I don't think it's a coincidence that the major proponents of doing away with traditional higher education and questioning the value of a college degree are peo

I don't think it's a coincidence that the major proponents of doing away with traditional higher education and questioning the value of a college degree are people with at least one degree (in many instances advanced degrees as well) from very prestigious institutions. They believe that in a practical sense, what you really need to know to perform you can gain more efficiently by doing. They ask "Who knows better than somebody with expensive degrees how worthless they are?" I completely disagree with that and I believe the opposite is true. Only people without degrees can speak reliably about whether they regret the decision or not. They actually put themselves on the line. I'm not convinced when I hear people with degrees say that they wish they had known that they didn't need them before or that they would have been just as well without them. That's like somebody who paid for flood insurance claiming "who knows better than I how worthless flood insurance is?" Perhaps the guy down the street who didn't buy it and lost his house. Edit: And to the author's point about iTunes vs buying full albums- that analogy is faulty. There have been community colleges around for many, many years, but the reality is that companies just don't value individual coursework as favorably as an entire degree, particularly one from a prestigious school. The purchaser of a song has very different objectives than a hirer. A song purchaser wants one song and does not want to pay ten times the price to buy an entire album which might have three songs that he likes. Clearly, single purchases are more efficient. But when it comes to hiring, there is no added cost. If I am hiring for a position with a stated salary, I want the most qualified person I can find. If I can hire a guy with three degrees in Computer Science from MIT, I don't really care about the guy with the Microsoft and Cisco certification, even if those are things that are precisely what you need to know on the job. College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. If you pull back and decide you are going to turn down MIT and go learn just the skills you need for your job, there are going to be 5,000 people lined up behind you ready to saddle themselves with debt and work through four years of college to get the degree and you will facing an uphill battle. So in the case of iTunes, a comparable situation is if I had $0.99 to spend on a song, and had hundreds of full albums with that song offered for my $0.99. In that case, I am not going to buy the single song.