A hard lesson

"Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, 

outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast." 

-- Peter Drucker, 1997

One of the big changes you can look forward to in the near-term is how we get a college education. In an excellent summary of all the reasons why,  John Paul Cassil writes in The Washington Times:

The average wages of new college graduates are declining. A college degree is no longer a guarantee of steady income growth, and there are actually organizations devoted to stopping the “college mentality.” Paypal’s Peter Thiel feels so strongly about this that he is paying 24 students $100,000 each to not go to college.

Education costs have escalated rapidly, increasing over 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income has only risen 147 percent.

The cost of higher education for one student is rapidly catching up to the median family income in the United States. The working American family is not gaining assets fast enough to cover education costs, so students are taking on massive amounts of non-bankruptable debt to finance it. In fact, student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion, and exceeds Americans’ total credit card indebtedness.

 It can't last, and it won't.