Self-directed education more valuable than a college degree in the job market?

Is having a college or university diploma still the avenue to a well-paying job or is the ability to access information technology enabling job seekers to bypass costly higher education that may leave them in debt for years to come?

A self-employed business that involves a real trade like plumbing, electrical, housing repair and the like is the real up and comer in my book.

At least until Obama has choked off all self-driven work, it will remain so. Opportunity to manipulate taxes, self-direction and satisfaction.

The only problem with it is that it involves hard work.

My brother in law is a plumber...the only time he’s lost money is when he did my house plumbing (all copper pipes) and when he comes over to my house to fix stuff. Guy carries around a wad of bills in his pocket you wouldn’t believe.

I have to reciprocate with him on electrical and electronic repair work.

I have a particular interest in this subject given the fact that I have 4 grandchildren approaching college age a lot faster than I would like.

One of these grandchildren, currently age 12, is attending a “virtual school”. That translates to 3 days of a school that has a strong computer learning focus and 2 days that are more or less self directed. You make a plan, the teacher approves and you carry out the plan. You learn to manage your time and you move at your own pace.

There is a very big focus on using the Internet as a learning tool. The Kids are taught how to use Word, Excel, Google, YouTube and whatever and are required to learn video editing.

For me this is a very interesting experiment. It just seems impossible, given the information that we have at our fingertips, that there won’t be a huge difference in the way kids learn going foreward.

The catch is, as some have already noted, will the kids do it. Do they have the discipline?

My personal observation: The Asian kids will.

The rest? Many but not all.

In my particular case I’m not worried. My Grandkids are very hip to computer learning even if it is just figuring out how to build things with Minecraft and finding their way around Google and YouTube. The tools are there. I think they will do OK.

You need SOME way of proving you have the skills and knowledge. A local branch campus of a state university may be much more sensible than forking over tens of thousands of dollars for some just-as-liberal private school that is just as filled with lecture-center classes. Obviously, that depends a LOT on the quality of the branch campus. There’s nothing wrong with being the best student in a class that wasn’t terribly selective; You’ll probably get the professor’s attention when you may have been anonymous in a flagship state university campus.

But I would definitely say that the $40,000 you’ll shell out just for Room & Board & meals to go AWAY to college is NOT worth it. And the $80,000 that many private colleges charge just for being private is NOT worth it.

“But I want to have the best professors!” Screw that. You’ll never see much of any of the “best” professors as an undergraduate.

Can you do it without going to college at all? Well, if you’re getting a college education for $20,000 total, instead of $160,000 total, you’re probably better off paying that much more reasonable cost. A liberal-arts background (that means math, science, literatire, history, philosophy, music and theology, as general-education courses, and NOT simply some useless humanities or social deconstruction program as a major) is very much worth it. Also, you can probably learn a second field through on-line courses very well if you are an adult who has already “learned how to learn,” but you can’t really replace access to a library, mentor, classmates, etc., for a college experience.

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