> I'm an optimist. The problem will fix itself thanks to technology. Education in the future is going to be nearly free. I think it is going to happen a lot sooner than people realize. Runaway education inflation will make even the "expensive" solutions look dirt cheap.
You're presupposing that tuition has anything to do with the cost of providing education, and that tuition will go down if the costs go down. It doesn't. Skyrocketing tuition is the product of schools being non-fungible prestige goods. It's how the price of Prada handbags doesn't have anything to do with their manufacturing cost.
College in the US isn't about education. It's about signaling. And the price of desirable signals, like Stanford or U Michigan, isn't going to go down based on competition from cheaper online educational institutions.
College in the US is about education and signaling. Capable people want to learn more after high school, so most of them go to college. It makes sense that the college one attends has become a signal since its so closely coupled with what capable people want to do anyway. In the future, this will not be the case. So many capable people will eschew a traditional college education that alternative signaling methods will arise. For instance, Y Combinator is a more powerful signal than Stanford is. (Stanford graduates don't automatically receive $150k in convertible debt for their endeavors once they graduate.)
> In the future, this will not be the case. So many capable people will eschew a traditional college education that alternative signaling methods will arise.
As long as 99% of employers depend on the traditional signaling methods, very few capable people will eschew a traditional college education. Only in certain segments of software engineering does the idea even have any traction.
> For instance, Y Combinator is a more powerful signal than Stanford is. (Stanford graduates don't automatically receive $150k in convertible debt for their endeavors once they graduate.)
Not really, outside a very specific niche of people doing a very specific type of startup work. If you want to build a web app, yeah, Y Combinator is a valuable signal. If you want to work for Lockheed-Martin or Goldman Sachs, not so much. As for $150k in convertible debt... you can earn that much in bonuses working on Wall Street for a couple of years, with far less risk and far more predictability.
You're presupposing that tuition has anything to do with the cost of providing education, and that tuition will go down if the costs go down. It doesn't. Skyrocketing tuition is the product of schools being non-fungible prestige goods. It's how the price of Prada handbags doesn't have anything to do with their manufacturing cost.
College in the US isn't about education. It's about signaling. And the price of desirable signals, like Stanford or U Michigan, isn't going to go down based on competition from cheaper online educational institutions.