[aksbhat]

Following are the counterpoints to their argument:

1. decreasing ROI on a college degree: They are confusing between supply and demand. While it is possible in future that a college degree will no longer provide an edge over High-School diploma, yet this might lead to even more intense competition for top schools. They cite Law schools as an example, however there isn't a uniform decrease in enrollment. In fact a bad job market means that you need to go to even better/reputed university than before. Also it does not means that alternate signaling mechanism is going to alleviate this problem.

The issue is the demand, assuming that in future the number of jobs available for college graduates decrease. This wont help alternative credential providing mechanisms. The reason people are hiring via git hub and stack overflow, is because there is an excess demand and low supply. If anything a bad job market will only lead to more competition for top universities.

2. MIT open course ware/ ITunes University etc. : While these websites make it easier for you to get access to the knowledge, yet they dont provide you other things which are needed, such as access to labs, examination etc.

3. Github / Stackoverflow :

Systems such as Github and Stackoverflow tend to have Pareto distribution i.e. top 20% have 80% contribution/reputation. Even if you are building a credentialing system, it needs to have a distribution similar to the grade curve used in colleges. Also at the same time, you must make sure that there is "some" protection of academic integrity.

[pjscott]

The uneven distribution of contributions doesn't matter so much on Github, since when an employer goes to scout out someone on Github, they're typically looking at the code itself, rather than the quantity of it.

[aksbhat]

Think of it this way, it is easier for anyone to write code for solving simple problem. however this does not makes you stand out from the crowd, also at the same time there is no guarantee that the same person wrote the code, i.e. it wasn't plagiarized.

A good metric for measuring ability of git hub user is to look for followers of his repos. Github is useful only when someone is making large amount of contribution or significant contribution, such as solving a hard problem.

A college can give someone A- in introductory algorithms and that gives you some confidence about his skills in algorithms. However github cannot provide this sort of credential, with same amount of confidence. Github can spot "exceptional" programmers, since large or significant contributions are more difficult to fabricate.