At the expense of playing devil's advocate for most responses in this thread, I really disagree with this statement. I went to a reasonably good (top 25) state

At the expense of playing devil's advocate for most responses in this thread, I really disagree with this statement. I went to a reasonably good (top 25) state school. I studied a lot of hard science: physics, astronomy, CS, math. I can wholeheartedly say that without the structure and rigor of college I would not have learned as much as I did. Sure, I might not use all that knowledge in my personal day-to-day, but it is a lot more complete than if I had tried to teach it to myself. On top of that, colleges really were the place to find information prior to the internet. Maybe Musk's statement is more relevant today, but in previous generations you needed something like a university to do research (try looking for physics journals that are up to date at your local library). Last, Musk's actions speak louder than his words: most of his companies' jobs currently require degrees, they mostly recruit from tier 1 universities, and Musk himself _completed_ 2 degrees, and started a third. Obviously he values the signalling a degree grants. All of this to say that despite that, some of the best developers I know have little or no formal education. So the caveat is true: you don't necessarily need a degree to learn and be successful in the modern day for at least some (or maybe many) things, I just personally find a lot of value in a formal education. (Sorry for any poor grammar, just had LASIK done and its a little hard to see)