Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.

Wrong question, I think. The correct question is "name some unsuccessful people who did not finish high school who might have been more successful if they had".

These people are not so easy to name-drop. Not because they don't exist -- there are certainly hundreds of thousands of such people for every famous name like Mark Twain or Ben Franklin. It's because of sampling bias.

If you drop out and don't become Mark Twain, nobody's going to write your biography. Indeed, you will find that a lot of people will stigmatize you.