Einstein finished his course in physics because without it, he could never have doen the work he did.

You can be the biggest genius on earth, but if you have never seen a piano, you won't know how to play it. Einstein went through a very tough curriculum (the description of it I read in the biography by Folsing made me woner how anyone finished!) but the work he did in the university, with all of its foibles, laid the groundwork for him to come up with the theories he did. He might have been able to do it locked in a room someplace, but there's a give-and-take with other people (which Einstein himself writes about pretty extensively, see his corresopndence) that makes good ideas possible. (As it turns out, Einstein himself was a terrible lecturer).

Einstein often credited his friends for their help in making his ideas work, at least insofar as they were able to provide sounding boards.

University degrees are a tool. Just like a screwdriver -- you use it to turn screws, not hammer nails or saw. A degree in and of itself doesn't mean much -- it is what you do with the time in university that matters. In the sciences, it's important to have a guide in the subject, even if you turn out to be smarter eventually. Science, like any other skill, is very dificult to self-teach, and teachers (good ones) are usually better than none at all. Think of the difference between a guy who is smart as heck and learns another language from books and tapes without conversing with others, and the guy who did that and spoke to native speakers every chance he got.

Some sciences, of course, lend themselves better to self-teaching than otehrs. Physics I think less so than higher math.

just a thought