On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown.

On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers.

Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.*

What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses.

* To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.

The main reason is the nature of the content. Anybody can work their way through a management psychology or communication class, but you'd have to be very far out on the bell curve to teach yourself optimization models and statistical data mining based on this material alone. You could be familiar with how to do it based on lecture notes, which is my goal, but without help not one of your 18-year-olds could correctly solve these problems in the real world. They could educate to a degree, but their ability would be nowhere near traditional students. The pedigree's value will be preserved.

Most of the classes have missing or incomplete material since OpenCourseware is clearly an afterthought. Someone would really have to go through the course reading list to be able to say they took the class.

Perhaps the issue with living in your parents' home is that you aren't forced to opt into the campus community because you can still hang out with your old friends from high school.

"I think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras."

He is arguing to replace colleges with vocational schools.

An undergraduate degree is not job training. It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture.

The fact that colleges have been marketing themselves as providing job training, using economic arguments like "See how much money you'll make with one of our degrees", is the real problem.

He made the point that the social aspect of college is primarily a function of economic background...people who are middle class or above go to college to meet people and be exposed to new ideas, while lower income people have to work and make great sacrifices just to get a degree and the opportunities that come with it.

It would be nice if the two were separated so that more people could afford to get the piece of paper without paying so much money for the social experience.

My friend once had this argument with me, saying that college isn't intended to train people for the job. Regardless of its intention, that is what it has become...the real question is, what are we going to do now that it has transformed this way?

But that is a great point: a lot of organizations, particularly big organizations, use a college degree as a "credential" for their first level of sorting through job applicants.

Yes indeed, college has become a clumsy sort of job training. That's how it is, and we have to deal with that.

However, colleges are not all the same. Small liberal-arts colleges are keeping the "community of scholars and teachers" tradition alive. Community colleges have a peculiar split in focus: between vocational training and college prep. Big state colleges offer undergrads training mostly in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, in order to fund real research.

I worked nearly full-time while in college (also full-time) for 2.5 years before dropping out, much of that time spent at a small local ISP in Georgia. I came in as tech support out of high school, and a year and a half later ended up its chief system administrator and basically operating the facilities side of the place. After that ended, I dropped out. Noone at any job I have held since or in between (and I've held quite a few) has - after a look at my resume - thought to inquire about my degree, whether I had gone to college, whether I had graduated, or anything like that. The focus was all on the experience. And since that point I have not been considered an "entry-level" applicant at any subsequent job, so there's no interest whatsoever in using entry-level criteria to differentiate me.

The only problem is that first hurdle, and it's not impossible to overcome. It may be challenging, but it sure as hell is cheaper and easier to overcome that challenge than to go to college to achieve the same end -- assuming, of course, that that's your only purpose in going to college.

Sending out résumés is pretty weak, even if you have a degree or two.

That's a nice way of saying it, not wrong but certainly rosy colored.

A more cynical person might say the degree is a low quality signal you're an adult. The community is about social stratification. And the classes are indeed just a formality.

Given the choice between one year of "visit the professor at home" or four years of college, I'll take the latter. And gladly pay more for it.

Did the people dreaming up these end of college ideas actually attend college? They're not talking about college, they're talking about college reductio ad absurdum.

Could I just read some books on assembly language, data structures and operating systems? Sure. But I don't trust myself to crack open the books and do assignments every night unless my money and grades are on the line.

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... are worth $100k+ in total??

Equivalent networking and social opportunities exist in plenty other areas of life that don't cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Depending on your industry and (sometimes) on your college, you're more likely to get in touch with those more influential and powerful than you (for science it might be renowned researchers, for law high-up law offices, etc). Since your friends went through the same college experience, the same goes for them. Therefore you're all in a good position to help each other.

I personally want to go into biology-related research. College is pretty much vital for this since I have access to professors who can go beyond what's in the textbook as well as have numerous opportunities to work in actual labs.

Now, if I were to start a software startup I admit that college is not necessarily the best option. Teaching yourself is easier and more likely to give you a good-enough foundation and if you're in the right place it'll be easier to hang out with the right crowd. However, for people who otherwise live in places far-removed from tech hotspots, college can give them a chance to move somewhere with a better chance of being noticed.

Also, besides startup-related events, what other non-college ways are there to have access to lots of networking opportunities?

If going to college was truly not worth it, then you'd see a lot more people not doing it. The fact that going to college is a such a common course of action says that people actually find value in it (or there's a giant inefficiency in the market -- which is the argument of this article, but I think it's worth considering the alternative as well).

And I don't think the lottery analogy works. Regardless of what you (legally) do, you can't influence the chance that a single lottery ticket of yours wins. But you can improve the chance that certain low-probability events happen to you (like founding a successful startup) by your actions. And I think going to a good college can be one of those actions for many people.

The author may have a point about universities being overpriced, but he missed a pretty key point, so his analysis is suspect.

I wonder if this is how society moves, or fails to move? Nearly everyone, at the individual level agrees with a sentiment, but we're all too entrenched in the current system to find a way out.

Anyway, If I'm correct about how solid the argument against the expensive four year degree is, I hope we're in for some interesting changes.

"After grant aid and tax benefits, full-time students at public four-year colleges are paying an average $2,700 a year in net tuition and fees."

So, if they commute, like I did, it's just over $10,000. I hit an inflation calculator and that's almost exactly what mom and dad spent for me, 1977 - 82. So in fact, there's been no change in 30 years. Maybe we should complain that the price hasn't fallen, like it has for computer hardware; shouldn't technical advances have made it cheaper? ...But wait, it isn't a commodity....

So to pay his imaginary $100,000/annum Purdue prof, our writer will need to get not the cozy group of 3 or 4 others -- but 37 or 38 others. So much for his little utopia, the fruit of careless headline scanning.

If your parents are willing and able to spring for the country club, great, you'll make lots of contacts; that's the point, and of course it costs a pile; though frankly I'm surprised how cheap it is, given how far colleges do compete on a country club basis with indoor rock-climbing, etc. ... And it may be worth it, if money is what you're interested in. Lifelong friends can be made on the artificial rock-cliffs of University X; they might come in handy. (I wonder how much of the later-in-life dollar value of a college education as it is usually measured is like the possible dollar value of a country club. )

All these headlines about "average tuition" are a total fail statistically ... What they mean is the average of absolute tuition maxima across universities and colleges -- something that only the royal families of Persian Gulf principalities pay. The stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions.

Let me say that again: the stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Arguments based on them belong to the realm of fantasy and demagogical politics, not reality and truth.

I remember once hearing the provost of X -- a super-elite private univ., now president of another -- say that if it were up to her, she would make X's "tuition" infinite so she could collect "what they could pay" from the Saudi princes et al., and use it to fund other students. But, she said, the alumni always oppose this sort of thing; they didn't what X making the headlines as the most expensive school.

One can't help sympathizing with the alumni, but the massive "tuition increases" "far outpacing inflation" etc etc. is entirely due to the massive increase in trustees and others taking the point of view of the provost. Or put otherwise, the "massive increases" are in the degree to which stated tuition is an accounting fiction. This may be somehow stupid or corrupt or whatever, but it is a fact. If reality is under discussion a completely different set of data is necessary.

(I should add, by the way, that our writer might be able to get away with a cheaper prof. The average salary figures he is quoting include the salaries of medical and law professors at Purdue, which completely distort assume the salary facts. (And medical schools in particular are huge, remember). Thoughtless use of these sort of statistics stuns the mind. In humanities and suchlike faculties, at researchy places, people start around US 40 - 50,000 these days and end up at like 70 - 80,000. It is of course possible to be paid much more if the market has repriced you.)

without competing prices it is impossible to tell what is and is not an efficient distribution of resources.