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"  As bubbles burst in one economic sector after another, we&amp;#039;re now hearing talk of a &amp;quot;higher education bubble,&amp;quot; in which cost increases, buoyed by cheap government loans, may be hitting their limit. Can technology save the day? Or does the problem go deeper than that?  No one disputes that college and graduate-school costs have skyrocketed. In recent decades, college tuition has increased at more than four times the rate of inflation, outpacing even medical--care costs and amounting to a 439 percent increase between 1982 and 2007. As Forbes recently noted, just a decade ago a year of college cost 18 percent of a typical family&amp;#039;s annual income\u2014now it has hit 25 percent and prices are continuing to rise. At public four-year schools, for instance, total costs rose 6 percent in 2011, to $17,131\u2014far outstripping inflation. The causes are debated. Some blame palatial facilities and reduced teaching loads for professors, while one recent study fingered bloat in the ranks of administrators.  As tuition has risen, students and their families have made up the difference by borrowing. The New York Times ran a sad story about a woman who had amassed nearly $100,000 in student loan debt pursuing a degree in women&amp;#039;s and religious studies at New York University, only to find herself virtually unemployable upon graduation. Even students who major in programs shown to increase earnings, like engineering, face limits to how much debt they can sanely amass. With costs approaching $60,000 a year for many private schools, and out-of-state costs at many state schools exceeding $40,000 (and often closing in on $30,000 for in-state students), some people are graduating with debts of $100,000 or more. That&amp;#039;s dangerous. The rule of thumb is that college-debt payments should account for less than 8 percent of gross income. Otherwise, watch out\u2014and remember that loan payments are usually not dischargeable in bankruptcy. The loans can follow you for decades. Economist Herbert Stein famously wrote that if something can&amp;#039;t go on forever, it won&amp;#039;t. So college costs can&amp;#039;t rise forever. The question is, what will happen next? It seems unlikely that college will return to its pre\u2013World War II role as a finishing school for the wealthy. When education boosters tout college as essential to competitiveness in the global economy, they&amp;#039;re mostly right (even though some workers can earn more and achieve higher job satisfaction in a skilled trade). The key to bringing college costs under control will be getting more bang for less buck. That&amp;#039;s a challenge where technology might lend a hand, but only after some basic questions are addressed.  The first step is to ensure that students are actually learning useful things. This isn&amp;#039;t much of a problem in engineering schools and the like, but in many other areas &amp;quot;core subjects&amp;quot; have been shortchanged. A recent survey of more than 700 schools by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that many have virtually no requirements. Perhaps that&amp;#039;s why students are studying 50 percent less than they were a couple of decades ago.  Once this issue is addressed, there&amp;#039;s plenty of room for improvement on the technological front. In the old days, professors were few, and it made sense for students to travel hundreds of miles to study with them. But today, once you move onto a campus, much of your learning, especially in the first couple of years, takes place in huge lecture halls where one professor addresses hundreds of students\u2014or gets a teaching assistant to do it.  Some students are saving money by doing their first two years at community college. The quality of instruction is often better, and the classes smaller, than in four-year institutions where professors focus more on research than on teaching.  That&amp;#039;s a worthwhile strategy, but innovation at four-year institutions could help, too. Now that webcasts are a routine feature of corporate training, perhaps it&amp;#039;s time to make better use of the Web for education. Take the top teachers in a field and let students at multiple colleges access their lectures online. (Sure, there&amp;#039;s not a lot of interaction that way\u2014but how much is there in a 200-student lecture class anyway?) Once the basic information is covered, students can apply it in smaller advanced classes, in person. Would this save money? Possibly\u2014and it would almost certainly produce better results.  The online approach is used by the popular Khan Academy, where lectures are viewed by students at their convenience and skills are perfected via video-game-like software, and the followup is done in a classroom, with a teacher&amp;#039;s oversight. The idea is to take advantage of mass delivery where it works best, and to allow individualized attention where it helps most.  The Khan Academy has gotten a lot of attention, but it&amp;#039;s not the last word in technological progress in education. What&amp;#039;s striking is that it has come from outside the educational establishment. Then again, breakthroughs often come from people working outside the old industries. Anya Kamenetz&amp;#039;s book DIY U talks about &amp;quot;edupunks&amp;quot; who are exploring unconventional thinking about teaching and learning. In fact, the best way to master many subjects may be for students to find their own path, with the role of the education establishment being more to certify competence than to actually teach. In one way, that&amp;#039;s how it works already. Right now, a college degree is an expensive signifier that its holder has a basic ability to show up on time (mostly), to follow instructions (reasonably well), and to deal with others in close quarters without committing serious felonies. In some fields, it may also indicate important background knowledge and skills, but most students will require further on-the-job training. An institution that could provide similar certification without requiring four (or more) years and a six-figure investment would have a huge advantage, especially if employers found that certification to be a more reliable indicator of competence than a college degree. Couple that with apprenticeship programs or internships and you might not need college for many careers.  The major problem with this plan is that college now serves largely as a status marker, a sign of membership in the educated &amp;quot;caste.&amp;quot; However, the sight of college graduates buried in debt may change that. We&amp;#039;re already seeing signs of a shift in popular culture, with advice-column pieces appearing that discuss women and men whose huge student debt makes them unmarriageable. At any rate, American culture at its best values people more for what they do than for their membership in a caste\u2014now is a good time to assert that preference.  At the very least, students (and parents) should be looking more critically at what a specific course of study offers. Research by Georgetown University&amp;#039;s Center on Education and the Workforce found that people who major in computer science, business, or engineering get a big lifetime-earnings boost, while people who major in the humanities don&amp;#039;t do nearly as well. That&amp;#039;s not a reason to look down on the humanities, but with college growing ever more expensive, a degree that won&amp;#039;t add to your earnings potential isn&amp;#039;t an investment, but an expensive consumer item. It may be nice to have\u2014but so is a Ferrari, another expensive consumer item. The difference is, nobody&amp;#039;s encouraging 18-year-olds to take on six-figure debt to buy a Ferrari.  There are many paths to increased earnings that don&amp;#039;t involve college, and that have smaller upfront costs: Skilled trades such as electrical work and plumbing face a constant shortage of qualified workers as Americans increasingly disdain manual labor, and these fields pay wages that compare very favorably to those earned by college graduates. There&amp;#039;s an additional advantage to these hands-on jobs: They&amp;#039;re harder to outsource. If you&amp;#039;re a so-called knowledge worker in the global information economy, you&amp;#039;re in competition with smart people all over the planet. If you fix cars or HVAC units, you&amp;#039;re competing only with the folks in your neighborhood.  These attractions, The Washington Post reported last year, are leading a number of college-educated people to jump tracks and take up trades. Such people often cite the satisfaction of hands-on work\u2014and compared with many drone-like cubicle jobs, a trade career can be more intellectually stimulating. If you might be one of those people, why not skip the college and save the money? Community colleges and state vocational\u2013technical colleges offer training in subjects such as plumbing, welding, and electrical work, and a licensed journeyman can make $65,000 to $85,000 a year. Of course, that change would make life tougher on professors, such as, er, me. But in the 21st-century economy, people or institutions who don&amp;#039;t add value don&amp;#039;t last long. The higher education establishment needs to ask itself if it&amp;#039;s really adding value commensurate with the costs, and what it should be doing differently\u2014before it&amp;#039;s too late. Full disclosure: Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He is also a blogger (instapundit.com) and author, most recently of An Army of Davids. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a12014/can-technology-fix-the-college-debt-crisis-6547416/>