A college degree is considered a status symbol, a sign of higher intellect and ambitious spirit. In short, without a college degree, the road to spectacular success and a life of privilege is all but closed.

However, there are some misfits and revolutionaries who, with determination and strong will, prove that you can achieve immense success even without a college degree. In this article, we are going to list those extremely successful individuals who have made their dreams come true with their strong ambition and self-imposed ambition.

• Michael Kors – net worth (income and earnings) $1 billion

Michael Kors, recently dubbed “Fashion”the latest billionaire by the prestigious Forbes magazine, was interested in fashion from a young age. His mother, who was a model, believed this may have been due to his exposure to the clothing industry at a young age. His earliest endeavor as a designer was to design her mother’s wedding dress for her second marriage at the age of five. His first foray into fashion came in his teens, when he started designing and selling clothes from his parents’ basement with Iron Butterfly . Then he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technologyin NYC. Nine months later, after dropping out of college, he took a job at a boutique across from Bergdorf Goodman on 57th Street, where he was given a small space to sell his designs. Since then, his designed clothes have been sold in several leading boutiques and he has also designed clothes for some famous celebrities.

• Ted Turner – Net worth (income and earnings) $2.2 billion

When Ted Turner took over his father’s billboard business at the age of 24, it was only worth a million dollars. A year later, he bought a UHF station in Atlanta and founded the Turner broadcasting system . Its brainchild Cable News Network, formerly known as CNN, would continue to revolutionize the news industry. With land holdings of 1,910,585 hectares (7,731.86 km ² ), he is the second largest landowner in the US after John C. Malone, who surpassed him in 2011 at Brown University . And that failure was not due to Turner’s weakness as a student, but to his vice president, the Brown Debating Unionand captain of the sailing team. Though he had his differences with his father when he decided to major in Classics, he was well on his way to completing his education until a female student was found in his dorm room and he was expelled.

• John Paul DeJoria – Net worth (income and earnings) of $4.2 billion

The John Paul DeJoria success story is a perfect example of rags to richesDeJoria was born to an Italian immigrant father and a Greek immigrant mother on April 13, 1944 in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. His parents divorced when John was two and by the time he was nine he was selling Christmas cards and newspapers with his older brother to support his family. A few years later, due to their mother’s precarious financial situation, he and his brother were sent to a nursing home in East Los Angeles. In his youth, DeJoria was part of a street gang. However, when he was told by his high school math teacher that he “would never achieve anything in life,” he decided to change his life. After high school, he spent two years in the United States NavyImpact on the USS Hornet. A few years later he joined the hair care industry as an employee of Redken Laboratories . After being fired from his job over disagreements over business strategy with a $700 loan and working with barber Paul Mitchell, he founded the famous John Paul Mitchell Systems .

• Richard Branson – Net worth (income and earnings) of $5 billion

Sir Richard Branson proved in his lifetime that if you have the determination and willpower, you can achieve great success without a high school diploma. However, Branson’s lack of education isn’t because he didn’t make the effort necessary, or because his parents were poor to be able to afford it. He was born in a wealthy family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a former ballet dancer and stewardess. Branson suffers from dyslexia, which affected his ability to study and contributed to his poor academic grades. However, he was undeterred by his problem and failure and started his record business in a church, where he wrote The Student Magazine“His decision to sell records cheaper than the chain stores helped him start his own record label.” Virgin Records has since ventured into countless industries including airlines, oil, spirits and tourism.

• David Geffen – Net worth (income and earnings) $6 billion

David Geffen was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish immigrants who met in British-mandated Palestine. Like Richard Branson, Geffen had a problem with dyslexia studies. In 1960 he graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn with an average score of 66 percent. He enrolled in three different colleges – the University of Texas at Austin, Brooklyn College and Santa Monica College, but had to drop out of all three. He then entered the entertainment industry, working in the William Morris Agency (WMA) mail room. He left WMA to become a personal manager. His first clients included Laura Nyro and Crosby, Stills and Nash. After failing to find a record deal for young Jackson Browne, he formed Asylum Records. Asylum Records signed talented artists like the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.

• Ralph Lauren – Net worth (income and earnings) of $7.5 billion

Ralph Lauren, who is one of the richest fashion entrepreneurs and designers, had developed a taste for fashion and business from a very early age. As a high school student, he sold ties to his classmates. Back then he wanted to be a millionaire and it is safe to say that he achieved that goal with considerable ease. He attended Baruch College, where he majored in business administration. Two years later he dropped out and served in the US Army for two years. He then joined Brooks Brothers, the oldest menswear company in the United States, as a sales assistant before deciding to start his own tie company. He started a company in the Empire State Building, taking rags from a drawer and turning them into ties.

• Roman Abramovich – Net worth (income and earnings) $9.1 billion

Roman Abramovich has everything a man dreams of – owning a famous football club, one of the most beautiful yachts, large mansions in several cities and a fleet of supercars. His conglomerate owns companies involved in a variety of industries, including oil, precious metals, consumer goods and stocks. Abramovich was also governor of Chukotka from 2000 to 2008. He is rumored to have spent over $1.3 billion (€925 million) of his own money improving wealth and other government conditions. Schools and housing have been improved along with living conditions, and new investors have been attracted to improve the state’s infrastructure.

• Michael Dell – Net Worth (Income and Earnings) $18.8 billion

Long before he revolutionized the PC retail business, Michael Dell had given a glimpse of his considerable genius. During the summers, while attending Memorial High School in Houston, he sold subscriptions to the Houston Post. As he made calls, he found that the people who tended to buy subscriptions built a lasting geographic and social presence. Gathering names of his target clients from marriage and mortgage applications, he earned $18,000 that year, which was more than his history and economics teacher’s annual earnings. Believing that a manufacturer selling personal computers directly would thrive through the indirect retail channel, he launched “PC’s Limited” from his home in January 1984.Dell Computer Corporation Over the years, the company has grown into one of the largest IT companies with annual sales in excess of $50 billion.

• Mark Zuckerberg – Net worth (income and earnings) $35.1 billion

Due to the immense success of Facebook, MarkZuckerberg needs no introduction. The chairman and chief executive officer of the popular networking website turned billionaire at the age of 23 and is one of the richest figures in the world with a current net worth of $35.1 billion. It’s a well-known fact that Zuckerberg began work on his ambitious project while he was an enrolled student at Harvard, where he had made a name for himself as a programming prodigy. However, many would not know that he dropped out of college in his sophomore year to complete his project. He had planned to return to Harvard to complete his studies, but the success of his pet project made him think differently. As Facebook started to conquer new heights, Zuckerberg received offers from several leading companies to sell Facebook, but chose to keep it under his control. As of February 2015, Facebook has reached a market capitalization of $212 billion.

• Bill Gates – Net worth (income and earnings) $80 billion

Last but not least, we have the richest man in the world on our list of billionaires who never graduated from college. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates has left Harvard to pursue his business venture. In 1975, Gates founded Micro-Soft with his old friend Paul Allen, with its first office in Albuquerque. Within a year, the company had dropped the hyphen from the name and also begun operating independently of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), makers of the new microcomputer. By 1980, Microsoft had begun developing an operating system for the then-planned IBM PC. The operating system was called 86-DOSand it would establish Microsoft as a major player in the IT industry. A year later, Bill Gates launched the first retail version of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft’s immense success would make Bill Gates the richest man in the world, the distinction he has held since 1995 to date, apart from a few brief periods after 2008.