It's just strange to me that "technology" is improving yet costs of "education" is increasing at rates that cannot be explained by inflation (and also "medical

It's just strange to me that "technology" is improving yet costs of "education" is increasing at rates that cannot be explained by inflation (and also "medical care" but I digress). Fifteen years ago I remember wanting an encyclopedia set to read and my computer was ten times crappier than any entry level smartphone on the market. > The New York Times did a story earlier this year declaring the college degree to be the "new high school diploma" I have developed this view from reading links from Hacker News, that every reader/contributor taught themselves how to code from the age of ten and subsequently freelance/consult/sold their startups for decent money, and would therefore find that statement laughable. Yet in my experience this view is so entrenched within the middle class - that in order to learn a skill you have to have information spoon fed to you, that people who are self-taught anything are geniuses. I'm a pharmacist learning how to code and when I tell my coworkers that I would someday like to be an entrepreneur web developer, they say "but you have to go to school for that... " Yet most knowledge is a few Google searches away. Maybe the first few searches you don't really know what you're even looking for, but as you read and gain familiarity with the vocabulary of your subject of interest, it's all there. So the idea of a college diploma as a surrogate marker for aptitude/potential/diligence is very much the perspective of my family and coworkers. There's got to be a better way of finding data, ranking it in terms of credibility/robustness, and testing for knowledge (startup idea?). With all the stuff that's available out there shouldn't we all be building solar-powered Arduino robots that can produce food and defend our family? Information is more accessible now than ever with more powerful tools to gather them, and many people still buy into showing up physically to a lecture hall and then filling in bubbles on a narrow strip of paper for four years for a beautiful piece of parchment.