Perhaps Gates, Einstein, et al. suceeded without finishing a degree, but they are, in my opinion, the exceptions that prove the rule. For every Bill Gates that founds a Microsoft there are probably hundreds of people who left college to found businesses that ultimately failed. We don't hear about them.

In the sciences, things are different than in business. Like it or not, in the sciences some sort of academic degree is necessary for success. Without it you're doomed to be an outsider, never taken seriously. Things were different in Einstein's day (not to mention Newton's). The academic pipeline wasn't as well established then. In any case, regardless of whether or not he needed it, Einstein worked hard to get into a college and did finish a BS (or the Swiss equivalent) at the ETH in Zurich as well as a Ph.D. Perhaps he realized that these degrees were necessary for him to have any credibility in his field.

And that's really what it comes down to. Studying in college gives you the necessary background and credibility. A university degree establishs a certain expectation of ability for the person who holds it. You don't want to go to a doctor who hasn't finished medical school (unless you prefer the woo woo world of alternative medicine). Likewise, I wouldn't immediately trust any results or analyses produced by a person who isn't trained as a scientist. They may have an original idea but he (or she) would have a much harder time convincing me that they didn't make a mistake that I learned not to make my freshman year in college.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli