In a recent post here at Open Salon, Joanne Jacobs writes about “The college payoff: $300,000 over 40 years.” In her piece she makes the claim that going to college is good by comparing the cost of going to college to the expected return. Maybe. But what if the college market turns out to be like the housing market—overpriced and awaiting a crash?

Oh, I don't mean that you're going to regret getting educated. But it seems to me like it's time for a price revolution and you might be sad you paid such a ridiculous price if you could have gotten an equivalent education for a lot less. So don't be lulled into thinking that the present system is the only possibility.

The traditional system may have stood for a long time, but few things are rock solid in the modern world, and as prices climb higher and higher, at a rate far outpacing inflation, it becomes less and less credible that the present system can survive without challenge. If you don't believe me, check out some ads for AIG from before the market crash. I'll meet you back here when you're ready to believe.

Why doesn't it fix itself?

The present US education system, enabled by business hiring preferences, seems to me to be operating on a kind of mindless autopilot, creating an effective education monopoly that is unchecked by substantial competitive options in the style, scope, and cost of post-high school education products. I am amazed by the lack of public dialog about alternatives.

It costs a lot to get a degree, so it's not surprising if those who have risen to the top on the strength of their degree have trouble uttering the words “maybe a degree is not why someone should succeed.” It probably reduces one's overall cognitive dissonance to say, both aloud and to oneself, “The reason I'm here is that I did the right thing. I struggled through all those long expensive programs and got the degree. And so I should reward and promote only people who did like me.” It's self-reinforcing.

It's not like the colleges and universities are going to cry out “the degree doesn't matter, just the knowledge!” They're selling degrees. Of course they're going to tell you the degree matters.

So who is left to speak for the public? People without degrees? Who cares what they have to say?

To what degree does competence matter?

Let's face it: Competence is just not the commodity of choice. Degrees are what they're selling and what everyone wants to buy. But that needs to change.

MIT's gesture seems on one hand extremely generous and yet in another way to fall drastically short. At the same time as it offers knowledge to many, it seems to me to also say, “we're secure in our understanding that our value is in our name, and we're keeping that just as scarce as it was before, even if the understanding we offer is made ubiquitously available.”

Of course, they might be saying that the lectures just aren't good enough to get across the course material and that the real value of their program is in the ability to ask questions interactively. But I somehow doubt that. I think it's about the brand.

And while MIT is offering a vast array of knowledge in a very useful way, it is not offering a roadmap for how to turn that knowledge into a credential. In a world of hungry people, electronic resumes, and con artists, legitimate and verifiable credentials matter. Telling people that if they just know things, they'll get by may have worked years ago, but in today's world it invites people to be invisible or to lie because the system offers no predefined path to success if you go this route.

What's the point?

Sometimes I wonder if college is meant to serve society or society is meant to serve college. Many discussions of how to arrange college seem to involve discussions about how it's the best time in one's life and a chance to really think and grow in ways that don't even relate to work. And I'm not knocking that. It was like that for me. But I think that's too much to ask for as a basic requirement of higher education.

The first goal of college must be to get a proper basis for getting started with a job, and preferrably a career. Anything beyond that is great, but is not a basic educational requirement. People who argue that it must be a touchy-feely, life-affirming experience are, I think, betraying their lack of understanding of their personally privileged financial status. The people complaining about college being too expensive are not complaining that they want a country club experience, but cheaper. They are worried about losing out on the basic education required to get a decent job in life because they simply can't afford the price tag. Those people, I think, would be willing to give up some of the more frivolous aspects of college if they could be assured of getting a good education that was recognized as such by employers.

Now maybe we'll find that all that money is going to massive corruption and that we can still provide both a decent education and a life affirming experience to everyone by just giving up some corruption nobody really wanted. But I don't think so. It think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras.

Yes, it will be sad for some people to miss out on all the extras. But it will be sadder still if you hold rigidly to the elitist line that college must be all or nothing. Because that kind of statement is spoken by someone who's used to getting the all, not the nothing.

The focus needs to be on getting people grounded in the skills they need to compete in a highly competitive global job market that requires modern skills to be efficiently delivered. This is no longer the American century, and what will assure our citizens get jobs that feed them will not be the location in which they were born, it will be the best preparation we can give them at a price we can afford to pay.

Is there another way?

How else might we organize society to deal differently with education?

Lifelong Learning. We tend also to lean heavily on the idea that a single four-year program will prepare a person for a life of work. And yet, this model was developed back when people got a single job with a single company that lasted a lifetime. In the modern working world, jobs may last only a few years, and people may change careers several times in a lifetime. Perhaps we should be planning a society where people make repeated visits to college, perhaps for fewer years each time. This could help to overcome the situation where businesses perceive college graduates as the ones with the latest and greatest skills and tend to devalue older employees as behind the times.

Alternate Sources of Learning. Why is it college itself that matters, rather than specific knowledge or skill. Some people need tons of interactive help to get them through a course of study, but some don't. Perhaps we need more co-op programs where people can learn on the job. Perhaps some people learn better in the library. It should matter more that people get the learning they need and that we figure out some way to measure that. Colleges seem focused on selling a particular type of hand-holding at a premium price rather than on maximizing the amount of learning per dollar.

Promoting Competition. Suppose that in order to be a properly accredited school, you had to allow the option for students to learn on their own and only show up to take a modestly priced competency test, rather than bundling such testing with a class that required attendance at a premium price? This would open up the field to real competition. Students could study on their own or even take a preparatory class at an alternate facility on a case by case basis. It might be hard to compete with MIT, but it might be feasible to compete with some particular course that MIT offered. That competition might encourage MIT to improve its course material, or to price its courses more favorably. Either of those effects would be good for the student.

Running the numbers yourself?

How would we tell if the money colleges want us to pay is reasonable? Well, I suggest that one way might be to think about the cost of doing it all at home. Ok, I can see you're already doubting me. But no, I don't mean self-taught learning. I mean really, literally arranging for college-level courses to be taught at your house—perhaps in the garage or in a guest room. Let's walk it through.

How much time do you really get with a professor anyway? Let's say two or three hours a week, shared with several hundred other students in a big lecture hall. And then maybe another two or three hours of time with a grad student answering questions in a more personal setting, still shared with another dozen or two of students. That's about 24 person-hours a week (6 person-hours per course, 4 courses a week) shared with dozens or hundreds of other people. So dividing through by a class size of a dozen people (conservatively assuming a very small class), that's maybe 2 hours a week of time that's really there for you personally.

Now, using data from Purdue, and then rounding a little to make the numbers prettier, let's say that the average professor at a pretty good private school makes $100,000 per year. And let's say that it costs another $50,000 on top of that for office space and travel for that professor. Someone who needs a lab might cost more, but for many fields that isn't necessary. So let's say we're not talking laboratory scientists here, and let's say $150,000 is the approximate real annual cost of employing a typical professor.

And with the average cost of tuition at a similar school being $22,000, and with $8,000 going to room and board, that means someone's shelling out $30,000 ever year to cover tuition, or $120,000 over four years.

So how could you make better use of the $120,000 you were given than a college would do? Well, you could take the entire chunk of change and use it to personally employ a single full-time professor for almost a whole year. (I don't think too many professors would like this kind of arrangement, but let's ignore that for now and focus on the theoretical economics.) It's not the four years of schooling you were going to get, but remember that it's high quality time not shared with anyone else. There's a lot you could learn from a full-time professor if you had eight hours a day, five days a week to spend for a year. And if you were done after one intensive year, that's three years you could be earning income that you were not earning if you took a four year program.

Suppose you and four friends rented a professor together? Well, assuming you each chipped in the same $30,000 per year, you'd have $150,000 a year to hire that professor with. Of course, this isn't all dedicated time; you're sharing with four other people, getting 8 hours for you and 32 hours for your friend. But it's still four times as much person-time as we said you'd get at a typical college, and it's all time with a professor. That's pretty good.

And we haven't explored the option where all of this happens at the private professor's home instead of yours. Perhaps he or she doesn't want to come visit you. The advantage there is that the professor is a professional with a decent salary, so gets a house with a few extra rooms to use as office and teaching space. That takes the pressure off of your guest room. If you and nine other people were brought in together, for a charge of “only” $15,000 per year, that magic $150,000 might still be taken in. Now you're only getting 4 person-hours of professor a week, even if you insist on not sharing time with others, but you're saving a lot of money.

“Ah,” you've been trying to inject, “but that's just one person. Real Colleges let a student select from a menu of professors.” Indeed, but it's no more expensive to get 100 students together to use 10 professors, and then you can mix and match. It still doesn't lose the personalized feel, but now you've got a nice, flexible mix of talent—a mini-university. Just mysteriously cheaper.

And that's without even talking about the idea of recording all the lectures onto video, letting you watch last year's lecture instead of hoping the professor can do it again this year. Why we insist that teachers be part-time holographic video players, recreating the same lecture over and over, I'll never understand. Why not save their valuable time for answering questions personal to you after you watch the carefully prepared and properly recorded standard lecture on this or that subject? If you factored in even a little of this kind of automation, the system would scale even better, yielding cheaper prices for everyone while at the same time allowing for plenty of in-person time with professors.

If not now, when?

So why aren't we all doing this ourselves now? Well, for one thing it's hard to get accredited. It's non-standard, and so who's going to want to let you try? Before any of this can happen, we need the societal motivation to do some experimenting, to disrupt the status quo. The entire education system right now is pretty happy right now with being the highly sought-after but quite expensive status quo. The impulse to change needs to come from the would-be students, and from the businesses who would hire them. Everyone looks to the colleges themselves, but they have no reason to change.

If we can't change what it takes to get accredited, we need to create some competing form of accreditation based purely on verifiable competency. Businesses need a reason to trust something other than the traditional ivory tower approach to learning. Yes, it's a gamble. And people fear gambling with their future. But if ever there was a time to take that gamble, now would seem the time, as tuitions soar and the value of our savings plummets.

I'm hoping that the silver lining of bad economic times will be that as people are dissuaded from pursuing traditional universities, they don't just give up. Instead, they should take the opportunity the present situation provides, be brave, and start paving the way to the future by trying out some new ideas that might be both cheaper and just as effective—if not moreso. A bit of competition would be good for an education industry that has grown all too complacent in its belief that it is the only game in town.

Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention. I see an awful lot of necessity in the area of education just about now. It's time to start birthing some invention.

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