But better knowledge will always be important for social mobility, at the very least via earning more money.

OTOH the traditional college may be not the best way to acquire certain kinds of knowledge. In many cases learning outside campus using recorded lectures, books, and computers may be as efficient, and visiting labs for necessary work could be vastly less expensive than doing full-time college.

I suspect the value of certain independent examinations / certifications, that is, the comparative advantage they give, will grow with time. The effort of passing them will be (or already is) university-level high, and the prices will also grow, but definitely not to the level of college prices.

This will democratize learning because of the lower prices, easier choice of time / pace, and easier choice of what you really want to learn. It's already happening, of course, but it's low-key by now. I posit that it will be a major force.

Certain things, like medicine, are not amenable to this approach, or course. But a lot of STEM, financial, media, even liberal arts curricula can benefit from such an approach.

>But better knowledge will always be important for social mobility, at the very least via earning more money.

College doesn't only improve your income via teaching you valuable skills that demand a higher wage on the job market. It also tells employers that you're the sort of person who can successfully get through college, and employers rightfully discriminate based off this signal.

Furthermore, there's a selection effect too. Colleges don't necessarily make their students better, but can often simply find better students. If you took Stanford and replaced 100% of the instruction with putting the admitted kids in a room together, the "graduates" would end up out-earning others simply because of the kind of person that they are.

There's some debate about the relative sizes of these three factors, but it's my opinion that the human capital theory is a relatively small portion of it. Under 20%, I think.

Sure, there is a lot of signal in having passed certain exams (like Stanford admission exams). This is why I think that examination per se, done by likes of Stanford, but also by now-being-establishing institutions, will be increasingly useful.

In a narrow IT industry sense, having an MSCE, or JCP, or Cisco certification used to be somehow valuable. But tech moves fast, so topic-bound certifications don't keep their value for very long.

If everyone would go to university, nobody would earn more money. It'd just push the boundary where people are separated.

In my country, vast majority of people go to post-high-school education. The result is that a lot of people have bachelor's or even master's yet end up working shitty dead-end jobs. Which they could do as well right after high school. In fact, many places prefer to hire people without degrees for such jobs for various reasons. Effectively higher education becomes net negative if you went there for the lulz and didn't make it.

Education should definitely be a differentiator.

Its being accessible is the issue, that is, we don't want to miss a bright child of not so well-off parents who can't afford to pay a lot. Hence education credits: if you're bright and determined, a good education will give you a lot, and land you in a financially more gainful place.

OTOH a diploma becomes a token of costly signaling, "all good kids get a degree", so a lot of people go to college just for lulz, or to appease parents, which is a pretty bad use of their time, and also a source of crippling debt.

Here's where differentiation actually occurs: it's between the determined kids who actively work on and benefit from education, and unmotivated kids who just fool around, because peer pressure, parents, or fashion pushed them to a college which they don't care much about, or which teaches only unmarketable skills. It's a pretty painful and costly way to differentiate; I hope the society will eventually find a different way to achieve a similar effect.

(To say nothing of the rising cost of education, fueled by the unending source of the educational credit money.)

For the record: I did not press my son to go to college, and he decided not to go. I'm fine with it. He's got an engineering job anyway.

Yes, accessible, but not universally accessible. And yes, accessibility should be merit-based. If you're smart and get good grades in high school - university should be available. But then some people start complaining how it's unfair and smart-but-poor kids can't get on the same level during high school. Thus we should push that one step further.. Which IMO is bullshit. People can use up any leeway given to them.

This isn't entirely true. A country's knowledge and collection of skills affects the overall wealth and standard of living of the people.

Perhaps on a purely relative scale, not much would change comparatively between the citizens. But the country's wealth will have increased.

If all of that knowledge and skills were marketable - yes. But many people go study bullshit degrees. They then expect good jobs and cushy salaries because degree. But apparently somebody needs to do dirty jobs too. Society would be much better off if a portion of people went to vocational school or were just trained at work.

Good plumber can advance standards of living and overall wealth much more than another failed literature critic. Who feels too smart to go to vocational school to learn plumbing after spending 4 years for useless diploma.