I remember when it first occurred to me that there was little barrier for tuition prices to keep rising in America. If they increased, students would just be expected to take out more loans.  Even as it is now, students are taking out loans far greater that anything they’ve dealt with before.  There is no intuition for what $40,000+ is.  Something felt predatory about lending people so young this much money.

I like groups like Sprouts for challenging the traditional education system.  They are focused on learning becoming something beyond institutions, to become something integrated deeply in one’s life.  They are focused more on creating a community than creating profits- and they are sustaining themselves.

Recently, Peter Thiel, of PayPal, introduced his plan to create a fellowship for students to leave college and pursue their start up dream.  He was motivated from his realization of our education bubble:

Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.

It is stigmatized to not go to college- which is now resulting in students starting their lives out of school with mounds of debt.  I believe a college education is immensely important- but I hope such programs challenge the consensus that it is the only path a student can take.