The higher education bubble has burst. The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.
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"Will Education be the Next Bubble to Burst?" The Chronicle of Higher Education 5/22:
Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.
[Hat tip: Freakonomics]
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I, too, am beginning to question the value of higher ed. I spent a night teaching myself genomics through videos and articles all over the web, and when you can customize something like this to your own knowledge -- pausing videos to look up something on Wikipedia or whatever -- I probably gained a much deeper understanding than I ever would have in a classroom lecture. The one thing that's missing is a professor to provide feedback on what I've learned, but this, too, would not be hard to solve with the web.
