I expect word will get around about the "coasting", making it worthless.

With the wealth of knowledge available, and the slow improvement of online learning, I hope we stop treating college as the place to discover things and improve our knowledge. It’s sometimes an okay way to do it, but is generally one of the least efficient ways in the modern world.

With a basic foundation in a topic, Wikipedia and open journals are much more valuable learning places than a lecture hall or study group. Those basic foundations should be built much earlier in primary education.

Do they though? In most parts of the world academics are not well paid relative to what they can get in the private sector. Even for most liberal arts subjects you can get paid more to produce good entertainment or good books than you'd get in the academy.

You can become a master programmer with no degree at all. Look at all the successful CEOs who dropped out.

One my best friend used to run a top architecture firm and he himself was highschool dropout, he had team of architects and engineers to get his wildest imaginations passed by government's approval.

Case in point, being if you've real value to offer. Absence of that degree or paper will never come in your way.