Yet again, the free market prevails (assuming it still exists...).

An excellent, uplifting read to start the week off. Now, if we could only do something about the other half of the equation...that public school education problem!

Which is why the left is so intent on destroying it, #1.

Anyone who spends a dime on college is a fool.

#2 - home school and parochial schools.

I´m not sure about home schooled engineers and doctors. I think that might prove impractical.

We spend too much on education. In higher education we mostly turn out people who are no better equipped for the job market than the day they enter college.

I am only for money for STEM degrees. Most of the liberal arts studies are taken by students that will never use anything they learn. The college experience was just a hobby for them. The number of students attending college should drop to 25% of current rate.

The "education" establishment is nothing but a Socialist/Communist consipracy to indoctrinate the young.

As soon as the Unions and all their supposed educational crap are removed and the Libs are all fired can we hope to recover from the Socialist/Communist Conspiracy to take over Education, the Media, The govt., and Society in general.

The greatest service taxpayers could perform for the nation would be to allow young people to get a job without getting a government license. Academia is where the hippies landed after they came down from their acid trips, and they turned campuses into Stalinist brainwashing camps. Cut off the money.

Your local Vo-Tech school or community college is the best and most cost-effective education today. If Universities concentrated on the courses that actually went along with your degree and didn´t require all the fluff garbage, that would be more cost-effective also. Not everyone should go to college. The requirement standards to enter college have been lowered over the past 30 years so more could attend. When the standards are lowered, then the ending product is also of lower quality.

If a kid really wants to get an education, there are colleges out there (the College of the Ozarks in Missouri comes to mind) where you can work your way through. Companies are waiting in line to hire the graduates from these colleges because they already have a good work ethic.

Several good points in the article: College-Progressive complex; technical/vocational training as an alternative (actor John Ratzenberger - who played "Cliff" from Cheers - has been pushing this for a while); and on-line alternatives. He left out another: breaking up "universities" and having individual colleges stand or fall on their own merits and value.

The left lives in a fantasy world. Without fact-based infrastrucutre to support their insane world view, they always collapse.

The engineering, science and medical schools still are turning out people capable of rational thought and able to contribute to the economy at a level higher than before they entered college.

Most of the rest is useless claptrap and SHOULD fall by the wayside, but I wonder how quickly it actually will. Perhaps the most directly destructive are the education colleges, turning out hordes of disfunctional teachers. The few good teachers I know confide that they conciously compartmentalized the obvious garbage being taught so as to not damage their thinking processes and ability to actually teach. Unfortunately, all of them have been driven out of teaching by the insanity and bureaucracy.

FTA: A decade from now, why will someone bother sitting in a huge lecture hall listening to some second-string professor drone on and on when he can download a lecture by a Nobel Prize winner for free? “Bueller, Bueller, Bueller” is going to be replaced by logging in when and where it’s convenient.

Mr. Schlichter is correct in saying that colleges and universities as we now know them are dinosaurs. If you want a degree in, say, general or organic chemistry, you´ll have to do your work on a university campus with the necessary laboratory facilities.

But most courses can be, and soon will be, shifted into cyberspace, causing tuitions to plummet and employment for professors and teaching assistants of underwater lesbian basketweaving and counter-patriarchal theory to dry up and blow away.

Tuition at Vanderbilt University (my alma mater) has gone up approximately ninefold since my graduation year of 1977. Textbooks for which I used to pay $15 can cost as much as $350, apiece, now. It´s been a nice racket, but education is about to face the brave new world.

(I am currently "taking" a 48 DVD lecture course on music appreciation, and learning a lot that I didn´t know. You´re never too old to go back to school, even if that school is located in your den.)