College should continue being the default. The luxury, expensive, reality-divorced and book focused 4 year programs are what need to end. College should structu

College should continue being the default. The luxury, expensive, reality-divorced and book focused 4 year programs are what need to end. College should structure programs to serve the needs of a profession and be sustainable in context of the professions they train people for. College remains the only viable way to get access to the top tier of limited opportunities and non-defaultable-loan-traps are laid everywhere. As long as both remain true, college can continue charging fees that are disproportionate to the actual value it provides. In a sense, college is a protection racket. Today universities signal class and prestige, serve as primary research institutes, are professional sports academies are a place to have fun and incubate social movements among other things. From a university's stand point, each is lucrative business in its own right. At its very core college is no more a place for higher education and training. If colleges start focusing on this, then we will start seeing sustainable colleges that 'everyone' can go to. I don't see my pipe-dream of scaled-back universities succeeding and that's because a scaled back university will never be able to attract folks who can facilitate quality higher education or training. Something will have to fundamentally change for that one bottleneck to be resolved.