[zanny]

The article you link touches on it, but before you even consider where students go to school you must ask why they do. And that is a very vacuous answer most of the time. I got my CS degree only because my peers said it would be significantly easier to be consistently employed with a BS even when it cost me 20k to get.

In reality, young adults don't go to college to learn. They did that for ~15 years (even worse, they did for 15 years by compulsion without much say in the matter) and the vast majority want to do something else. Most of them are there for credentials, not knowledge, and that is the problem.

The most important problem here is the necessity to disconnect education from schooling. The intent of the latter is to cause the former, but the former is not dependent on being confined to the latter. You can apprentice, you can self-teach, you can dive in as a high risk newbie in an industry. None of those involve going to prohibitively expensive summer camps turned annual to get lectured at.

The Internet enables a lot here - where previously it was very hard to find like minded individuals interested in participatory group learning about a subject, now it is stupidly easy, a search away. Learning resources are also rampant online in what used to be confined to a tome from the local library or a prohibitively expensive book purchase.

So the third viewpoint is that the problem has nothing to do with how the government behaves here because it is symptomatic of a baby-boomer irrational quest to get pieces of paper saying "bachelors" on it for everyone currently under the age of 30. The solution is to get a significant chunk of the people currently attending college and accruing these insane debts into more productive and better directed paths to careers in the things that interest them without the cultural baggage touting a phd in some field writing on a chalkboard as the golden goose of learning.

The real, true, bottom of the barrel reason I think this entire debacle even exists or came about in the first place, and I think it is at the root of most societal shifts for 30 years, is that the ultra-concentration of capital and wealth into so few people has dramatically slowed down the productivity engine of the first world. There is little motivation when you already pull the strings of international business to invest in risky youth labor, and when you control a huge chunk of the economy your lack of risk taking on new talent means huge droves of the population are never given a chance to succeed. It is safer and (here is the key) more profitable to play games with rigged fiat money and banks or stocks of fortune 500ers than to actually create goods and services by growing productivity and creating value.

[jacques_chester]

Universities are older than the printing press, older than telegraphs, older than fast & cheap mass transport, older than radio and television.

To be quite honest I don't see the internet usurping them either.

[greghinch]

Are you being facetious? All of those things have been dramatically changed by the internet. Or are you saying because they are older, universities are impervious to change?

[saraid216]

He's saying that universities have not been significantly changed by the numerous communication technologies that came after them, and implying that the Internet does not have a property distinct from those previous technologies.

[jacques_chester]

Right. And I thought I said it pretty clearly:

> To be quite honest I don't see the internet usurping them either.

I mean, OK. The internet is a big damn deal. But it's not a quantum leap as the printing press, steam or telegraphs were. It has antecedents in all those three technological revolutions.

The printing press was the first time knowledge could be cheaply conveyed to masses of people without needing someone to manually sit there with the learner and communicate with voice. It totally upended the concept of how individuals could receive their education. It didn't replace the university.

Steam was the first time that production and transportation could happen faster than muscle power or wind could move objects. It didn't cause a meaningful change to the university model.

Telegraphs did to thought and knowledge what steam had wrought in the physical world. One could be anywhere on earth and communicate to anywhere else on Earth within the hour. Minutes in some cases. You could use it to form communities of like-minded learners, and people did exactly that. It didn't unseat the universities.

For some reason, the concept of a vertically-integrated, physically co-located community of scholars and students seems really, really hard to shift. Technologies come along and modify this or that part of it, but students plucked from Bologna in 1088, from Oxford in 1167, Harvard 1636, Sydney 1850 and so on and so forth would find that the modern experience is broadly the same beneath all the pizazz.

Students relocate to be near a community of scholars. They pay for access. The scholars read aloud. The students take notes. The scholars test the students and write letters of introduction that verify that the student knows the subject.

What has changed throughout that long string of technological revolutions -- technological revolutions that destroyed the universality of the Catholic Church in Europe, revolutions that destroyed feudalism and absolute monarchy, revolutions that totally upended the whole model of the entire world -- is almost nothing. Hardly any damn thing.

Given that the internet is new only in degree and not in kind, forgive me for being skeptical that it will do away with such resilient institutions.