Posted on 05/23/2026 9:36:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
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,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts— Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026
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?
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The problem is, how do I evaluate what you know and what your experience is, in a short period of time. You need some form of accreditation, to show not only you have the knowledge, but also the discipline.
I’m a great believer in apprentice learning.
American universities,for the most part,are “Institutions of leftist indoctrination.”
My uncle, who was a great inspiration to me was and Electrical Engineer and a Nuclear Physicist. I asked him how he came to know so much. He just said, “If you can read, you can learn anything.”
but he knows that if he doesn't get back to me right away...he'll get a note saying...never mind...I figured it out.
He keeps me from getting "lazy brain".
Right Elon. We can all learn Coupled Loads Analysis by whackin it out on ChatGPT.
Sure man
I get a lot of info free online. Much of it is junk. School, tetbooks, teachers, opinions, ideas need, I think, an atmosphere where hopefuly wiser minds can help sort it all out, reconfigure ideas, come up with other possibilities, introduce alternatives. Elon is a scientist, what about liberal arts types who want to be writers . teachers, bankers, merchant princes?
Plus our college years and in my life, high school too, can benefit greatly from being “away at school” surrounded with many people from, different backgrounds, even financial gtoups. Is all of that a distraction? For someone s driven and brilliant as Elon, is must be. For me it was a leaarning experience, just as travel to different countries is.
Still learning every day, a lot of it here.
I have often said, “4 years in the navy and a set of Harvard Classics - $299 from ebay - best education in the world...”
There is at least some truth in that. The military has some of the best tech schools around, with a built-in apprenticeship. And you can compensate for a formal education by being well read. I wasn’t in the service, but a lot of the guys I worked with learned their craft in the military.
The lack of a formal degree doesn’t have to hold you back; being good at what you do makes its own opportunities.
My kids were born six years apart. When my son blew an assignment at school, his excuse : the library was closed. My daughter? The internet was down.
Most people are not auto-didacts. College is supposed to be a place where students are taught how to gather information and process it, with wisdom. One needs someone to criticize the ideas that percolate in students heads.
We get enamored by successful “self starter Brainiacs”. Very, very few of them.
We just have to get school back to those goals. Get rid of most of the “administration”, minor league pro sports, teacher unions, college staff unions, therapists, huge buildings, opulent dorms, mindlessly granted government money, and the costs go down, and the leftist propaganda is no longer profitable.
Elon is correct. I am a pharmacist now retired. Aside from the labs and hands on experience in hospitals with patients there is little I could not have learned sitting in front of a computer screen. Pharmacy is a 6 year ordeal. 4 years could be done via computers. You really need the last two years in the real world of pharmacy interacting with patients and the doctors.
Fantastic story. I knew a WWII vet who never went to college but became a highly skilled mining engineer. Like your uncle, he read everything he could get his hands on. That was all he needed.
Republican parents keep sending their republican children to the colleges tho.
End result: More democrat voters. Democrat parents abort their offspring. They have no children.
Elon isn’t going to change this. The Republican parents will not stop the insane things they are doing.
Community College near me wants $131 per credit hour. I wanted to take an online 3-credit Python programming class and they wanted almost $600 total. A total scam. I asked them what is it that I get for $600? Her answer is “thats just what it costs”. I said that the program is freeware and there is no textbook and I can learn the exact same curriculum anytime I want to. After a long pause she just said again “thats what it costs”.
There’s this channel on YouTube who offers pretty good computer courses:
https://youtube.com/@brocodez?si=w-GXrHfUSshzrtmb
Go to Tesla website and Space X and see about getting hired without degrees
You can learn by reading but many trades require “hands-on” experience. You need experience to become an airframe and powerplant mechanic to fix airplanes. Pilots have to learn by doing. Crane operators, bulldozer operators and truck drivers need physical experience. Welders, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, sheet metal workers, machinists, tool and die makers and many other trades have to learn by actually working with masters of the trades.
You won’t get that in most modern Universities in this day and age. You get compliance and indoctrination.
The gullability factor is hard to overcome. Every positive statement presents itself as credible, whether spoken or read. Wisdom and curiosity combined go a long way in self-education, but a well-rounded life requires personal interaction both with family and, to some degree, the world at large. Classroom settings have, for the most part, been a pox on learning.
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