I agree with your main idea. Online self-education was implicitly promising stable, well-paying jobs for the people without the means for formal studies. But i

I agree with your main idea. Online self-education was implicitly promising stable, well-paying jobs for the people without the means for formal studies. But instead of governments standardizing, expanding and accrediting these tools, they were abandoned. They are now only used to supplement normal studies. In my opinion, the reason for that is preserving the status quo. We're used to the rhetoric of merit-based job distribution and knowledge/productivity based salaries. If a country created university programmes that were nationally accredited (ie by taking tests with physical presence in addition to online classes) then high-paying jobs would be available to everyone. Or would they? Because to a large extent, university degrees are useless without connections. If everyone had access to higher education, the lie that the poor are just lazy and stupid would collapse, exposing the nepotism and corruption of corporate and government jobs, and also empowering the people to take over these jobs themselves. You can see this difference in the contrast between countries like the US, where higher education is unreachable for most people, and thus owning a degree guarantees almost 10x higher salaries than the poor, and the many countries in the EU where free or subsidized education results in much lower wage inequality. Making education so accessible that you can earn a degree by watching 2-3 hours of lectures per day would disrupt the current situation completely, exposing many pathologies of both the educational and employment systems.