Serendipity35

According to an op-ed on FORBES, it will be online education that will be the next "bubble" to burst rather than traditional university learning. The latter is what has been predicted by many, including myself, since we entered the 21st century and especially in the past year or more as MOOCs have emerged.

That article by John Tamny is not another MOOCs-will-destroy-academia story and the author is not an education writer but one who writes about economics and politics.

He writes that "...when parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status."

It might anger educators to read that "Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught." Parents and kids are willing to pay Brown University $50,000 per year intuition. The author claims that the universities are not a bubble about to pop because they still open doors to opportunities and people are still willing and eager to attend and pay the price tag through loans. It's an investment.

Tamny's conclusion:

There’s no college-education ‘bubble’ forming simply because teens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job. Online education only offers learning that the markets don’t desire, and because it does, its presumed merits are greatly oversold. There’s your ‘bubble.’