Since the topic of degrees and inherrent respect came up on Talk I thought this article would prove informative
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/meet-college-dropout-who-invented-gravitational-wave-detector
From this photo you can see this guy has been a maker from an early age. His speciality is/was experimental physics, which means he spent his career building his own equipment.
http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/images/349-Young-Rainer-Weiss.jpg
By the way, the detector he designed was so senstive that they needed to figure out how to remove noise caused by individual photons impacting the mirror…
I smiled when one news articl said “Three American scientists — including one who initially flunked out of MIT…”, and then later in the paragraph went on to say “…Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” 
Edit: although further reading provided this information: " He returned to school, got his bachelor’s and doctorate at MIT and ended up as a professor there."
So I stand corrected.
I hate it when a good story is ruined by a wayward title…
Not ruined. He did fail his exams and was dropped as a student; however, his work earned him a professorship anyway…
As a professor he is known for helping non-traditional students, including committing large amounts of his personal time helping students pass those exams…
Well…
When I read the headline “college dropout” I do not expect to find that he actually flunked out, not dropped out, and then returned, thus no longer a dropout, had that been true.
It’s not a big deal, but it casts a bitter tinge over reading the rest of the article for me. Having no formal education and earning a Nobel prize is a different story than having strayed briefly from the pathway of formal education and then earning a Nobel prize. None of this holds a candle to the diminishing of the Nobel prize by its conferrance on our former commander-in-chief, but ruined my enjoyment of the article all the same.
Yep, these days compliance with the system is all but an absolute necessity for some areas. Academics is certainly one. Never the less, I felt the title made a apropos point relating to some other Talk posts.
There are Nobel prizes and then there are Nobel prizes. The prize for Physics is of the latter. The Peace prize is all but a joke now-a-days.
Really always has been. The people who created the peace (soldiers) were rarely the ones winning this prize. Just the talkers. And when the soldiers one, it wasn’t for their actions which actually created the peace, but rather talking about it…
remember when Obama got the peace prize when he was president for like 2 weeks!
I need a CV from everyone in this thread before I decide whether or not to read your responses.