How many jobs really require college?

I would guess it was more of a high level indicator of someone who has ambition, some base level of intelligence, perseverance, etc.

That still leaves you with false negatives and false positives. Just something somewhat better than hiring randomly. There are other criteria you could have used that had nothing to do with a college degree, that would likely have similar results.

The enlisted ranks of the US military, for example, use something called an ASVAB test as a bar for certain highly skilled jobs. It's also not perfect, but yields at least similar results. And the pool has very few college grads.

That said, it's clear that online education has the potential to transform millions of lives for people who have the discipline, vigor, and intention of going into a specific field.

Many people around the world are learning on their own time, be it linear algebra or Python programming, without needing to spend thousands of dollars on a formalized education.

The current explosion in peoples interest Deep Learning is in no small part because of the availability of information on the internet, such as free or inexpensive textbooks, free video and written tutorials from dozens of high quality sources, research papers on Arxiv, and tons of written information by the leading researchers of our time. If you're interested in Deep Learning, going to a local college that isn't an elite institution is unlikely to have significantly larger benefit over spending the next few years studying and learning on your own.

I can honestly say that from my college education, only a small % was truly applicable to my eventual career. Was it worth $40k+? For the social network, yes, but for the practical methods of improving my own skillset, hardly. Most of my professors were quite frankly lesser skilled than the students who eventually graduated. Clearly, I didn't go to Stanford or MIT!

On the topic of the "camaraderie of students," there's nothing that says people can't form their own groups without the need of a university environment, such as through Meetup.com or Facebook. I'm currently part of a study group that's going through an online Deep Learning course, where we meet every week to discuss the weeks work. And we sometimes bring in a PhD level practitioner to answer questions and give feedback.

I'll also just underline this: the level of teaching of particular subjects varies from college to college. You are not guaranteed to get a good professor on the topics you truly care about. A lot of people will never have the experience of going to an elite institution that has industry leaders or excellent teachers. The wonder of online education is that you can find a teacher who absolutely has a style and process that works for you and you may learn a lot more through that process than going to a class where the teacher sucks the life out of the topic. Or just simply makes you do work that isn't structured well.

For example, look at comments written on highly popular math videos on YouTube, where students lament the fact that they're taught basic things in a way that is extremely abstract, pushing them to just learn rote memorization. It takes people like 3Blue1Brown and Sal Khan to open up their minds to the intuition.