That has generally been my suspicion as well. The good news is that if what you say is true, then it makes for a very promising opening for a conservative policy on higher education.

I should note, however, that a lot of the movement on the MOOC front has been coming from higher educational mavricks like Anant Agarwal at MIT, and now president at EDx, and are not, from what I can tell, remotely right of center.

Pseudoplotinus, I think I agree.

Here I would highly recommend Charles Murray’s book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Education-Bringing-Americas-Schools/dp/0307405397/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353867614&sr=8-1&keywords=charles+Murray+education

I work in high tech manufacturing and have seen the wasteful effects the requirement of a piece of paper has on an organization and the natural mobility of talented individuals.

I vividly recall the aggravated experience of recommending one of the tech’s that I manage to be promoted to a jr engineer position. My supervisor said it was not feasible unless said tech had a degree, this despite the fact that he had 15 years of relevant experience in the very complicated field of vapor deposition and knew more about the subject and its practice than any bachelor level chemical engineer.

So the wise words from my supervisor was that the individual should go to school and finish his degree and then we could talk about such a promotion. In otherwords, the oganization I worked for would prefer for our subject matter expert who was essential to our operations take time away from our organization so that he could take a number of classes mostly irrelevant to his work so that he could at some point in the distant future be promoted to the job he was frankly already performing! In Japanese manufacturing this is what is called Muda, waste!

In his book Murray offers the observation that for many professional positions, something equivalent to a CPA type certification would be sufficient to qualifying individuals. What he is saying is that a method of certifying qualifications should be the gateway to a professional career not a college degree. In making this transition we put the burden of deciding how to gain those qualification on the individual, who could achieve that knowledge through schooling, through a decade of personal experience in the field like the tech I was talling about, or even just hitting the books.

This also brings up another development that should completely disrupt the higher educational status quo. Last year I took an electrical engineering class from MIT. I didn’t have to qualify for admissions, I didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars, infact it was free, and I was able to do it from my home. How? Welcome to the new world of MOOC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

It’s now possible to take the kind of coursework that would qualify you as an engineer (among other careers) in any field, from the greatest institutions in the world, and for free:

https://www.edx.org/

So why am I worrying about the hundreds of thousands of dollars its going to cost me to get my two, now infant, children through college when they reach college age? Does any of this make any sense? And so why are we talking about making higher education affordable when the problem is higher education itself?

We should be focusing our attention on mainstreaming certifications and MOOC’s in todays industries so that the brick and mortar universtities can focus on what they do best, sort of. By which I mean producing academics, research and researchers, and the next generation of Phd’s.

2. Unfortunately, saying the above will get you demagogued as someone who thinks only the rich should go to college. This is because the MSM is composed of nothing but total economic ignoramuses, and too many politicians are cynical cretins.

3. The GOP should immediately propose to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy. This will sound good, and will have the effect of suppressing the availability of so much easy loans, so will all in all have much of the desired effect.

4. Making the model for health insurance individual-held high-deductible plans would accomplish nearly everything that advocates for Obamacare say they want (of course, it wouldn’t accomplish anything that they actually want), and would be pretty easily achievable with fairly small changes to the tax code. Unfortunately, it is clear that a majority of folks today don’t actually want health insurance–what they want is for someone else to manage their health care.

5. All that matters in the medium term is reducing the amount of money the government borrows. People do actually care about the deficit and the debt. The fact that the GOP allowed their opponents to present themselves as the side that actually cares about debt reduction made them completely deserving of defeat.