LivininCali you are sooo spot on.
HS grads are rapidly waking up to the misrepresentations of the entrenched interests, AKA the education industrial complex, lenders, guidance counselors, tenured professors, etc. They know that many of the titans of high tech did not have time for college. They know of too many college grads working as barristas and waiters living in their parents’ basements and contemplating their $100,000 debt. And when they throw in lost income from four years (or five, or six) when they could have been learning a trade or building a business, they are rapidly changing their minds.
The employers too are learning that the college degree is devalued and proves little in terms of their productivity. Too many high school grads go reflexivly to college that do not have the aptitude, interest, or finances for it. They go for the social life, or their parents’prestige.
On-line education promises to cheaply and effficiently teach specific courses and skills, and then award certificates after testing and proof of mastery of that particular subject. Job seekers in the future will have to prove certain competencies in line with the employer’s needs in order to be hired. No more using a mere college degree as a “signaling system” to hire a dozen college grads and hope that a few turn into long-term employees.
Many of today’s colleges and universities will be gone in ten years, and the survivors will be vastly restructured. Learning will be vastly cheaper and more accessible to the poor (esp. in the third world), and the anachronism of tenure will be on the way out. It’s all good.
