[timwiseman]

I think part of the point of the article in the Chronicle is that the top schools will be fine and do not need cut back. While this only applies to the very top schools, they will still have people willing to pay the tuition and endowments large enough to cover any student they want to admit that cannot cover the tuition themselves.

It is the small and mid grade schools that may need to carefully look at their models.

Personally, I think a bigger question is what will it do to families trying to help their children climb into a higher income bracket if there is a major shake up in the higher education market?

[adamc]

I think the real solution is to stop overvaluing university degrees. Most of the folks coming out of universities don't have any particularly valuable job skills. (I'm thinking of majors in business, or liberal-arts fields, or for that matter most people with a BA/BS in the sciences.)

Will that happen? Not unless getting university grads gets hard.

[potatolicious]

There needs to be a real separation between vocational schools and comprehensive universities. I get the feeling that as a society we have a thing against vocational training - even though some of the most celebrated jobs really belong there instead of at a traditional college (e.g. engineering, accounting, etc).

The problem here is that people are going to university expecting this to lead nicely into a job - it does not, particularly for the liberal arts where the path is even more vague. People expect the fact that they have a degree to mean something to employers, when it in fact does not.

This whole thing would be a lot simpler if we didn't have such a grudge against vocational schools - who by and large do not seem to have trouble placing their graduates into jobs.

[netsp]

I don't think we do really. Just against the name and against the professions that use vocational schools intensively.

The medicine path is very similar to the electrician path. Medical school is vocational school. We have nothing against those.

[timwiseman]

I think you have a very good point. Personally, I got a traditional degree and am working on my Master's, but there are people in my family that learned things like welding instead and they are doing quite well for themselves. Similarly, a fully certified mechanic is in an excellent position. Some people need traditional degrees, but we as a society do need to value significant trades more highly.

[joe_the_user]

Actually, I think that just the opposite should happen. The goal of higher should not be crude "job skills". The value of higher education includes a wide view of the world and broad participation in intellectual life.

This goal should be furthered by private foundations and government. More things should be "priceless".