Depending on your definition of "education", I agree with the first part of your statement. The second part of your statement I wholeheartedly disagree with. Education in general is a very valuable thing, but a classroom education is not the only one, and college can be valuable but is not necessarily so. I'm a high-school dropout, yet I've never regretted it for a second -- I have a good deal of education, but it comes from self-exploration and experimentation and it's shown itself to be quite valuable so far. My case is by no means the norm, but propping college up as the only path is pretty silly.
"college can be valuable but is not necessarily so"
You can always claim that "X can be valuable but is not necessarily so". Where X can be anything in this universe.
Second, you are trying to turn a personal experience into a generalization. A good question to ask would be what would happen If the college enrollment dropped by 10% or 20% or 50% ? How would this affect the workforce and the industrial output?
Another extremely important question is that how do you decide who exactly should drop out?? Should people drop out on basis of financial resources or some limited test of intelligence. The problem is that it is hard to tell who should enroll and who shouldn't.
While certain subjects can be learnt online, a large number of subjects cannot be learnt. A university provides Labs, Wide range of subjects, access to a social network of like minded people, Faculty, Assessment and most importantly some guarantee of Academic Integrity. Universities are an example of the Theory of the firm.[1] You can surely separate different components of college education which I mentioned above, however there will be significant transaction costs.
The underlying theme of this discussion is not about education or elitism. It is about allocation of capital. Peter Thiel being a Venture Capitalist is interested in allocation of capital, thus the whole 20 under 20. Dont confuse his efforts with education or elitism. If anything his program might be more elitist than Harvard.
If not, how do you know if you would have learned at lot there or nothing at all.
I can't blame you for dropping out of high school, but please don't tell me what college is or isn't if you have never gone to one.
It's like saying to martian geologist, have you been to mars? If not, how do you know what rocks are there at all?
No, but that person has parsed data from probes and knows what s/he is talking about.
It's like saying that while planning a moon mission for the first time. Have you gone to the far side of the moon?
No, but we will.
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The thing you're advocating is dogma. This person has lived through a lot of things and can offer a unique perspective based on his experiences and the data in front of him.
So, why should you not listen to him?
But an English degree is not higher education, it is a fiction we created for those who want to go to college but can't hack it in the real world.
A STEM or a law degree will make you a lot of money.