My girlfriend is going through the process of starting her own business and it's amazing how little a college degree would help her right now. If she was focused on the traditional route for starting a business according to a college education, her main focus would be on a business plan that would do very little to help her.
Instead, she is focused on improving her business by taking as much action as she can and iterating based on the results. She's taking a Lean Startup approach, but this isn't something she could have learned from a university. She had to look through popular and highly rated entrepreneurship books on her own and implement that way.
Information Abounds
A few hundred years ago there was a huge limitation on the amount of information that humans could access. We would have to visit libraries and go out of our way just to find basic books and information. Sometimes the best information was still locked away by religious orders who hoarded books and our access.
In contrast, we have never had so much information at our fingertips. The vast majority of people are actually overwhelmed by how much information (free or paid) is out there and the material is completely democratized.
A new era has been rising over the past 1-2 decades and the trend only looks like it is going to continue. With so much information, the only thing one requires to be educated and successful is self-reliance and the will to learn.
Where Are Universities in All This?
My girlfriend never got a college degree much less a business one. When she was looking for label producers for her business in France, she had to figure out how to call French phone numbers, how to speak a bit of French, and negotiate a price. You can't learn that in a college!
This isn't to say there aren't benefits of going to a university. Many of the best universities have specific honors programs that are rigorous, include some of the best minds in the world, and offer dozens of crucial connections. The Six Sigma Training, for example, brings online education leveraged with technology to provide guidance without taking 4 years of your life.
Other programs at prestigious universities, such as MIT, Harvard, and Yale are all going to open doors and support someone to be more successful. The point is, they may not be required to make anyone successful.