This Thiel-influenced not-going-to-university thing has got quite tedious. It's as if people think the only thing worth learning is coding and entrepreneurship.
If all you want to learn is programming and to a lesser extent computer science then I guess you don't really need to. However if you want to learn science, medicine, law, mathematics or any other real subject then of course you should. Plus if you want to have fun meeting new friends, getting wasted, and meeting sexual/romantic partners.
It's that last sentence that covinces me that university is obsolete or at best misrepresented as an educational experience. Getting 100 grand into debt to have fun and have sex? Get wasted?
And jf I appear to be cherrypicking the second half of your post, it's because thr first half is cherry picking itself - I'll venture that fields where you Do need university stamp of approval such as medicine and law are becoming rarer and fewer compared to fields and professions where there are valid or better alternatives.
This is not to say education isn't needed and awesome, or even that structured, guided, formal education isn't needed and awesome. But north American universities (and I'm an alumni of a good one) have lost their way and are far from the most efficient or effective method these days.
So don't go into debt to go to university then. I think that's pretty easy if you avoid the US for your undergraduate degree, and it's probably also possible in the US with some planning and careful university choosing. And if you pick the field of your PhD with some care you can do a PhD without going into debt, even in the US.
You mention medicine and law as fields were you need to go to university, but you forgot also the vast majority of research. I think some subfields of computer science, because of their youth, are still the wild west and it is possible to do research in them without a PhD (like the author of the article), but even in those it's hard. In math you definitely see almost no research at all being done by non-PhDs, probably the same is true in various sciences.
Fair enough - It has admittedly been 25 years since Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terra rt has been instilled into my head -and I'm rescuing those neurons just as fast as I can! :-D
If all you want to learn is programming and to a lesser extent computer science then I guess you don't really need to. However if you want to learn science, medicine, law, mathematics or any other real subject then of course you should. Plus if you want to have fun meeting new friends, getting wasted, and meeting sexual/romantic partners.