Although American colleges and universities have (most of them) been corrupted into Woke Factories, and at their best have always been too rigid, I believe that many people can benefit from higher education when it is done properly and well.
But yes: A percentage of people (such as Elon) have the drive (and the IQ, for certain careers) to create exceptional things -- from artwork or music to high-tech, multi-billion dollar corporations -- without wasting time slogging through college for a degree.
Includes a video, 1 min 25 sec, of Elon saying essentially what you see below.
https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2044252562443120728
https://nitter.net/r0ck3t23/status/2044252562443120728
Dustin @r0ck3t23
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.
Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”
That is the product. Not intelligence. Not creativity. Not vision. Compliance.
You are paying $200,000 to prove you can tolerate bureaucracy on a schedule.
Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”
The entire system is a sorting machine for corporate HR. It does not measure what you can build. It measures whether you can sit still, follow directions, and deliver on command.
Four years of obedience dressed as education.
Musk: “If you’re trying to do something exceptional, you must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.”
The system optimizes for average. It rewards the compliant. It certifies the patient. It quietly filters out everyone who refuses to wait for permission.
The ones who reshaped the modern world never finished the test.
Musk: “Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Jobs is pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out.”
They did not drop out because it was too hard. They dropped out because the speed limit was too low.
The most dangerous thing a university does is convince a generational talent that finishing the syllabus is the achievement.
It is not. It is the floor.
A degree is a receipt for compliance. The future has never belonged to people who finish their homework. It belongs to the ones who never needed the assignment.
Don't forget the crushing debt,that locks you into shitty jobs.
TPS reports anyone?
Yeah, I’m gonna need that in my desk by tomorrow morning.
Sorry I'm staring at the wall now,for they next hour.
I "went Galt" over 20 years ago. The "crushing debt" is self-imposed. People don't need the huge new house, new cars every year and a car for every person in the house, or the latest phone, or meals out every single day. I can remember a time when I lived in a house trailer, drove a used car, and had to eat chicken bologna sandwiches three times a day.
I got 270,000 & 315,000 miles out of my last two cars; both were used cars ~ 2-3 years old. I’ve only purchased one new car in my life; not worth it.
Now that I can, I buy new so I don't have to ever worry about expensive repairs. I have driven over 8 years without any major repair at all. I did have to get one electric window checked out. I go to the dealer for all service, and they wash the car each time. I haven't washed a car in 8 years. I pay the monthly payment and a bit of gas each month.
I used to drive used cars, and they needed expensive repairs almost every month, except for one 1979 Plymouth Fury Salon that I managed to get a deal on. I drove that one 4 or 5 years with just one major repair, the starter motor.
I'm too old to have extra worries.
You had a house trailer and a car?
You lived like a king.
The house trailer was a 1971 Conner that was only about 10x40. It had two tiny bedrooms, an oil furnace that I never used, and a stove I never used. It only cost $3,000, and I later sold it for $2,000. My lot rent was $35 a month. My car was used and cost about $100 a month. So all my bills and expenses could be paid with just a minimum wage salary. What I made above that could be saved or used for extras.
I wish that were true, but it's difficult to get employers to take University of YouTube on a resume seriously. kek!
You're quite right.
To a prospective employer the degree is a filtering process. It takes care of a lot of questions up front. It's said that hiring managers read resumes from bottom-up. The order of priority is 1. recommendations from someone I know, 2. job history or "track record," 3. university term projects (if fresh out of school), 4. university courses, 5. volunteer work.
But, Elon is not just a critic. He has opportunity to lead by example. How will the HR teams at Space X and other companies at his helm adjust their practices, I wonder. All talk and no walk would be an incongruity.
Be the employer, not the employee.
If only, I know nothing about running a business, let alone being competitive in saturated markets without undrrselling or over promising lol
Start with Today Matters by John C. Maxwell. It's basically "Entrepreneurship 101"
It can't guarantee you that you'll pick an empty, profitable market for what you want to do, but it will guide you to solve your worst problem. You.
You're not taught to be an entrepreneur in the gov't run schools, you're taught to be a worker bee. Everything Musk said about University is true on steroids for primary and secondary education.
My son works in the public school system. Rural area, not as bad as blue city schools. They had a statewide conference where they invited top students and teachers. The keynote speaker was the CEO of a decent sized local business. He started his speech with “the first thing that we teach new hires is, forget everything you were taught in school”. My son said that some of the organizers of the event literally ran on stage and interrupted and stopped him. Sort of like Forest Gump at the Lincoln Memorial. I’m not sure if he was allowed to finish or not.
Not at all. You can use interviewese to reclassify it as a personal/independent project.
Depending on interviewers, they may be more interested in what you have learned and how that can help them.
I never needed a piece of paper for any job I ever had. And I was able to "retire" at age 50.
Congrats, you avoided background checks...
For a student I’m about to tutor, I relearned how to integrate trig functions for calculus. I first learned it 50 years ago and last taught it 10 years ago. I didn’t pay a dime for the videos I watched.
You get out of it what you put into it and what you intend to develop. Think of it like a gym, going there does not guarantee anything unless you come in with a viable action plan to get the most out of it to your benefit.
I spent 5 years in college and could have consolidated everything I learned into 4 classes. I've taught myself nutrition, physiology, finance, welding, and auto painting from YouTube.
He's right about learning stuff, but college teaches discipline and focus over a period of time. Its easy to be smart. Its easy to learn. What's not easy is doing it almost every day for 4-5 years and being tested on it infront of your peers. I dont know about yalls colleges, but mine wasnt easy. 5 classes a semester is challenging especially with a job. I can tell you that my admin skills with Microsoft are night and day better than non college students. Capitial letters and writing are noticable. Thats due to writing tons of papers and being graded. Something non college students wouldn't have practiced. I dont think college is for everyone. I think trade schools are very important. College is not a true representation of the "real world" but it does ingrain better admin, computer, financial, and organization, skills by far.
Well done, exceptional anon! Of course, this is categorically impossible for the millions of people who can't even get a job in their field WITH a degree; and who, if they drop out of school, must instantly compete against the other dropouts for any low-paying dead-end job they can scrounge, just to make ends meet; then slog through life, each day a loathsome drudgery, yearning for the weekend; but these are minor details. :)
—Drew Carey
Excellent!
It's true. I've learned so much from YouTube University I'm confident I could do my own heart surgery, they just make it so hard to get the meds.
Good read! What to do now with the elementary, junior high schools and high schools? They have turned into indoctrination centers. Heck they dont even teach the most basic concepts any more. Kids nowadays cannot write their names in cursive nor even read cursive. I've asked 18YO high school kids if they learned cursive hand writing and they looked at me with a "What's cursive" look! But they certainly can play Xbox or Playstation games.
I was homeschooled K-12, once I got to 5th and 6th grade the curriculum was self teaching, I had to use critical thinking to get the work done. Having critical thinking skills was one of the main reasons my mother chose to homeschool.
It's a gigantic circle jerk. This job requires this degree so we charge this ungodly amount.
This is exactly why I, someone who has a degree in education and child development, has decided to “unschool” my children.
The same children who are “unschooled” watched their parents perform a life saving operation on our horse in the middle of the yard. This was after we called two degree holding veterinarians who said he was good for dead. They were sure to add they had never seen a horse pull through this type of injury/recovery (evisceration.) We decided that wasn’t an answer and took matters into our own hands. We saved his life that day.
After the event, our children asked us how we knew what we were doing, our answer to them was we used our intuition and recalled everything we’d ever learned on the subject.
As mentioned above, “They take a test at the end of courses to prove their understanding.” You have the same opportunity, learn always, one day your test might be a first person experience that can really pay off and you don’t need a degree to prove it.
If you’ve been around this board a while you know me and won’t be surprised when I say, we sent a lot of good vibrations and light through our hands too. ;)
College is now nothing more than commie socialist factories spitting out little comrades.
amen
So where will the teachers come from? A lot of people need teaching, autodidactism isn't for everyone.
"I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability" Nevertheless its a very good indicator of it.
🔥
Elon isnt organic. Nor is Zuck, bezos etc. Small business makes the US work. You dont need a overpriced education, to build a service in your community, that will pay you more than any employer. Taking a salary, is sacrificing stability, for pay.
Anything that needs to be taught in person (hands on) needs workshops or something
Anything that can be taught online and is tuaght at a school is at risk of being automated with some kind of alternative option
The only real things holding back a flood of productivity in these directions are government licensing mandates and accreditation processes of schools (I am kind of surprised these things don't get more attention)
Trades and specific stem require education. Everything else is a scam. Ten students can go to college, major in communications with a minor in meteorology. The only one who will get hired as a weathergirl is the most attractive one with the nicest voice.
But Bill really really wanted to be a "weathergirl"
So he has to go back to school and get a PhD in meteorology plus a bachelor's in journalism or environmental science..and then if he's lucky his local news channel will hire him over the hot girl and he can finally fulfill his dream of talking about the weather on TV
It's all arbitrary. It's all BS. I supposed he's happier because he knows a lot more about the weather now...but half his education wasn't even about the weather. He had to take two semesters of musical Theatre and one semester of African studies and a dozen math classes that don't even apply to his job
Way back in the Hippie days, a professor told us essentially the same thing. He said having a college degree means you have the stamina to stick it out for 4 years and follow instructions. The knowledge wasn't so important.
I coasted through high school. I put in enough effort to pass most subjects and excelled in the few that I found interesting. I stumbled into a field that I never would have sought out and eventually wound up with my own company. My competition included three of the biggest mining companies in the world, and I set out to be better than them. I had never given a shit about science in high school, yet there I was running a company where science was everything. Within five years, we were leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. I was stunned when I got the opportunity to look under the hood of the one competitor that I thought was way ahead of us. It was actually really disturbing to find out that we had been the best from practically day one.
Degrees, titles, prestige, fancy suits, etc., mean nothing to me now. I think 90% of people and companies are coasting through life just like I coasted through high school. Drive and determination are far more powerful.
It's the result of lazy employers who didn't want to take the time to determine if their prospective employees were competent or not and decided that if they had a degree, it was proof that they were competent. And as we all know, a degree isn't proof of anything except that you paid a lot of money and invested years into doing whatever you needed to do in order to get that degree. For some people, it was studying hard and learning the material, for others, it was paying people to take exams for them, and for the diligent but dull brained, it was finding the schools/teachers that would pass you with a C, no matter how crappy you did on the work, as long as you showed up to each class.
100% honest here, I went to a private Christian college that had a statistics professor who, on the first day of class, promised that as long as you came to each class, didn't miss a day, and at least gave the appearance of trying, they would pass you with a C.
Needless to say, I didn't miss a single class. My brain just doesn't do well with numbers.
Getting back to the point, a college degree now has been so diluted in importance that it's the equivalent of what a High School Diploma pre-80s/90s used to be.
It's why there are more unemployed people with college degrees than without them now. It's hard to get a decent job with a college degree in fields where they are prerequisites, but if you apply for a job that doesn't need one, then you're deemed over qualified for that job. Classic case of dammed if you do, dammed if you don't. WT actual F is that about?
You need the paper to get a real job. You can know phd level material and get passed by someone with the degree who used GPT to do all the assignments.
Spoken like a true 200-I.Q. autistic genius.
Sure, what he says is theoretically correct.
In practice, in the real world, however, it's different. Almost everyone, even smart people and geniuses, need the repetition of schooling and the external discipline of instructors, class participation, and assignments to bring about the relentless daily and nightly study necessary to master a body of knowledge. When you HAVE to get up and go to class, when you HAVE to pass an exam, you do it. That's the value of formalized instruction IMHO.
Some things are gate kept, like medical and law schools. Some fields require actual proper and correct tutelage because of thr inherent danger to life and limb, like OTR truck driving, electrical or HVAC, etc. Other trainings require equipment and supplies that are cost prohibitive to most people, like welding/metal fab, but Elon is right for the most part. With the internet, most things can now be self taught, even if it requires you to dredge away at a day job doing something you don't necessarily like or want to do, just so you can afford the equipment and supplies to train and educate yourself for what you want to do.
I've seen loads of people on YT who are all self taught, for the most part, and are now making boat loads of money not just through thier YT channels, but also their actual craft/trade.
If you have the drive, almost anything is possible. The problem is, almost everyone gets the drive and motivation to be what they truly want to be beaten out of them through 12-13 years of grade school. I saw it with my boys. None of them are doing what they truly want to do with their lives. My daughter is the only one of my children who is actually motivated to educate herself and train to do what she loves. My boys are just sort of aimlessly drifting. And I think the difference is that she is homeschooled whereas my boys were not.
Amen anon. Amen.
MIT has a ton of their courses online for free. You can download the syllabus and course materials, and there are video lectures you can watch online.
There are millions of items you can read for free on all subjects on Archive.org. There are YouTube videos on how to do anything you want, from auto repair to knitting to programming.
You also don't have to convince an employer what you know. You can start your own business.