For those of us who grew up in the days before the internet, even now it's rather amazing that we have all the knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips. When I was a kid, if I wanted to know something, I looked in books; if my parents' rather extensive library didn't have the information I sought, there were a couple of city libraries within an hour or so by car, and I could generally find what I sought there.
Now, though? If I'm not sitting here at my desk in front of four 27" screens and access to the entire internet, I can squint at the tiny screen on my phone and find pretty much the same information. Granted, the internet being what it is, there's an awful lot of chaff to be sifted through before one finds the wheat, but sometimes disappearing down those rabbit holes is part of the fun.
I'm also a guy who went to college. Twice, in fact, in the mid-1980s for an undergraduate degree in biology, then in the early Oughts for an MBA in technology management. In the case of my undergraduate degree, in those days, I only used a computer to write up research reports and to run a very elementary biostatistics program for some of my research. That MBA, though? All of that was information that I could have found on the internet.
Elon Musk has now taken the interesting position that this technology is making the university system obsolete. He might have a point.
Here's the key point from this:
Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial.
Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise.
Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”
For a thousand years, universities held one monopoly. Access. You paid the toll or you stayed ignorant.
The internet erased that in a decade.
Every lecture. Every framework. Every textbook. Free. From any screen on Earth.
The six-figure tuition is no longer buying knowledge. It is buying a signal.
Yes, everything you want is free, but there is a certain discipline required to attain and absorb that knowledge to the point where it's marketable. Colleges and universities can provide that discipline, or, rather, they can enforce that discipline. But here's the question: Should they have to?
Our system of higher education is badly broken. The system once brought a young skull of mush discipline and knowledge, but now, it seems increasingly like a rubber-stamp for... what?
Elon says these days that college is "basically for fun." Not everyone agrees with Elon.
Gen Z’s relationship with higher education has never been more fraught. Soaring tuition costs and a brutal entry-level job market have left many young people questioning whether getting a degree was worth it at all.
But Valerie Capers Workman, who served as vice president of people at Tesla, has a sharply different message for the graduating class of 2026: Don’t buy the noise. This comes even as her former boss, Elon Musk, is part of the chorus of powerful voices casting doubt on college.
“Do not let anyone, not a tech founder, not a headline, not a podcast host, convince you that your education was a waste,” Workman said last week at the Defining the Future conference at California State University, San Bernardino. “It was not. It is more valuable today than it has ever been.”
Color me skeptical. The American university system isn't functioning. It's not focused on producing young adults with marketable skills. It has been co-opted by the far-left, coddled by leftist politicians, and devoted to spewing out a plethora of useless Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies degrees. Maybe only the few that are dedicated and focused enough to learn on their own should be employed in fields where they are, in essence, selling their knowledge. That's how the world worked for hundreds, even thousands of years. Now, with all the knowledge in the world at our command, why shouldn't it work that way again?
