I finally decided to quit waiting and to write a post about this topic… With the continued increases in college tuition (above any other metric which they might be able to use as a cause…), the idea of a college education is slowly sliding from the grasp of the average American. In 1960 the average undergraduate tuition cost was about $5.00 per credit… Now, even considering going to a two year college (to help minimize costs), a four year degree will cost somewhere in the range of $70,000 (this is the sticker value, there are probably many ways to diminish parts of this via grants, et.al.).
There seem to be several trends in education in the last 40 years which are sometimes at cross purposes. In the post WWII world, it has become common sense that to get a ‘good’ job, you will need a college degree. The importance of a high school diploma has diminished, unless it is used as a means toward getting into a college. There seems to be an obvious trend (maybe better termed as an arms race) where college student aid barely keeps track of increasing college tuition. This particular trend is possibly the darkest in this little list…
The net result is that college educations (if only for the diploma) have become an obvious prerequisite toward getting into business that it is taken for granted. At the same time, this degree is starting to cross the level where it is a practical possibility (for many, but not most…yet).
For me, this calls to mind as to what an undergraduate degree really signifies, and what is the utility of paying enormous costs to walk in from of ivied halls of learning (usually wearing penny loafers and a sweater…). There are some potential answers out there, and they are quite obvious.
Everyone who gets a college degree is impelled at some point near the beginning of their time in school to have to pay for and endure classes which are made of lectures presented in huge halls with hundreds of other freshmen students. Why is this somehow more valuable than merely downloading the video podcast on iTunes of about the same thing?
This starts to look like the emperor’s new clothes at some point… I think that even now, there are actual opportunities for learners to get the real equivalent of taking these sorts of classes for free… If you consider this along with the notion of taking (paid for) classes online, what is the purpose in spending four or more years at an institution which exists only to fertilize the ivy (that is, if the majority of classes were to be taught online…).
This whole system seems to have become so top heavy that I wouldn’t be too surprised if it were to tip very quickly. I expect to see that most students take classes online and that there will undoubtedly be some students (within the next couple of years…) get degrees from college by taking only online classes.
Whether this is a net good, or not, I wonder how colleges can continue to charge such growingly exorbitant prices for something which is already available online (sometimes for free!). I guess that downloading MP3’s or even whole movies are but an appetizer in this next conflict of the future versus the status quo.
