How Western Governors University Will End the Insanity at American Colleges...Sort Of

A long time ago a fan of mine put me onto WGU or "Western Governors University."  It is an online college that charges less than half the national average in tuition, it's accredited, it allows you to study from the comforts of your own home (or anywhere, really), you don't have to commute, pay for parking, walk in the cold, get falsely accused of rape, attend marxist indoctrination seminars on "diversity" or "privilege," take worthless pre-requisite classes, or pay idiotic "student service fees."   It (along with ASU online) is one of the first accredited colleges to do one simple thing that:

banks
brokerages
music
movies
energy companies
retailers

and nearly every other sector of the economy has managed to do these past 20 years.

Offer their service online.

Of course, colleges have absolutely no incentive to go online even though their product (education) is ideally suited (i.e. - a service, not a physical tangible product) to be sold over the internet.  Because if they did start offering accredited degrees over the internet, nearly everyone in higher education would lose their jobs and have to go find real ones in the real world instead of teaching.

One excellent professor can deliver a superior seminar or lecture to millions of students over the internet for a fraction of the cost it would take thousands of inferior in-classroom professors to do so.

You certainly don't need student centers, dorms, sports arenas, safe spaces, classrooms or any other physical buildings, let alone the land or infrastructure required for a college campus.  Just some servers and IT staff.

And all those college administrators, professors, diversity counselors, diversity directors, directors of inclusion, dorm managers, coaching staffs, student aid officers, janitors, counselors, and consultants?  Gone.  Again replaced with...well...some servers and IT staff.

If you think about it, the cost of college tuition should be approaching zero.  It's just so few colleges dare to offer accredited degrees online that what few entrants there are can still charge a pretty penny (though half the cost...and 1/100th the hassle and brainwashing...of that of physical schools).

According to economics this less costly, less painful, and ultimately superior product should cause a mass exodus from America's traditional colleges and universities and into the new online ones.  This exodus I believe would also be doubly encouraged by the never-ending price increases in physical colleges' tuition and the fact the upcoming generation of college students (Gen Y) have spent their entire lives online.  And though we won't know for sure until it happens, it's almost as obvious that today's physical colleges are as outdated and obsolete as the horse and buggy, the typewriter, newspapers, and ESPN.

There's just one problem.

Tell today's college bound kids that.

The truth is we...well...don't tell the youth the truth.  We lie to them.  Every day we tell them they "have to go to college."  That the "key to success is college."  By god, if you don't go to college you'll end up poor, alone, and (GASP!) not as successful as your peers!  And you don't want that do you?

But there is something else much more fundamental going that adults, parents, and people-you-shouldn't-trust-because-they're-over-30 don't understand.  And that is we have created such a hopeless, prison-like environment in the K-12 education system that these kids literally have NOTHING ELSE in life to look forward to than college.  We don't teach them about the trades.  We don't teach them about potentially joining the military.  We don't teach them about homeownership, repair, housekeeping, having kids or the American dream.  And I don't know one family that sits their kids down and tries to teach them about the importance of love, friends, family, and their future, giving them a kernel of hope there's something better for them in life than "just more school."  This myopic focus on college ensures that young people today view college more like a young lady views her wedding day than they do an incredibly expensive and important financial investment in their future.  And thus a fair amount of college-bound kids do not view college as an education, but a birthright entitlement called "The College Experience."

This will cause a split between America's college-bound.

Serious kids who want to invest in a real education that will increase their lifetime earnings.

and

Defeated kids who, lacking real guidance and upbringing from their parents and teachers, just want to escape to The Promised Land of Canaan College for the "college experience."

And this is how the insanity at America's colleges will end...more or less.

With physical colleges being unable to compete for the real college students, their attendances will drop, their revenues drop, and the quality and caliber of their students will drop.  Again, this won't happen over night (and online colleges will have to start offering more STEM and engineering degrees if they wish to accelerate this process), but it is already happening.  Tuition is getting so expensive it's forcing kids to look for cheaper alternatives, plus the internet is exposing higher education for the racket it is, not to mention breaking the information monopoly the old "Baby Boomer Era" of professors, teachers, and deans held in analog days over their students.  The worthlessness of many college degrees is becoming apparent and alternatives to attending the "big university" are becoming increasingly well-known to college-age youth.

But this exodus will not only leave traditional, physical college with less money, but it will also leave them with the poorer-quality students.  The mere "dreamers."  The "college experience" students.  The pot-smokers.  Those who don't take their studies seriously and largely major in worthless subjects to post-pone adulthood for another 4-8 years, perhaps their entire lives by becoming professors themselves.  This will not only result in physical colleges becoming more hostile towards serious students (protests, made up student fees, forcing people to attend "sensitivity training, accusing people of privilege, etc.) and thus further driving them into the arms of online colleges, but it will highlight to the world just what a mentally insane (and ultimately worthless) environment physical colleges have become.  Combine this with the internet, and the DAILY insanity is hilariously/tragically chronicled for all the world to see.

What's worse for physical colleges, however, is while all the world will witness their mental and childish behavior, they are so inoculated in their precious world of academia they're completely unaware how they're driving students away.  And thus, they will not only continue this insane, even hate filled behavior, but turn it up to 11...then 12, then 13, then 50, inevitably deterring even the most brainwashed of students because it will have turned into nothing but a radical, hate-filled cult of leftist, mentally damaged inferiors.  Alas, slowly, but surely, physical colleges will no longer be bastions of true diverse and independent thought, with 10's of thousands of students, but poorly-attended liberal arts colleges that the world will make fun of...and never hire from.

In the end we will never get rid of the allure of "The College Experience."  There will always be mis-informed kids who were so ill-raised they will have nothing else "but" in their lives.  But with the power of the internet, both in terms of the nearly-free education it can deliver and its ability to expose just what a toxic and worthless institution American higher education has become, we can maybe start saving generations of youth from making the crippling mistake of paying for overpriced worthless degrees instead of feeding them to the meatgrinder of Big Education.
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