[Denzel]

MOOCs are merely a stepping stone along a much broader movement. They were based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how degree-granting institutions work. For most people, knowledge gained during the pursuit of a college degree is secondary to the projected $17,500 increase in salary. [1] MOOCs have no such carrot motivating people to complete them.

Online courses are just that: courses + the internet. Anyone can load up on MIT OCW, Coursera, and Udacity lectures that have a value of ~$0 on a resume. What does a 10x improvement upon education look like? What happens when we stop watching talking heads in a video and start taking part in individualized tracks that can prove our knowledge of a subject to a certain degree of certainty, as it evolves over time, for any subject. The issue has never been learning, it's been proving that you know what you've learned.

As it stands now, college degrees serve as a signal for what someone knows. No matter how outdated that notion is.

[1]: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-...

[iopq]

No, you prove what you know at a technical interview. I think a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge. There are really useless people with Masters degrees in CS.

[Denzel]

You and I may believe that a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge, but industry at large (both inside and outside of technology) does not. Furthermore, proving a lifetime of learning and knowledge in the span of at most 8 hours is dubious at best and impossible at worst.

[dougabug]

College dropouts (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuckerberg, etc) can make it to the top in the tech world. OTOH, top tech companies like Google and Facebook routinely screen out candidates with Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees from top schools because they don't pass the technical interviews. This process itself is surely imperfect, but the ability to solve hard problems on the spot is generally more valued than a vegetable with a (once) sacred piece of paper.

[jobposter1234]

All 4 of the dropouts you mentioned started their own companies.

I think the more mature the company (the more of a typical corporation it is), the less likely they are to consider someone w/o a college degree.

[randomdata]

Interestingly, Google has seemed to go in the opposite direction. From being staunchly vocal about hiring only graduates from top universities when they were still comparatively small, to coming out and saying that educational histories not correlating in any meaningful way with employee performance as they've grown.