If colleges provide a service that's worth the price they have to charge, they'll stick around. But arguing that we should avoid credentials and vocational school because they could compete with college is like wanting to ban hybrids because you look forward to driving an SUv, and figure that if hybrids become too popular, SUVs will be obsolete and you won't get one. A rational person would ask why your preference for SUVs over hybrids should force everyone else to be wasteful.
But what if everybody (or almost everybody) prefers SUVs? And I guess we need to extend the analogy a little more: what if everybody needs a car, and their parents are buying them one, and the parents choose primarily based on cost, and hybrids cost less? But everybody wants an SUV. Maybe everybody wants an SUV to the extent that they'd be willing to personally pay for the difference in price, if they had the money. Oh, and maybe the SUVs are actually better for the environment.
The point of the analogy was that you are trying to say that you have so looked forward to the old, stupid, obsolete system that you'd like to hold progress back a few years so you can experience it. I think that's ridiculous, and that if we were talking about how you wanted to manufacture buggy whips or VCRs, it would be obvious that getting in the way of cars and DVDs would not be worth it.
If you can give me some reason that the existence of something that performs most of the functions of college, but that is cheap enough to be a viable opportunity for people who work, or people who want to get their credentials faster or whatever, is such a threat to college that it must be stopped -- but college, despite its vulnerability to better ideas, is still worth keeping around -- I'd like to hear about it.
But that might be convoluted. So here's what I would ask: if we had the credentialing system and no college, how would you pitch the concept of a modern college to the typical VC?
