I'm biased, because I went there, but I think people need to break down a college education into two parts: (1) the education you receive (the things you know at graduation minus everything you knew as a day 1 freshman) and (2) the people, friends, and connections you've formed.
Part 1 is quickly becoming a commodity for many study topics that are available online, for free or close to it, so it's hard to justify a $200k price tag for something you can teach yourself.
Part 2 is much more difficult to supplant with alternative education. The people I've met while at Stanford have been invaluable to me in starting my career, and I don't even consider myself great at networking. There's just such a huge brain trust there it's hard to even question the value of being there. I'm sure the same can be said of the top 20 schools, however that probably quickly drops off past that.
Those are interesting points. I think there are some other factors as well: College provides kids with the experience of face-to-face interaction in an academic setting, which is sufficiently similar to a professional setting. And it also may provide psychological conditions necessary for some kids to actually finish. I would have had a hard time earning my BS degree sitting in front of a screen all day every day for 4 years, while living in a my backwards little hometown.
As a thought-experiment, imagine going down the hallway at a large company, talking to all of the new entry level recruits, and trying to guess which ones went to college and which ones studied at home, just from their behavior. Now guess which ones will move up the ladder and which ones won't.
If colleges are driven out of business, affluent parents will find other ways to provide their kids with those extras, poor kids won't know why their online education hasn't made them employable, and we'll just be back to the same disparities as before.
I'm obviously pushing a particular agenda here, but I think it's worth considering.
I don't know that that doesn't happen at real schools too though
while I'm sure college works as a smoothing function
but it seems to me that certain (almost always UMC) kids show up and immediately get what the valuable connections to make at the school are
they get what sorts of fraternities are worth trying to get into, what sort of extracirricular activities are likely to prove valuable in the future, what sort of internships are worth angling for, that sort of thing
while alot of the less clued in students sort of fumble around almost at random
it strikes me that the degree of clued in'ness' usually breaks down along class lines
(this might be more of a finance, politics, business thing than a tech thing)
Part 1 is quickly becoming a commodity for many study topics that are available online, for free or close to it, so it's hard to justify a $200k price tag for something you can teach yourself.
Part 2 is much more difficult to supplant with alternative education. The people I've met while at Stanford have been invaluable to me in starting my career, and I don't even consider myself great at networking. There's just such a huge brain trust there it's hard to even question the value of being there. I'm sure the same can be said of the top 20 schools, however that probably quickly drops off past that.