Why We Won’t Need College in 15 Years
We all have that one thing in our lives we keep around without really knowing why. If you live and work in a big city, you may still have your car from the days when you used to live in the suburbs. At one time, the car had a purpose. But now? It just collects parking tickets and bird poop.
If you think hard enough, you can probably find something like this in your life. The same is true for society as a whole. Have you ever seen a pay phone and wondered why it’s still there?
Some things outlive their usefulness. Is a traditional college education one of them?
Why we used to need college
Long before the Internet came along, in post-WWII America, information and knowledge were hard to come by. Knowledge was largely centralized in the universities, so if you wanted to gain the education necessary to obtain a middle-class job, you needed to go college. And the government paid you to go to college through programs like the GI bill.
Somewhere along the way, though, things changed. College tuition started rising more than the cost of living, and wages stopped increasing, making college a questionable financial investment. The quality of a college education began to decline, and employers started to realize that doing well in college didn’t correlate with doing well in a real-world job. The old system started breaking down.
Today, the Internet has decentralized knowledge and government funding for college has dried up, but we still see college as the only viable option for an education. Why? Because most employers still require college degrees.
But what if we could find jobs that didn’t require a traditional college degree? And what if we could find a way to acquire the knowledge required to be successful in those jobs without incurring $100K in student loans?
With the decentralization of knowledge, we can acquire the education to be successful without a traditional college education and, at the same time, find good jobs that don’t require traditional college degrees. The infrastructure for this type of system is already being built, and the disruption of the traditional university system has begun.
Full story at Brazen Careerist.