Modern industrial societies have come to depend on professionals, people with technical expertise attested to by the acquisition of a certificate saying they have completed a special course of study -- a university degree. People who may have gained that expertise in other ways, but who have not acquired such a certificate, are often not allowed to practice that specialty because they lack the certificate. A well-known case is that of Vivien Thomas, a gifted surgeon who assisted with the first successful heart transplant, and whose story was told in the popular film "Something the Lord Made." There is certainly an advantage to having a degree, because many jobs are closed to those who have no degree. Practicing medicine, for example, without a degree or license is illegal.
The absence of a degree is not indicative of an absence of talent, skill or knowledge. Famous autodidacts include Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Peter Jennings, Estee Lauder, Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X, Beatrix Potter, George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy. Some people claim that the conformity and rigidity demanded by a university education are actually impediments to creative and critical thought, and regard formal education as an intellectual disadvantage, even as they concede a degree is required for many jobs.
Ivan Illich, a priest, philosopher, writer and university professor, suggested that education itself -- conceived of as a product -- captures society at large and the individual's intellect in a self-reinforcing monopoly of needs and services administered by a technocratic dominator-class. Those who share his critique call this system "credentialism," or the rule of credentials. Our age, says Illich "will be remembered as the age of schooling, when people had for one-third of their lives their learning needs prescribed and were trained how to accumulate further needs, and for the other two-thirds became clients of prestigious pushers who managed their habits."
In 1985, "The Atlantic" published an article by James Fallows, called "The Case Against Credentialism," where Fallows' research indicated that your parents' economic status was more likely to determine your success than a degree in the United States, and that among those who were creatively successful, a university degree was often unimportant, and oftentimes an impediment. The quantification of knowledge in institutions of higher learning, he suggested, fails to teach the most important ingredients in success that bypassed hereditary wealth -- leadership and risk-taking. That cannot be learned in preparation for standardized tests.
With all that said, it is impossible to generalize differences between degreed people and autodidacts. There are many degreed people who are creative, strong leaders and risk takers; there are many autodidacts who are misled, conformist and as captive to popular culture as the university graduate might be to her education.