Elon Musk OnThe Value Of College Education

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

Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A.

I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty adviser got involved. (He was actually schtupping my graduate-assistant girlfriend as well, but that's a whole separate matter.) He got all sanctimonious and insisted that "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" was the standard. I really couldn't go against him, except that I had the text the student had cribbed right in front of me, but he claimed that wasn't enough.

Actually, the standard of proof almost universally used in academic environments is "more likely than not", as explained in this University of Alberta policy:

Unlike the criminal system which must meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, . . . the Code is based in Administrative Law, which lowers the requirement for proof. . . . Balance of probabilities is the “more likely (or probable) than not” standard. In other words, if the available evidence convinces the Dean to the point that he or she is 50% + 1 certain that a student has committed an offence, the standard of proof has been met.

But clearly any argument I made in that direction wasn't going to get anywhere. The problem was that I was going against the whole reason for college: an easay I linked in a post here not long ago puts it one way:

As the economist Bryan Caplan has observed, “The main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or ‘signal,’ their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity.” As long as college remains a way for upwardly mobile kids to stand out from one another, and as long as employers believe that a better college degree is a sign of a better potential worker, the American university system should survive, even if teaching methods change.

Or more succinctly, the point of a degree is to qualify students for a certain level of white-collar job, but, contra the typical university mission statment, preparing students for responsible citizenship by fostering critical thinking, or something like that, is not what's on offer, those are just words. The point is to go through motions that more or less suggest something like that has taken place, when everyone pretty much recognizes it hasn't. The tweet above variously quotes and paraphrases Elon Musk:

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.

A number of the commenters to the tweet got quite hot under the collar:

I would prefer a surgeon with some institutional training, and a pilot and maybe a lawyer.

But surgeons and lawyers go to med school and law school for that training. A four-year degree has little to do with it. Even a pilot can't get hired with just a degree from Princeton or whatever; they have to have flown for the military or been to flight school. And for that matter, why do even med schools like Yale do DEI? That implies that even prestige professional degrees can be gamed.

And the four-year certificate of compliance quite frequently can be satisfied with everyone going through the motions. The English Department knows it's a popular major in some measure because the students recognize it won't just let them by if they plagiarize, it'll give then As. Why else would their parents pay $200,000?

Not only that, but the English Department is fully aware that if it became routine for instructors to bring students up on honors code violations, enrollment in its courses would quickly fall to something approaching zero, from which it would follow that faculty positions in the department would also quickly fall to something approaching zero.

That was the year it began to dawn on me that an academic career wasn't going to work out for me; no matter what I did, I'd just be going through the motions, and in fact, if I had a PhD on my resume, I'd be less employable in the real world than if I didn't have one. A real education might have made that clear to me much faster than the one I got.

Looking back, I recognize that what I should have done was try to find out how many plagiarism cases had ever gone through the system. It probably would have been something in single digits, notwithstanding everyone who taught freshman comp was fully aware that a huge proportion of freshman essays was cribbed. Actually, I wonder if any university has ever made a serious study of the size of the plagiarism problem and why it exists. I think that would raise too many basic questions about the system.