Elon Musk thinks college is ‘basically for fun’—but his former Tesla HR chief tells Gen Z even their liberal arts degrees are more valuable than ever

Gen Z’s relationship with higher education has never been more fraught. Soaring tuition costs and a brutal entry-level job market have left many young people questioning whether getting a degree was worth it at all.

But Valerie Capers Workman, who served as vice president of people at Tesla, has a sharply different message for the graduating class of 2026: don’t buy the noise. This comes even as her former boss, Elon Musk, is part of the chorus of powerful voices casting a doubt on college.

“Do not let anyone, not a tech founder, not a headline, not a podcast host, convince you that your education was a waste,” Workman said last week at the Defining the Future conference at California State University, San Bernardino. “It was not. It is more valuable today than it has ever been.”

The skills a degree develops—the ability to reason, question, and lead with humanity—are precisely what artificial intelligence cannot replicate, she argued. 

And counterintuitively, it’s liberal arts fields like history, English, and the arts that she says are becoming more relevant in the AI era, not less, despite long being dismissed as financially impractical.

“In the age of AI, these disciplines are not ‘soft skills,’” Workman, who currently serves as the chief human resources officer at........

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