Handschooling.com

Will the bursting of the higher education bubble give college-age people time to focus on acquiring useful knowledge? That conclusion can be drawn from reading an article in the Washington Examiner.

The laws of networking have burst many bubbles, including analog ways of doing things across a range from scheduling travel, finding a job, meeting a spouse, collecting music, publishing news, and on and on. The Examiner article has interesting answers to this question that it poses:

So what happens if the bubble collapses? Will it be a tragedy, with millions of Americans losing their path to higher-paying jobs?
Maybe not. College is often described as a path to prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money in three different ways. . .

The first of the three points by the article authors involves acquiring skills to become economically productive. The other two are about gaining credentials and establishing a workplace network. The analysis given in the article is well worth reading toward understanding what lies ahead under the notion of education.

But also, think how cool this is: With the college three-ring circus diminishing, people in their late teens and early twenties can spend real, quality time interacting with knowledge — essentially all accessible in the device in their hands and able to travel with them. Could the fun time partying — important to building later workplace networks — be replaced by adventures in chemistry labs, archaeology digs, jungle explorations, or apprenticeships in hospitals, transportation control hubs, and construction sites?

The bursting of the higher education bubble will surely mean that eager young minds will soon have more time to engage what is known by humankind. And don’t you think the networks born of knowledge engagement will be more worthwhile than those that emerge from higher education as we know it now?