otherwise, your comments are easier said than done. look at housing prices in any place with a good, large job market. most are ridiculously overpriced. having money to put away to cover 4-5 months expenses, after expenses? not gonna happen. used cars are the way to go. but most are so unreliable that it costs the same in a year to buy a new one, minus the headache.

but i do agree with your last sentence. a debt culture that was spawned in the early 70s has led us down a rocky path and it’s going to be tough to get back on the right road.

Anyways, I do think that there is something to what he is saying and of course – for the last 2 years or so – I myself have been a prophet of doom. Take my comments with that pinch of salt.

Having said that, I hope I am wrong and our way of life is nt destroyed.

It should also have a tag cloud suggesting its content and direction. I found this to be a complete waste of my time and I fully agree with Ryan on the loss of credibility.

This is already available (MIT), but taking those classes, while valuable to the individual, does not improve your chances at a job making more than $25k if there is no accredited degree program with it. I think it is sensationalist, naive, and in very poor taste to tell people this is where we’re headed.

There will always be a place for higher learning even when classes and information are available for free (What is a library? Yep guess what, information has been free much longer than you’ve been alive).

We are facing a continual decline of American students entering technical, science, and engineering oriented degree programs that has many people worried. These fields are all rapidly changing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, and likewise the amount of study needed to become an expert in the field is increasing…

Free classes may become a reality, but someone will always have to verify that you have the capability to translate ‘book’ learning into skills, and that is a part of what a college classroom does. For technical fields the degree program is not going away in our lifetimes.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

http://about.ck12.org/

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2935

This week, the efforts of the Foundation seem to have paid off, as they provided electronic textbooks through a California initiative that were clearly more aligned with state standards than any electronic texts from major publishers. According to a report from the California government,

“Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.”

It’s already happened. Get with the times.