Silicon Valley leaders are publicly rethinking the return on a traditional college path as AI alters startup economics and labor demand. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he envies Gen‑Z college dropouts for their freedom to build companies, signaling growing skepticism in tech circles about the necessity of a degree for entrepreneurship. Education entrepreneur Sal Khan warned that AI will displace workers at an unexpected scale and urged companies to fund large‑scale retraining. The juxtaposition of Altman’s endorsement of nontraditional routes and Khan’s call for corporate responsibility pressures universities to retool curricula, scale lifelong‑learning and create aggressive reskilling partnerships with industry.