They laughed when he demonstrated his new communication device. A distinguished academic who had discovered the medium he was using had said there were no practical applications. Another distinguished British academic had failed to make such an apparatus practicable, despite prolonged efforts. As a young unknown foreigner, with no formal education beyond high school, how could he succeed where the cream of academia had failed? Yet it was 1896, he was Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the apparatus was radio and the distinguished academics were wrong. In 2026, can it be that a college education, never of much value other than in signaling to large company prestige employers, is becoming completely worthless?

Marconi, from a well-off Italian gentry family, had picked up the basics of University of Karlsruhe professor Heinrich Hertz’s (1857-94) 1886 discovery of “hertzian” radio waves in his local library in Bologna. There he had also read in a scientific journal about University College, Liverpool professor Oliver Lodge’s (1851-1940) June 1894 presentation at the Royal Institution. He then staved off his father’s increasingly urgent suggestions that he join the Italian Navy and spent eighteen months in the grounds of his family’s country house refining Lodge’s invention, so that it had a practical use in transmitting Morse code signals over a distance without a wire connection.

Once he had successfully transmitted Morse code a mile over a local hill, he went to London with his well-connected Irish mother, got an introduction to William Preece (1834-1913) chief engineer at the Post Office, also without a university degree but theoretically responsible (thanks to idiotic Disraeli legislation of 1868) for all British telegraphs, wireless or otherwise, and with Preece gave a successful public demonstration at Toynbee Hall in December 1896. When the Post Office thereafter proved dilatory in taking up the idea, he was able to avoid that monopsonist institution, obtain a British patent and through a stockbroker relative float a company in July 1897. The rest is history, although Lodge and the combined British academic community made much fuss and many patent lawsuits attempting to prove that so great a discovery could not have been made by so unqualified a man.

Marconi’s lack of a university degree would have been irrelevant 50 years earlier – almost no university offered degrees in any science beyond pure mathematics. 100 years later, when credentialism was at its height, he would have been very lucky to have got any kind of hearing. In 1996, radio would have remained un-invented until some dozy college department realized there might be a practical use for it, or Marconi himself had worked his way through four years of a college degree and three of a PhD – say around 2003. Today, credentialism is still with us, but it is thankfully in decline.

In today’s world, the most important benefit of a college degree that takes four years and may cost close to $400,000 is as a signaling mechanism to the large prestige employers – Google, Facebook, Nvidia and the like – that you are a high-quality employee who can bear the unutterable tedium and drudgery of the average four year college STEM course. (In arts subjects, the tedium is equally bad but the drudgery is less, especially if you get ChatGPT to write your essays!) A generation ago, this made sense; the colleges selected almost entirely on merit and so if an employer selected a graduate of a top college, he knew he was getting the best. At a lower level, the same applied to graduates of state colleges and lower-rated institutions, except that a state college graduate with exceptional grades might have attended it for financial rather than ability reasons and be as good as any Ivy Leaguer.

This is no longer the case. Top colleges have taken to requiring all kinds of meaningless extracurricular activities from their entrants, most of which are designed to show if the student’s political affiliation aligns with that of the college administration. Various “affirmative action” policies, which prioritize rich members of minority groups over white and Asian applicants who may be much poorer, further distort the selection criteria away from merit. However, if the top college’s Admissions Deans are selecting based on non-merit criteria, and the college has “dumbed down” its classes so that almost all students get As provided they repeat the “party line” then a degree from a top college is no longer an accurate representation of ability, any more than it was in 1890, when top colleges took few non-aristocratic students. If large prestigious companies are still selecting primarily on the basis of Ivy League or equivalent degrees, they are now selecting sub-optimally and over time will fall by the wayside, overtaken by smaller, intellectually nimbler competitors.

Even the venture capital/private equity industry, which selects the best graduates of the top schools, has found its investment returns dropping below those of a simple index fund, as have the endowments of top colleges such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The “best of the best” at these institutions may well have been nothing of the sort, merely lucky enough and woke enough to be selected by the Admissions Office of their Ivy League alma mater and endowed with sufficient bovine conformity not to get thrown out of it.

Without college, fifty years ago it was impossible to acquire the necessary knowledge to specialize in anything near the frontiers of science. Culturally, the paradigm was a somewhat socially inept individual, clad generally in a white coat (even when his scientific activities did not require one) who worked best in a large team of similarly-clad, similarly-personalitied oddballs, managed by an MBA of far less intellectual ability. With the Internet and subsequent AI revolutions, this paradigm has switched; while many scientists still work in large teams doing the tedious coding work necessary to keep today’s mega-software operating and free from malware attacks, the people who make major advances are typically lone operators. As AI becomes more capable, it is the large teams who will be made redundant.

Marconi is an excellent example. He was only 22 at the time of the Toynbee Hall demonstration and almost entirely self-taught, although he had received a little private tutoring from local physics professors in Bologna. It is not given to all of us to be born into a wealthy landowning Italian family, with British connections also. Yet a Marconi today would not need private tutoring; courses in whatever he wanted to learn would be available to him from various online vendors. His sources of information, like those of all of us, would also be more or less infinite, not constrained by the resources of a provincial town like Bologna, the first university in Europe in 1088 but by 1896 a medium-sized city of only 150,000 population. Peter Thiel was the first to recognize this new paradigm, setting up in 2011 his “Thiel Fellowships” available to those who drop out of college to pursue “ambitious, innovative projects.”

With modern online learning available, the cost-benefit equation of university attendance has changed, especially for those of exceptional intelligence and non-leftist belief systems. As governments have idiotically attempted to push higher and higher percentages of their populations through college, the intellectual quality of those colleges has inevitably declined. For the top 1-2%, especially those sufficiently motivated to put themselves through a directed course of learning from online sources, college is not intellectually stimulating. If in addition his college has an active DEI culture, it may suppress a top student’s ability to express his own beliefs as he develops them.

In a healthy capitalist economy, the most interesting opportunities are not with the big companies – Google, Facebook and the like – however fashionable they may be. Nor are they in government – heaven forbid – or in the myriad of institutions, success in which depends on office politics and an ability to adhere to the fashionable norms of the day. The best opportunities will not all lie in entrepreneurship either – not everybody is well suited for that perilous road. Nevertheless, steering clear of the big battalions, whether the fashionable employers or the “best” colleges is probably wise for anyone with intellectual integrity, access to a modest minimum of resources and sufficient determination to overcome life’s difficulties, whatever form they may take. Obeying instructions from a boss with inferior abilities is soul-destroying – trust me, I have endured it – and if you are any good you will be fired in the end, anyway.

Colleges are pretty useless for people with such ambitions, and those people are increasingly coming to recognize this. Given that recognition, and the top colleges’ extortionate cost, the demand for colleges will evaporate fairly quickly, and they will therefore shrink or disappear – their endowments, however huge, are not sufficiently well managed as to save them.

If we are lucky, Guglielmo Marconi represents our future!

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)