Majoring in Hackademics: The UnCollege

College debt across the US has skyrocketed to near $1 trillion, risking a catastrophic financial bubble when it bursts. At the same time, the benefit a student derives from a four year college degree is falling off, year by year.

Minyanville

The diverging trends are taking a toll on students and recent grads. Student loan delinquency rates now exceed those of credit card, mortgage, and all other types of consumer debt. And many indebted grads are being forced to delay buying homes, having children, and saving for retirement.

The situation is causing many experts to warn of a student loan bubble that could burst much like the housing market did in 2008. Howard Dvorkin, author of Credit Hell, told The Fiscal Times last month: “It's hard to predict when the student loan meltdown could occur, but if the bubble explodes, the consequences will be devastating for the economy.” _Minyanville

NYT

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to “hacking” higher education.

...UnCollege advocates a D.I.Y. approach to higher education and spreads the message through informational “hackademic camps.” “Hacking,” in the group’s parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends. Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt might consider enrolling in a technology boot camp, where you can learn to write code in 8 to 10 weeks for about $10,000, Mr. Stephens said.

THEY can also nourish their minds from a growing menu of Internet classrooms, including the massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which stream classes from elite universities like Princeton. This guerrilla approach hits home with young people who came of age seeking out valuable content free on Napster and BitTorrent.

Mr. Stephens, a dropout from Hendrix College in Arkansas (he later earned a Thiel Fellowship), started UnCollege less than two years ago, and already its Web site attracts 20,000 unique visitors a month. “I get on scale of 10 to 15 e-mails a day from people who say something along lines of, ‘I thought I was the only one out there who thought about education like this, I don’t feel crazy anymore,’ ” he said.

There are other groups, too, like Enstitute, which offers two-year apprenticeships with entrepreneurs in lieu of college, and Zero Tuition College, an online support network for students looking for alternatives.

The goal is not to foment for a mass exodus from the ivy halls, Mr. Stephens said, but to open people’s minds to a different set of opportunities. _NYT

Children need to be trained in the many arts of making money long before they reach college age. Children schooled in The Dangerous Child Method will acquire the skills to support themselves financially at least three different ways -- and they will know how to manage the money for its best utility as well.

The US government educational system isolates children from a very young age from real world responsibility and avoids teaching them vital real life skills which they will need when they are out on their own. Each stage of education kicks the can down the road a little further, expecting that the next level of education will fill in the gaps. Sadly, parents are complicit in this massive scam of the "educators," and then they wonder why their children move back in with them -- unmarried, unable to find work, without meaningful skills or competencies.

The trend toward general indebted incompetency is one that the government welcomes -- because it gives governments new excuses to expand to new areas of oversight and responsibility, while taking away or restricting more individual responsibility. Time is running out on this misguided culture of psychological neotenates and lifelong incompetents.