Do jobs that require college, require college?

I'd highly recommend reading Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich:

“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.”

“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.”

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”

“School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.”

“In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.”

“Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort.”

What these "we don't need college" advocates fail to understand is that most of the people that accomplish great things without college are extremely motivated individuals that are already primed to do great things. Going to college just gets in the way of what they want to accomplish.

I can think of at least 4 people that did not finish college yet they changed the world, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. And if I spend a bit more time I can think of many more. But what they have in common is that they were very motivated to do what they did and were/are life long learners.

You can't say that about most people. Most people will not force themselves to learn new things outside a structured learning environment.

It's true that you can accomplish anything you want without a college degree but it's a damaging fallacy that most people don't need a college degree.