> Despite Musk’s skepticism, many of the open job listings at SpaceX list a bachelor’s degree or higher education as a basic requirement.

Snarky reporting at its best.

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At it's core, Musk looks to be claiming that college isn't required for learning (trivially true) plus an implicit claim that people waste time in college where they could be productive. Fair enough. Seems like a silly proclamation to make but there's a class of people who like to make these claims. Suspiciously these people tend to be the folks who are uniquely driven, but that's just my bias, I suppose.

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I do think a lot of this sentiment from Musk and others in this thread come as a result of a pretty naive way of looking at learning. For illustration purposes, let's go with a story.

When I was in high school, I fell in love with the band Rage Against the Machine. Because I was a curious sort, I listed out all the books listed in the linear notes of _Evil Empire_ and tried to read as many as I could. I have a distinct memory of sitting on the floor at my childhood home with a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_ and a dictionary. I was smarter than average, I guess, but I really was floored at just how many words in that book I didn't know. I may've made my way through 1/3 or 1/2 of the book before I was too exhausted to continue.

In college, I studied philosophy. For whatever reason, I fell in love with the subject and exclusively focused on that in college. Well, that love lasted until roughly senior year when I realized that I had fallen out of love with the subject and had zero interest in pursuing the subject as a career. That really sucked for me since I had put all my eggs into one basket. I hadn't really focused on taking courses which provide hard, technical skills which I could leverage into easily acquired job opportunities. It also sucked that I graduated in 2007 and while the full on financial crisis hadn't hit just yet, the easy throws were there so I had a hard time finding a job. I luckily got a job at an academic library and moved on with my life focusing on developing the skills needed for a long-term job.

The sense that I had squandered my time in college was a malignant wound on my psyche and I would've been sympathetic to the views that Musk and others hold now. One day when I was shelving books in the stacks, I happened upon Stephen Jay Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_. I remember reflecting on the memory of me in high school and picked the book up to see, almost on a lark, whether it was still mystifying to me. I scanned a paragraph here and there as I flipped through the book and was absolutely shocked. Those words which were barriers to the high school version of myself? Easy. I knew them. Not only did I know them but I knew the historical backstory and context to the topic that Gould was presenting. I knew the pro arguments, the con arguments, the responses each side would have to the cons. I couldn't believe it.

Ever since that experience, I've been left with a fairly firm belief that we just do not have adequate ways of quantifying learning when it comes to the liberal arts. It isn't tangible. We can't easily do tests to see if people can communicate more clearly. Whether they can analyze arguments. Whether they have a cultural context to understand why people believe what they believe. As a consequence a certain set of people love to disparage the whole enterprise. It's really unfortunate since it seems pretty self-evident that those skills, that awareness is extremely valuable, both to the individual and to the society as a whole. It's fair for someone to disagree on the merits and I am sure there are thoughtful people who do, but the larger belief that this experience inspired is a humility when it comes to casting aside things which aren't easily measurable. That cynicism has stuck with me and has proven to be extremely valuable in my professional life since the KPIs and measurements which organizations love to fetishize are those which just so happen to be the easiest to measure.

Yes, Gould was a biologist. Yes, that book was about evolutionary biology and certain specialties in psychology. But the crux of the book was a really in the liberal arts sphere of things.