So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your 
  money and energy behind your convictions?

Third, the extent to which the beneficiaries of usurious student loans now find themselves on the back foot is amusing. "First they laugh at you, then they fight you..."

Wadhwa has realized that he can't simply shame the critics of higher ed into silence (as he's attempted for the last few years [1]), so now he's saying:

  "We can now make education affordable and pervasive."

Most of all, it means obsolescing the higher ed business model of charging $60,000 per year [3].

In other words, while it's refreshing to hear people in higher ed finally start to acknowledge that the benefits they provide need to be greater than their costs, they don't understand that the solution involves the end of college as we know it.

How could it be otherwise when there is now a six-order-of-magnitude gap between the cost of watching a Khan Academy video ($0) and the cost of dozing through the same content in a Harvard lecture hall ($250,000)?

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/founders-fund-33-million-le...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/25/students-stay-in-school/

[2] http://biocurious.org

[3] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost...

You also completely skip one of the main arguments in favor of a college education. Does Khan Academy also provide an atmosphere where students can study, party, hook up, make mistakes, and otherwise learn how to become members of society? I don't think there's a YouTube channel with that feature.

Granted, kids shouldn't pay $40k a year to party, but you're declaring victory over lecture halls with a collection of online classes that started a week ago. We're a long way off from fixing education--a couple of YouTube videos and a single co-working space on the West Coast are one in many steps we need to take.

You know what provides that atmosphere? New York. Or SF. Or Boston, Seattle, Austin--pretty much any city. I did not miss out on those opportunities from dropping out. The difference was that I was in the real world that colleges theoretically prepare you for: no RAs, no meal plans, fewer second chances, etc. I don't know why a fake version of the real world is a better preparation for the real world that the real real world.

There was one other difference: not going to school is far, far cheaper. And you have enough free time to defray even that minimal cost by working.

I have to vigorously disagree with the assertion that the real world offers fewer second chances. In fact, it's the other way around, the real world (i.e. marketplace) offers as many chances as you can create.

It's the rigidity of academia that closes off chances for a lot of people who don't fit the predefined molds (categorization by major, standardized pedagogical technique (the lecture), and on and on). Additionally, academia is often a zero sum game (because of grading on a curve).

Right! I don't know why doctors have to practice on cadavers. Stick a scalpel in their hand and let them operate!

You first.

That's also a completely different argument from the one I was addressing. It sounds like your version is that 18 to 22-year-olds are too dangerous to be unleashed on society (the person getting the "operation" in your analogy), so we need to send them to school to keep them out of trouble.

But I don't understand why school is a better alternative than the job market.

That's the most important lesson you don't learn in college: how to do something completely novel. And it's the most important lesson one can ever learn.

Ignoring that many people don't live near large cities like these, how should a 17-year old support themselves? What would they do instead of going to school? Waiting tables isn't scalable--there aren't enough restaurants.

(Although I don't think those particular objections are valid, I'm still not in favor of the "uncollege" concept.)

  How does 20 Under 20 change education in any way? 

  also provide an atmosphere where students can study, 
  party, hook up, make mistakes, and otherwise learn how to 
  become members of society...

  kids shouldn't pay $40k a year to party

We need to decouple the stated reason (it will get you a job) from the actual reason (it is fun). Because it is not so much fun when it doesn't get you a job and the party is over.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/your-money/a-recession-for...

The problem with scaling is that is assumes most people start at the same base line, need the same resources, and progress at the same speed. We've had an industrial model of education in this country for decades and it's not really working for us. I've seen countless people try to "solve" the education problem by modeling business practices and generally speaking it never works out.

Many of the Thiel Fellows have already undertaken 3rd level studies but the majority have not, and the Thiel Fellowship is not meant to be a condensed college replacement. It's a platform from which the Fellows can launch their ideas.

Education is a very broad term. We shouldn't limit it to what happens on a college campus, but I think that we should bear in mind that for the majority of people a college setting works best for their development, both social and intellectual.

But LinkedIn/github/etc. are starting to provide better networks. As an employer, I give more credence to a kid with a good github account than I do to even a CS major from Harvard.

As for credentialing, that is the next big step. It is already the case that if you see a CV with Google or Facebook on it, it doesn't matter whether that person has a college degree. You know they've been vetted by an institution of comparable prestige to Harvard.

Solving the vetting and credentialing problem is going to be important, but it's not insuperable by any means. For example, ai-class.org, db-class.org, and ml-class.org are providing certificates of accomplishment. Any kid who nails Andrew Ng's CS229 class is definitely someone to consider over a liberal arts major, or even most CS undergrads.

Instead of a school what we really need is a company that does some of what a school does (guided education/training/ credentialing), some of what a recruiter does (identify and matching talent), and some of what an HR department does (onboarding company specific training).

This is just based on my experience (not a pleasant one) in identifying and recruiting talent.

ootachi's comment is spot on. big companies like google, microsoft, and goldman sachs get way too many applications to not care about degrees.

yeah, if you filter by college degrees, you're going to miss out on some great candidates, but there are a lot of great candidates out there. you don't need all of them to find a great hire. its simply not practical to do in depth examinations of every candidate. a good github account? big companies get so many resumes that they don't even finish reading many of the resumes, so forget about looking at code on github.

maybe in the future, certain online universities may get enough general recognition that merely the presence of that university on a resume will pick up the interest of HR people, but currently, that's nowhere close to true. and until that happens, most kids will prefer harvard to taking classes online.

plus, its not like its mutually exclusive. a kid from harvard can have a good github account.

on the question of networks:

linkedin is a joke. i'm way more likely to get a job or start a business with someone i knew in college than someone off of linkedin.

github is a lot better, but its a pretty restricted space. you can get interviews for lots of kinds of jobs by going to harvard. programming is probably all you can get with a good github account (and probably not at really big companies). maybe if you're 18 and you know that all you want to is programming, maybe you should take a bunch of classes online, but the majority of 18 year olds probably want more flexibility.

They might be better off not accepting resumes and just recruiting people with outstanding github accounts.

So, they already do that kind of thing :)

Outside of that top 10, the value is only in certain subjects (e.g. engineering, accounting, nursing).

I think what you are saying is a "Khan Academy" concept as opposed to the actual Kahn Academy...

As of the latest info on the Khan academy site (2/23/11) Kahn had done all the videos:

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#videos

You're not suggesting that Sal Kahn is in any way shape or form a replacement for learning from multiple qualified professors, instructors etc in their respective fields (even in they are only phd candidates for example) are you?

Someone with no real world experience in many of the things he is teaching is "as good" as someone who has actually done something?

Sal says

"What topics do you plan to cover?

"My goal is to cover everything."

If you look at some of the latest videos, you'll see Sal recording videos side-by-side with Vi Hart and professors from Stanford (focused on medicine in this latter case) This is just the beginning.

I've heard Sal say many times, "In no way do I want to be the only person making videos. I just want to make videos until I die."

That said, I'm not convinced that 20 under 20 is a very good model for the long run. Hopefully Thiel will iterate.

Oh come on, surely you know pre-calculus better than that.

But Wadhwa's advice is just ludicrous. If it's 2005, and you claim that housing is a bubble, the proper response isn't "Go put your money where your mouth is: start manufacturing mobile homes, or tents, or something." It's a non-sequitur: people are overpaying for education because they treat it as an asset: if you double the sticker price, buyers react by assuming that they're buying twice as much of it.

The right responses to a bubble: short it, or at least structure your life so you're not dependent on it. In real estate, that means renting rather than buying; in higher ed, that means dropping out and investing your efforts into tasks that better measure your underlying talents, and don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.

It's just a weird defense of the status quo: nowhere does Wadhwa ask questions like: have we overestimated how many people should go to college? Are we even willing to tell people that they'd be happier (and society would be better off) if they became electricians or plumbers? It seems like Thiel's framework is flexible enough to imagine a country where 50% of the population earns a masters, or where only 5% pursue a BA. Whereas Wadhwa's framework is robust enough to imagine a swing of half a standard deviation away from whatever the status quo is.

Full disclosure: it's a little early to tell, but I'm fairly successful; I dropped out of college my freshman year.

Due to good luck with the real estate bubble and getting paid to program instead of paying to learn it I posit that the personal cost of my degree would be around $400,000.

  $200,000 in lost wages
  $150,000 in lost in tax free capital gains
  $40,000 - $50,000 for the degree

If you're good at stuff, opportunities exist. If you're not, but you're motivated, you can learn more, faster, cheaper, outside of school.

My first technical job was doing dial-up tech support I found that job over IRC. Who knew typing +++ATH0 into mIRC could get you a job?

From there I worked tech support for the local cable company, and then wrote them some scheduling software in my spare time. After that they had me program instead of answer the phone.

I subscribe to the garbage man theory of value, do the jobs no one else wants to do but are essential to society. Avoid any job that seems glamouros it usually pays like crap.

As a (former?) game developer, I can say this is spot-on.

But, for everyone else who lack the will power, discipline, attention span for self-education, college is a great way to structure higher education. College is more than just a piece of paper, it's an opportunity to explore new subject matters and grow both intellectually and socially.

College isn't for everyone. Most private colleges are too expensive to be affordable to 90% of the attendees. But, nearly every state offers a high quality public university at 1/10th the price, so if cost is the main reason why college is taking such criticism in this forum, then I'd agree in merit, but I'd encourage more students to consider public college options instead of skipping college all together.

But, for everyone else who lack the will power, discipline, attention span for self-education, college is a great way to structure higher education.

This is a great and accurate comment; it reminds me of what I wrote about in "Policies have consequences: Teacher edition" (http://jseliger.com/2011/03/06/policies-have-consequences-te...), in response to another HN thread.

The gap between the rhetoric I see on HN regarding education and what I see in classrooms is so vast as to be amazing. Many if not most people simply won't do something educational or vaguely educational unless there's some kind of external structure in place to make them do it—for more on this phenomenon, see Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. The HN commenters who are wildly self-motivated and, as you say, auto-didactic, are the exception.

Which is great, by the way, and, as many commenters point out, the Internet is a great way for to achieve educational and intellectual goals. What the commenters miss is one thing: it's great for the highly motivated and interested. For everyone else, it doesn't hurt, but it's also not a substitute.

People aren't born with original sin. They don't always suck. It's not innate. Their educators fail them, fail to teach them how to learn, fail to teach them that learning doesn't have to hurt, but instead convince them that learning does hurt through years of suffering, boredom, and not learning much.

So, you're right that most people at age 18 are not very good candidates for a life path that requires initiative, motivation, self-learning, etc... But that doesn't mean the current system is the right thing for those people. It not only does a pretty terrible job of helping them at a high price (college doesn't teach them how to learn, how to love learning, how to take initiative), it created a significant part of their problem due to systematic failures in approach to education.

Learning is inherently awesome, but schools (and parents and culture) convince people otherwise.

From Wadhwa's bio:

Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learning, and faculty member and advisor at Singularity University.

Vivek declare your income from Berkley, the CERC, Duke, Harvard, Emory and Singularity and we'll be happy to explore how much your lifestyle could be impacted by Thiel's point of view.

However, pointing out potential bias is still appropriate.

I am just another internet commenter, so take what I say with a grain of salt. All I'm doing is repeating what I've read and heard.

But if I had a nickel for every time somebody suggested that you could start with the end goal in mind, then somehow invent your way there, I'd have several dollars.

The more general your investment strategy, the more likely you will find something that works. So at the most general, say some kind of web app or service, you still have only a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 chance of hitting anything. And that's with all the other variables stacked your way.

This isn't a magic trick. Just because Thiel has done so well in many areas doesn't mean you can point him at a random problem and expect something useful. If you're a guy who wants to fund new startups in solar-powered mobile education, good luck! You're going to need it. You've already constrained yourself to unimaginably high odds without even getting started.

I used to see this same kind of reasoning applied to landing on the moon. For years, whenever there was a tough problem, some yahoo would come out of the woodwork and say something like "If we could put a man on the moon, surely we can do X" And you could put whatever you wanted into X.

As it turns out, there are a lot of Xes which we cannot solve, no matter how many men walked on the moon. And looking back, even putting them on the moon was a lot tougher than we thought. We managed to work out the tech and lost the will to continue the mission. Not all impossible obstacles are technology-related.</rant>

I'm sure the author meant well, and his call for folks to help out education is a good one. We need all the help we can get. That kind of rhetoric is just a pet peeve of mine.

Once a child is taught to read and write, basic arithmetic, and critical thinking, they should have the tools necessary to teach themselves most subjects. It's easy to fix education, it's difficult to fix schooling.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/gatto2.1.1.html

"Self-evaluation – the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet – is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth."

If you turn the tables, and have Peter Thiel provide a solid policy prescription and then have Wadhwa poke holes, I think they would easily come on top in the debate.

I've taken a lot of classes where I could watch a video of the professor lecture 100 times and be completely lost without the ability to interrupt and ask "excuse me, but how did you go from the base case to the inductive case" or "could you explain that more".

If you take STEM classes where the class size is under 40, i.e. upper division classes, you are both able to do this, and you almost NEED to do it. I really don't see people learning operating system design, complex analysis, abstract analysis, circuit design, and organic chemistry, from Khan Academy ...

I'll say this again: the problem with modern education lies with bureaucracy and operational inefficiency. http://www.uwo.ca/ is a wonderful example. I feel like I should write a more detailed post about this.

I actually took the initiative to write several angry letters to the administration, and eventually got a meeting with the Registrar's office. Among other things, I told them about http://www.schedulizer.com which is pretty much everywhere in the USA already. Their response: "Well, if it doesn't cost us anything, we don't see any problems, and we don't need to do anything, we can potentially allow it to be implemented it in 3-4 years."

Therein lies part of the problem. We treat 19-22 year olds as children.

These are what make education important and essential....

However, if you know what you want, then you obviously don't need University to make you successful.

How much third-party subsidy should any one person get to enjoy those advantages? What criteria should be applied to deciding which persons get to enjoy subsidies for that advantage from funds paid by taxpayers, including poor taxpayers with no hope of attending college?

Where is the proof of return on investment? (That is the point under discussion in the submitted article.) I am happy to spend my own money on education--I still do--and I am happy to spend family money on my children's education while my children are minors in my care. But why should some person poorer than I am pay for my children's education in their adult life if what my children are doing is exploring options to make up their mind what to do with their life? That's the kind of issue I was responding to in my response to your comment above. We all have teen years while still in high school "try out your hand at different fields, and figure out which ones you are good at, and where you can be successful in the future," if a high school is properly structured.

After edit: a friend on Facebook, a high-tech engineer, suggested this link today as a rationale for examining ALL the ways that colleges spend money now.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/14/stop-funding-college-s...

Some people love music and so they start a band. If they are good at what they do, they might find financial success from their efforts. While the potential is there, you would be laughed at for calling a band an investment in your future.

And yet, college is no different. It is a place for people to exercise their passions and collaborate with others who share in the same. Just like the band, if you are good at what you do, you might find financial success by being in college. Or you might not. It doesn't matter – you are not there for that reason anyway.

College is an awesome place. People should go. But they should be going for the right reasons, not some made up idea that you can buy your way into success. You cannot and will not.

BUT, it's simply not cost-effective. So many of the benefits of college can be gotten outside of it without the ridiculous cost and without dealing with people who don't want to learn.

Now, what's really lacking is an integration of all these different opportunities (free online learning like Khan, the potential for social learning via FB, Meetup or other sites, the potential for direct access to top minds in the field (try emailing really cool academic authors with an intelligent observation or fact and you'll get a response!).

We have to remember Thiel lives with two feet in the future he's already envisioning college alternatives fully fleshed out, unfortunately, I think his futurism is so second nature he has a hard time articulating the potential. As a brilliant guy he may just forget it's not obvious to everyone.

Of course these are statistics, thus broad generalizations, but there is a strong correlation between education level and (monetary) success. Certainly there are exceptional individuals out there who will be able to achieve great success without the aid of a college education, the computer industry is full of examples, but for the average person, that just isn't the case.

I live and work on the campus of one of the top research universities in the U.S. (#19 in the list above), I have yet to meet a student who's here for the party. Sure, they have fun now-and-then, but they're here for the education. The vast majority of the undergrads would have a difficult time making it past a phone screen with companies like Google, Microsoft, my startup, etc. On the other hand, those who make it through UIUC's intense CS or ECE programs can compete with anyone with 5 years of experience.

I guess my point is, not only do the stats back up the claim that more education leads to more (financial) success, so does my individual experience.

This can also be explained by a signalling effect (having a degree demonstrates to employers that you'll be a good employee) or a selection effect (smart/responsible people are much more likely to get a degree, but they'd be successful even if they didn't). In either of those cases, society would be collectively better off with less emphasis on formal education.

Your fist statement "having a degree demonstrates to employers that you'll be a good employee" indicates that there is value in obtaining a degree. That is, you are more likely to get a well paying job if you have one. As a side note, my experience (family members who are HR directors) is that this is very likely true. However, the effect that this has on the statistics is a real effect, and must be considered when determining the value of obtaining a degree.

Your second statement could certainly be a confounding factor when it comes to the stats, but really doesn't support the claim that society would be collectively better off with less emphasis on formal education. Further, it implies, what I believe to be, an unlikely claim. That is that the majority of graduates would have been successful without the university experience.

I should note here, that I do not, necessarily, support the status quo. I'm a big fan of programs like 20 under 20, YC, and other micro-funding type programs, and would love to see these types of programs expanded. The university systems of the world are in dire need of reformation, but that doesn't mean tossing the entire thing out.

Changing the way education works has always been a long, slow process, but changes are starting to happen. Advocating for a ripe-and-replace "solution" will only cause the current apparatus to close ranks and take a defensive posture. We need to work with the education systems, break through that resistance to change, and move to a system that better suits the needs of today's students, which do differ from students of the past.

Yes, to the individual. But it creates an arms race scenario where everyone is induced to spend more resources than is socially optimal. Bryan Caplan addresses this in more detail at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/me_and_the_retu.....

Further Caplan tends to focus on liberal arts education, and ignores hard science and engineering. This, of course, means that only part of the education equation is being considered.

I fear, (and this is at risk of completely throwing my argument off the rails with fallacy), that what may be at work (Caplan) is more a case of dogmatic adherence to libertarian ideology. With a lack of demonstrable social implications, signaling becomes largely irrelevant as an argument against the system, as it is.

What can we really make of that? Hard working people tend to make more money? That has been true since people started trading services, long before colleges.

It is definitely an interesting correlation, but correlations are just that. The stats show nothing to prove that college is the reason for success. It is much more likely that the people who go are successful people to begin with. When I was in high school, the people who went to college were really driven to go there and I assume continued with that drive into their careers. Those who did not go to college lacked that drive not only when it came to school, but in all aspects of life.

The chances of finding a million dollar record deal are much higher if you are in a band too. It doesn't mean joining a band only to become rich is a good idea. Your fortune could have been lying elsewhere all along. But as long as you love what you are doing, it doesn't matter.

Here's the thing.. all of these statements are true:

- Higher education can give you a great professional career path

- Higher education can give you social skills

The problem is this; there is a third option, which is not to go into higher education and to do something vocational. Unfortunately we live in a world where this is a worse option.

That is fucking unbelievable.

I just got someone in to do a bit of extension work on my house. It looks great, it is precise craftsmanship from someone who has worked at it his whole life. He learned it vocationally and worked his way up to a pretty successful living. OK, so he is not making millions, but neither do most graudates.

Here in the UK, at least, it is assumed you are aiming to go to university and get a degree. In my time it was pretty bad, I think now it is even worse.

That's such a worrying idea; I mean, if everyone is a high flying management executive, who the hell are they managing?

Kids are sold this idea that you have to go and get a degree and then your life will pan out for you. What a joke; you can hardly blame students for being dissillusioned when they realise that they now have a stonking debt, and there are still no guarantees.

I'm not criticising the risk of doing higher education on debt, just that we lie to our younger generations and pretend that it is a done deal if they just get through a couple years are uni.

Fucking stupid.

We need to refocus. Going from school at 16 to college to learn, say, graphic design is awesome. Except as a society we are supposed to roll our eyes and go "oh, college.. right."

I myself fall into the second of my bullet points; my career now is entirely through finding a job for my hobby skills, learning a new "trade" (digital forensics) on the job, and working my way up. Sure, I learned a lot about critical thinking in my degree, but the real takeaway was earning some friends, developing some social skills, making connections, letting myself go for a bit (uptight as a kid, sigh..). My career is entirely self-made at this point (learning programming myself, before uni., Learning forensics. Learning business acumen. etc.) - there are many many similar people out there but because I went to university I must be somehow awesome at this! here's the joke - my grade was about average because I barely turned up for lectures, having more interesting things to do :)

The aggravating thing is that I look at really smart, capable people being passed over because they never went to university. Because it is ingrained, now, that for any vocation there is a degree for it.

The education revolution, when it comes, doesn't have much to do with cost. But with perception.

My personal issue with this whole debate is which are we referring to. Potentially college-bound students who are HN readers and have the capacity to understand how to be didactic/resourceful AND know which field to enter, are probably the ones who will probably not benefit as much from college as other students. This group is less than 1% of college-bound students. Yet all these debates and discussions are focused on them. Thiel with his 20 under 20 and Bienen at Northwestern are catering to the top few.

What about the rest? Those who are not sure what they want to do. Those who need some formal education to actually learn something. College is for this majority. Yes, an improved, affordable college that focuses more on career skills would be better. But whatever state it's in, these students need to be there to escape low-paying jobs when they themselves are ready to pursue more knowledge-based careers. /rant

P.S. It really was an exciting debate to see in person, especially the part where Vivek Wadhwa got excited and challenged Thiel on the spot.

The way I see it, Thiel may have other priorities. Among other things, he is a big (the biggest, if I recall correctly) donor for the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), which works on reducing existential risks. That does pretty well for "averting disaster", though we're not talking about education here.

Wrt. current state - if you can make people learn basic amount of the knowledge necessary in today's human civilization [ie. BS = K12 + college] in 12 years - fine, drop the college years, otherwise the public education standard must be increased to K16. Higher education right now means MS or PhD. People with bare K12 are the ones left behind and deprived of a chance of being a productive and successful member of the civilization .

One of the limiting factors on early-stage civilizations is that it takes pretty much a lifetime to transmit information from one generation to the next; between books, specialization, urbanization, and price signals (which are basically an API on human desires and the resources necessary to fulfill them), we need far less general knowledge than we used to.

yep, and more "good paying manufacturing jobs" :)

Seriously, it looks like you just don't understand the r- and K-selection (because it would be an unnecessary "general knowledge" until you're an evolution biology professional and thus you don't know it) and thus you don't understand where your sentiment is coming from.

r/K selection is a nice addition to the mental toolbox. (I learned about it while in high school, because I cut class to hang out in the library.)

There is a difference between liking an outcome (people who have the intellectual tools necessary to contribute to society) and being wedded to any particular means (ever more students going to ever larger institutions to spend ever more money learning ever, ever less).

these current particular means of Brick & Mortar large institutions are the legacy of the pre-Internet age just like any other B&M institution, and they will still have their niche going forward. Online education is going to be the dominant form in the elevating of the basic level of education to the next level beyond current K12. DB course from Stanford, Control Systems from Berkley, Quantum Physics from CalTech, Differential Topology from Princeton (or any of these course from my University :) while living in some dorms in Tibet with a bunch of students from other countries ...

> learning ever, ever less)

this is where global competitive pressure comes into play. Free global flow of trade, capital and labor immediately emphasizes the role of the level and quality of education.

Peter, "put your money and energy behind your convictions" since "the world is ripe for another revolution" through "tablet-type devices" that are "ubiquitous".

Tl;dr, this whole thing is stack of non-sequiturs.

http://projectonstudentdebt.org/

But that does not mean that education in and of itself structured in curricula and colleges is actually a bad thing. Even with subsidies, education is quite a huge financial challenge for most people. And increasing privatisation of education will only lead to more student debt, almost to the point where the opportunity cost is too high to go to college. That is fine for the genius 1-2% of the USA but for the rest of the US the structure does not really create knowledge based human capital so needed to be competitive in the current global landscape

The financing of education brings about a core philosophical issue, which is, is education a public or private good. In most European countries, it is considered a public good, and as such the state's responsibility. As such student debt issues are almost marginal in these countries. However, on the other hand, education and research quality in these universities is really low, as evidenced by rankings:

http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp

(I know rankings are debatable but this is the only worldwide global ranking system so lets just use it as a proxy for approximating how good a university is). I also know that due to huge amounts of student loans subsidized through private lenders, the whole education financial system came to an absolute halt in 2008, whereby lenders could not lend to eligible students to go to college. This is due to the fact that education loans are also packaged into securities and sold to investors. They are also some of the highest performing loans. The US government mainly guarantees these loans, but in 2008 had to actually inject money to get loan market flowing again.

So the question is, is the university just a place to teach, or somewhere we advance humanity through sometimes isoteric research that may become relevant 20 years from now. The US system has betted on the latter of these two options for the past 30 years or so. The University system in the US is more of a business than a place of education. The increased privitisation of education has thus lead us to this place. Does it make sense to privatise it more given the current situation? In my opinion, probably not.

As for people calling for the Khan Academy Model, please look at what they are doing recently: they have partnered up with the Los Altos School district to integrate their platform in classes. That increases the use of tech in education, but it does not necessarily entirely change the way education is imbibed to children. Same with Knewton, which works with universities.

Guess what folks the K12 budgets have not alarmingly increased over the past 12 years, just colleges. We have a system where elite bankers get to rob tax payers and students with Loans that defy the uniform commercial code with on term limits and other somewhat illegal terms.

Than we allow that banking elite class to stack the trustees that are elected at state colleges so that there will always be a raise in budgets and rates every year.

Here is the difference...30 years ago a student could pay for college tuition from a job right out of high school.

Are we really gaining something when we allow colleges to enact unfunded liabilities such as retirement to those who only put in 10 years and a sports program that basically is a farm team for professional sports without professional sports paying for the that farm team?