However, we have nothing reliable to replace sitting in school and passing classes for four years. Any sort of testing credential system will be open to rampant cheating. Microsoft and other test based certification providers spend a small fortune to stop cheating, and they still have terrible problems.

MOOCs are currently a joke, just an online lecture system—and in the end, to be useful as certification, they’ll need a test. See above paragraph.

The real problem is that we’re sending way too many people to college, because we can’t use the usual cognitive standards without basically eliminating college as an option for 70-80% of blacks and Hispanics.

The value of the ivies is primarily peer effects. So long as they remain the best place to hang out with other brilliant, financially well-endowed people they’ll still be a good deal, even if they cost 250k+.

The bottom 85% basically sell peer-effect and exclusivity illusion and people are slowly coming around to the fact that the emperor has no clothes. I think they’ll start to see their enrollments plummet (a lot of them already have) and they’ll either be forced to close if they’re private, consolidate into large state conglomerates if they’re public, or change their function as the higher educational system evolves to a more networked model with different universities serving more narrowly defined functions rather than the individual fiefdoms they are today.

Well, students want status for themselves too. And anyway, people are always going to want some to signal status, so what alternative will pop up that’s as salient and compelling and has that impressive, instantly recognizable name-recognition?

I can see, for example, how Dartmouth can collapse and fall from the graces of the top-10, but there will always be some equivalent of an A-list that people want to get on.

What I hope doesn’t happen is that it causes a singularity of singular star teachers in each field who charge exhorbitant fees for the class.

As for peer effects, there’s a world where this could be achieved for much cheaper – with Minerva like entities providing status and peer effects for a lower cost.