The cost of education is ridiculously high and outrageously cheap

Allow me to draw your attention to this scary graph:

As you can see from this graph, by the time my son is old enough to attend college, I will have begun boiling the soles of my shoes. I will also consider obtaining a bindle.

I found it in a Seth Godin post (my annotations). I don’t know what any of that inflation factor stuff is, but it sounds terrible. Look at how sharply the orange line curves upward. Why don’t we put this in more recognizable terms:

As you can see from *this* graph, the bindle will not be optional.

Community college is looking good. But back to Seth and his idea of the factors making those colored lines feel so bad:

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
3. The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.
4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

All these disruptive forces are in the air. At the same time that higher education is becoming more expensive, there’s an explosion of free knowledge on the internet. Once you get past the initial cost of a PC and monthly bandwidth charges, you can teach yourself whatever you want with a ton of free – or almost free – services.

Delayed benefits

In the beginning, teachers got education kiosks, VCR-teaching, and clunky learning computers that did no such thing. Some of it was hopeful crap, other stuff was make-quick-money crap, but both types of crap ended up stuffed into A/V closets. The early nineties saw students around the world using Mozilla to access webpages; at the time, the significance was lost on me, but not those connected students.

There was all this frustrated hope that the internet would revolutionize education. But when something was useful, it was in blinking pink text on a black star-field background. Usability had a ways to go.

The ‘net went from nothing to everything. In the early days, email was the killer app; and it still is, but I bet free, embeddable video has done more to improve general education than anything else.

And the internet is better than ever; amusing cats are plentiful. The tech has filled more of the promise it had in the early days. There are publicly maintained encyclopedias, privately maintained encyclopedias, god-like search engines, and search engines that like to think they’re god. Some of those expensive colleges even post their lectures and seminars online for free. And there’s plenty of cool stuff to come; I’m sure I won’t be able to imagine my life without that…thing that hasn’t been invented yet.

Do it Yourself

For the edu-hackers out there, Godin has some more radical ideas. As an avid Lifehacker reader, I can appreciate anyone wanting to do-it-yourself. There’s no reason to omit  education and also no reason for those of us outside it to hold universities with scorn. An ad-hocracy won’t be displacing universities any time soon, but it would be nice to integrate the best tendencies of traditional institutions with these new strategies.

The solutions are obvious… there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference (start here). Most of these ways, though, aren’t heavily marketed nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped two-hundred-year old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new. (Seth Godin)

For now, I’ll hold off on the bindle.