Do you need a college level education to be a successful writer? No, but it certainly helps, whatever the degree is in. Take a look at the fifty writers on the NYT bestseller list in any given week. Count the number of college degrees they hold. It's no coincidence that the great majority of them have a college degree.
But a college degree is as much about kind of person you are as it is about what you actually learn in college, at least with a degree in the liberal arts. It shows you have what it takes to work, to stick to something for four years, to do whatever it takes to make the grade.
College does expose a writer to people he's unlikely to meet anywhere else, it surrounds the writer with others who want the same thing, it forces him to work.
Some came successfully give themselves the equivalent of a college education without ever going to college, but most will not. It takes a good deal more discipline, a good deal more work, to educate yourself properly when no one is making you, when there is no chance of someone flunking you out. College is a systematic method of education, and this, too, is something the self-educated most often ignore.
It's true enough that not everyone who goes to college comes out with a real education, but that is, at best, a straw man argument. The worth of a college education isn't about those who fail, who sleep their way through, who go to college only to party, it's about those who take advantage of all college has to offer, and who do come out knowing one hell of a lot more than they did going in.
And if you think many who go to college come out uneducated, take a look at those who don't go to college.
Can you be a successful writer without a college education? There are exceptions to everything, and some few can. Most can't.
The trouble with exceptions is that they are exceptions, and counting yourself as an exception before you prove you are one is always a dangerous policy.
