Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!
Why do you think that has happened? From my perspective (I graduated over 20 years ago) things like CS degrees seem to have been tried to become far more directly useful by becoming rather more like vocational training than pure academic subjects.
[NB I'm largely interested because I have a son who is starting to think about what he might do at University].
Other than to edit your LaTeX document files, or course! :-)
I mean 10 years from now will a college education be devalued to the point of not being worth what you paid for it?
I don't know the answer to that but if I were giving the advice I'd tell students to try the startup community while attending an accredited online institution. You could spend a few hours a week doing that and have a degree in 6 years while still chasing your startup dreams.
[Edit: £9000 is the fee for EU citizens, probably a good bit more for anyone else]
Indeed. If you make decent high school grades in the states, then it's possible to attend a state university on scholarship and owe less (perhaps much less) than $20K in school loans after graduation.
[NB I actually don't think this is very fair]
If this guy was an econ professor at least he would know he was just talking his book. You don't need a symposium on entrepreneurship you need to sell stuff at a higher price than you bought it to paying customers. Thats it, it's a sentence not a 2 year degree program.
This is an extremely ignorant and insulting statement. Further, you have just asserted that the worlds best minds, and many of histories great figures, are all incapable fools. I hope you realize how this statement makes you look.
Did Einstein have tenure or a teaching position when he discovered relativity? Point out to me those revered figures of history known primarily for their teaching or tenure positions. The worthlessness of the university system is exemplified by people like the Admissions Dean of MIT who was able to perform magnificently at her job sans the appropriate degree. The degree obviously being so unimportant to MIT to even bother checking that she had it for some 30 odd years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27mit.html
The statement is insulting only to those who hold their degree / teaching position as part of their identity which is supposed to be some kind of proxy for them knowing / being able to do something.
I greatly respect the capable, the intelligent, and the driven, what I don't think is that having a teaching position / tenure is a great proxy for knowing that.
Your statement is insulting to anyone who values knowledge, teaching it, and pursuing it. Perhaps you are not a native english speaker, but your statement is very easy to read as implying that only those who cannot do [what? research? engineering?] teach, and only those who are lousy teachers get tenure.
It is an indefensible position and your obvious hostility towards modern academia is unjustified. For one academics don't necessarily want to teach. But as a society we deemed that we will in essence force them to. Why? We need good teachers and goodness knows industry won't waste money on it, let alone have any sort of quality control. So we force these people who have devoted their lives to research to also teach.
As for tenure, it is often attacked as something protecting poor researchers. I think this notion is very much overblown. In modern times you cannot even get tenure before you are 35 or 40. If you look at those with tenure, the majority continue to do good work for the remainder of their careers. That aside, the main purpose of tenure is actually to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It exists to prevent management from dictating what people may research. It is to allow researchers to pursue risky or unpopular approaches.
Academics do what they do because they primarily enjoy research. Insinuating that they are incapable of doing this simply because they also teach and are granted the protection of tenure is very insulting.