‘Learn Anything You Want for Free’ – RedState

For those of us who grew up before the Internet, it’s still pretty amazing today that we literally have all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips. When I was a child, if I wanted to know something, I looked in books; If my parents’ fairly large library didn’t have the information I was looking for, there were a few municipal libraries within about an hour’s drive, and I could usually find what I was looking for there.

But now? If I’m not sitting here at my desk in front of four 27-inch screens and access to the entire Internet, I can squint at my phone’s small screen and find pretty much the same information. Sure, the Internet being what it is, there’s a lot of chaff to sort through before you find the wheat, but sometimes disappearing down those rabbit holes is part of the fun.

I’m also a guy who went to college. Twice, in fact, in the mid-1980s for an undergraduate degree in biology, then early at Shoulds for an MBA in technology management. In the case of my undergraduate degree, at that time I was using a computer only to write research reports and to run a very basic biostatistics program for some of my research. But this MBA? All of this information was information I could have found on the Internet.

Elon Musk has now taken an interesting position that this technology is making the university system obsolete. Maybe he’s right.

Elon Musk has just put the entire university system to the test.

Not the program. Not the teachers. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn things. 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

Here is the key point of this:

Elon Musk has just put the entire university system to the test.

Not the program. Not the teachers. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn things. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

For a thousand years, universities held a monopoly. Access. You have paid the price or been left in the dark.

The Internet erased that in a decade.

Every conference. Every frame. Every manual. Free. From any screen on Earth.

Six-figure tuition fees no longer buy knowledge. It’s buying a signal.

Yes, everything you want is free, but some discipline is required to acquire and absorb this knowledge to the point where it is marketable. Colleges and universities can ensure this discipline or, rather, they can enforce it. But here’s the question: should they have to?

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Our higher education system is seriously broken. The system once brought a young skull of discipline and knowledge to mush, but now it feels more and more like a buffer for… what?

Elon says that these days, college is “mostly for fun.” Not everyone agrees with Elon.

Gen Z’s relationship with higher education has never been more strained. Soaring tuition costs and a brutal job market for entry-level students have left many young people wondering if getting a degree is worth it.

But Valerie Capers Workman, who served as vice president of people at Tesla, has a very different message for the Class of 2026: Don’t buy the noise. This comes even as his former boss, Elon Musk, is part of the chorus of powerful voices questioning the university.

“Don’t let anyone, not a tech founder, not a title, not a podcast host, convince you that your education was a waste,” Workman said last week at the Defining the Future conference at California State University, San Bernardino. “It wasn’t. It’s more valuable today than it ever was.”

Color me skeptical. The American university system does not work. The goal is not to produce young adults with marketable skills. He’s been co-opted by the far left, coddled by left-wing politicians, and devoted to spewing out a plethora of useless ethnic studies degrees underwater in dog polishing. Perhaps only the few who are dedicated and focused enough to learn on their own should be employed in fields where they essentially sell their knowledge. This is how the world has worked for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Now, with all the knowledge in the world at our disposal, why wouldn’t it work like that again?

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