The question resurfaced this week after a report in Le Monde highlighted a growing scepticism towards university degrees among some Silicon Valley founders and investors. Critics argue that higher education has become too expensive, ideologically rigid, and increasingly disconnected from labour-market realities—particularly at a moment when generative AI appears to be reshaping entry-level technical roles and the cultural myth of the self-taught dropout-founder retains symbolic power.
Whether such claims are overstated or selectively framed, the underlying uncertainty deserves attention. We genuinely do not yet know how employers will value traditional academic credentials in a labour market where demonstrable skills, adaptability and experience may carry greater weight than formal qualifications alone.
Yet reducing higher education to a signalling mechanism or a short-term employability metric would be a serious mistake.
A university degree is not solely about what students know at graduation. It concerns what they become through the disciplined process of study. When intellectual standards are demanding, and learning environments remain open and rigorous, universities cultivate capacities that are difficult to automate: critical reasoning, sustained argumentation, epistemic humility, curiosity, collaboration, resilience and the ability to navigate ambiguity.
These are not ornamental virtues. They are structural competencies for uncertain, AI-centred economies.
There is also a deeper human dimension. The university remains one of the few institutions explicitly designed not merely to transmit knowledge or train workers, but to help individuals interpret the world, challenge inherited assumptions, refine their judgement and articulate a sense of purpose. That form of formation does not always map neatly onto quarterly hiring data, yet societies have historically relied on it.
We do not know whether companies will reward degrees as they once did. But if students approach their studies seriously, and if professors defend the academic mission with clarity and courage, higher education can still offer something that is increasingly scarce: not merely credentials, but the cultivated capacity to think, to reason and to act with discernment.