It should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever been to college that the model there isn't exactly one of "efficiency." My first two years were a good time,

It should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever been to college that the model there isn't exactly one of "efficiency." My first two years were a good time, but if you're a 45-year-old man trying to get skilled as quickly as possible to put food on the table, taking three credits of Shakespeare just seems silly (and I absolutely adore Shakespeare). Not to mention the fact that the notion that you should decide what you want to do for the rest of your life when you're 18 and have never worked or experienced a job market just seems completely insane to me. The fact of the matter is we're going to need widespread adult re-education, and the current four-years-at-18 model is woefully inadequate for the future that we can all see coming. In fact, the future that's here. Why can't I be prepared for a job in 6 months or one year? Can I take just the part of a college education that helps me be skilled? IMO the blue collar jobs of the future will be many of the white collar jobs of today. I actually include "coding" in that. Relatively simple programming is something most people can learn to do relatively quickly, provides immediate value, and has rising demand (even the code bootcamps flooding the market still, somehow, leave huge gaps). My company, Lambda School, (shameless plug, I suppose - YC S17 https://lambdaschool.com https://lambdaschool.com) is trying to solve some tiny portion of that by providing a live, online, skills-based education and job placement program that's completely free until you get a job. Soon it will be available entirely after hours. We've literally seen students go from applying at McDonalds to six-figure job offers; not because we're the best teachers in the world, but because they were already smart enough to become that person, they'd just never been given that opportunity, and for very practical reasons four years of college and expensive student loans were out of the question. But we're still relatively expensive, still at the higher-skill-level-but-more-difficult end, and we can only cover a tiny portion of the market. In the next 10 years I hope there will be a booming industry of college alternatives that can get people placed, so long as they're not crushed by licensing and regulation (neither of which I think are a bad thing in proper amounts). If you can move people from unemployed or minimum wage to regular living wage, the value created in that movement is enough that you can take a piece and everyone is way better off, and the cost of doing so is orders of magnitude less than college costs now. I really think we're going to enter a golden age of educational innovation, because the current system is broken enough folks are looking elsewhere. I would love to see someone do that at a serious kind of scale for high-paying trades: plumbing, welding, etc.