There are many people who disagree with ADUDE about the value of a college education. For the greatest chance of a six-figure income with the lowest risk of being automated or offshore-outsourced into unemployment, your best bet is to apprentice yourself to a plumber -- an occupation that doesn't even require a high school diploma. They're desperate for apprentices; American kids all think they're going to be investment bankers even though they can't make change for a one dollar bill without a calculator.
For what a university education costs, a person could start a small business. (Like a plumbing shop, many of which are for sale.)
Get a college education if you want it, if you think you'll enjoy it, if you're passionate about everything you'll learn there. But don't become one more of the endless string of burned-out twentysomethings who don't really like school but keep going because they hope it will make them successful and/or rich later. There are lots of people with impressive educations and no jobs -- particularly in IT (in the USA). They're all wishing they'd spent their 21st birthday skiing the Alps instead of dissecting a fish brain.
Frankly I am very reluctant to recommend an IT career to young Americans. IT in the 2000s looks like automobiles in the 1960s. An industry that the USA dominated for decades has matured to the point that it is arguably no longer viable here. The improvements that IT needs to grow from a medieval craft into an engineering discipline -- such as reliability, standardization, and upward compatibility -- are the same things the auto industry needed 40 years ago, and they're not things that we American cowboys are good at.
As for Microsoft, be careful. To me it looks an awful lot like the Detroit auto factories in the 1960s. You're going to start seeing entire countries dumping the Windows architecture.
