It&#x27;s quite likely that by the time my 11-year-old hits 18, private universities will cost over $100,000 per year (tuition plus fees, housing, and food plan), and public schools will be $25K [EDITED orig. $50K] (plus or minus, depending on state subsidies and other funding such as corporate donations).<p>While the university experience is undoubtedly a valuable one for the 18-22 age range, with tremendous intellectual and socialization opportunities during this formative period, I wonder whether it&#x27;s still going to be the best and only pathway to intellectual and social growth.<p>With MOOCs and other online learning resources flooding the internet, many free or for moderate fees, the focus now has to be on justifying the classroom experience.  Are you still best off in a 300-seat lecture hall, scribbling&#x2F;typing notes while a grad student or adjunct spews information from the lectern, at an arbitrary time of day that if you somehow miss it, you&#x27;re out of luck?  You can&#x27;t exactly ask the lecturer to pause while you go to the toilet, or &quot;please rewind 10 seconds, I missed something&quot;.  <i>Maybe</i> they have videoed the lecture and <i>maybe</i> the videographer remembered to zoom in on the powerpoint screen at the right times.<p>You hope that meeting all those fellow students will lead to a group learning experience -- &quot;Hey, let&#x27;s meet at the coffeeshop and go over this stuff together!&quot;  That&#x27;s possibly the best way to learn material, to teach it to your colleagues and have them quiz you as well.  But is that not reproducible in the online model, e.g. chatrooms, skype, etc.?<p>In my opinion, the U.S. government should get out of the business of providing and guaranteeing educational loans.  It has resulted in a vast, bloated system of exploitation of the students and the loan system, and we are now facing possibly a trillion dollar bubble that may burst in the next few years if all those freshly minted degrees don&#x27;t lead to good paying jobs to retire those loans.<p>Universities in the U.S. must be put on notice that the free ride is over, and they have to get costs under control, stop with the billion dollar student centers and bloated administrative offices, and try to get back to basics of providing lecture halls and white boards and reasonably secure jobs for professors to do what universities ought to focus on:  teach.