I totally agree with Elon Musk on this one. I'm an autodidact, I had to teach myself to program software and engineer networks. I didn't have the money to pay for 4 years of college so I was not able to finish. Student loans like the ones now didn't exist back then.
I was a bored teenager in high school and my grades were B and Cs, my parents thought funding my college would be throwing money down a hole in the ground. They never considered I was not challenged by high school. But college did one thing for me, it taught me I was far more intelligent than my high school councilors and teachers lead me to believe. What a difference a good teacher can make! When I discovered I had a knack for programming while my fellow aspiring electrical engineers were having difficulty with it. Mind you that was the punch card days and just writing the code was a sheer act of will. God help you if you dropped the punch card deck on the way to the reader! My parents did help my youngest brother, he graduated with a geotechnical degree. I'm not jealous, I am glad he got the help he needed! My brother is an amazing guy.
I have seen what credentialism of modern academia has done to my child. Subservience to the higher mind of peer review and mass consensus was not what I expected from my child. Social networking of the research grant system is a useful skill but it cannot replace excellence in thinking. If I had to do it over again I would not encourage that choice. But back then I faced being shut of jobs because any company who had a DOD contract got funding based on the degrees of their employees. No degree no job. Even when I was completely qualified.
When I was in my 50s I was shut of jobs simply because I was in my 50s. Ageism in not as prevalent in tech as it once was. Thank God!
Credentialism is the worse thing that ever happened to science. Look at how many took the COVID vaccine and damaged their health simply because "authority" said it was safe. And some where told it was dangerous and did it anyway1 We created a generation of lemmings. Science is all about questioning the status quo.
Elon Musk just put a price tag on obedience. It costs $200,000.
— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) July 4, 2026
Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”
Every lecture. Every textbook. Every framework ever written. Free on any screen… pic.twitter.com/Qi6wz9Yrnf
