainstream companies, etc), while doing a tech startup allows one to succeed without playing ball with these mindless behemoths. But the real solution to the problem isn't for everyone to go into tech, it's to find a way to reinvent the old institutions.
A tech company like IBM is doing things in the health care system by letting Watson loose on making lung cancer treatment decisions that existing players in the health field just wouldn't do.
Building the tech that you need to track heart rate and skin resistance 24/7 on a high resolution and analysing that data properly might be a lot more important than spending billions on drug research.
On the government front, there even more need for tech companies to get involved. I think parliaments would be a lot more effective if they would have proper tools for ...
Some remarks relevant to young aspiring entrepreneurs:
Entrepreneurship and age
• In Why to not not start a startup, venture capitalist Paul Graham says he thinks that the chances of creating a successful startup increase with age up to 23 (at least), but that the best way to gain experience relevant to creating a successful startup is to try creating a startup. He suggests that in unusual cases, 16 year olds may be equipped to create a startup.
Whether or not to go to college
• Going to college (especially an elite college) gives one the opportunity to find cofounders and early employees. Mark Zuckerberg met the early employees of Facebook while at Harvard. Drew Houston met a number of the early Dropbox employees while at MIT.
• It's rare for highly successful entrepreneurs to not have started college. Sean Parker (Napster founder & venture capitalist) skipped college but was already earning $80k+/year by his senior year of high school, which is very unusual. See also stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.
• The general consensus in the comments on the Hacker News question To go or not to go college? seems to be that even a highly skilled high school programmer should go to college. However, the remarks therein are not directed at entrepreneurs specifically.
Creating a company while in college
• Entrepreneur Nate Berkopec wrote that an aspiring entrepreneur can learn more through starting a business than through coursework, which is very plausible.
• Entrepreneur Jason Baptiste suggests that rather than creating a company while in college, one should instead work on a less time-consuming side project, and see where it leads.
• If one does find a cofounder and has a promising project, there seems to be little harm in taking time off from college to work on a startup. However, unless one is exceptionally talented, the project probably won't be sufficiently successful so as to furnish a decisive case for not completing a degree.
• In Why to not not start a startup, Paul Graham says that he wouldn't feel comfortable recommending that somebody with a family do a startup. So all else being equal, one should try earlier in life rather than later in life, and this is an argument in favor of working on something entrepreneurial while in college.