No you don't need a college degree to fly airplanes or even be a good pilot. What a college degree does offer is an indication that someone is motivated and interested. Beyond that, college is about two things: knowledge and how to learn/retain that knowledge. Study skills are as important as gaining the knowledge itself. Those same skill sets you learn in college are applicable to flying. Beyond those study skills are critical thinking skills that are beneficial to any pilot. Yes, perhaps some people have them naturally, but college allows others an opportunity to develop their own critical thinking skills. Furthermore, by the time someone graduates from college, they're older, generally more mature, and less reckless (obviously this doesn't work for everyone, but I think most people would agree it's true for many graduates). While none of these are reasons someone MUST have an aviation degree to fly an airplane, they are good things that give pilots more tools to be better pilots.