Then invent a new credential system and you will be plenty wealthy. i have heard people murmuring about one.
All a credential is is something you've done in the past which implies your ability to do something in the future.
Graduating with a degree in Econ from Harvard implies that you might be a good consultant for McKinsey. Founding Facebook implies you might be a good founder for a future effort. Having a great GitHub project implies you might be a good programmer for some simliar tasks.
There probably exists a spectrum of opinions on whether the credential is useful because of the vetting or the experience of the actual program. Candidly, I think that YC probably has a value add in attendance. Higher education? Not generally, no. I have a $140,000 degree (two, technically) which basically certifies that at 18 years old I was smart enough to get into my university and then, for the next four years, I did not die or fail to sign my loan docs. I know I learned some things of value in those four years, but I could just as easily have written myself a course of study with zero commercial potential, and my degree would say the same thing in a language 99.998% of Americans can't even read anyway. (East Asian Studies degree written in... Latin?!
The problem with higher ed is that if there is value add they make it impossible to know. Try to get outgoing metrics, besides grad rates, of outgoing undergrads and its near impossible. Professional schools do a better job of this.
For example, I'd love to see income distributions by university/major. The universities themselves cannot be trusted to provide it in any accurate fashion[1], but mining it from a large sample of graduates would be much better and less biased.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=1&#...
YC, TechStars, Thiel, etc. are awesome signals for those who achieve them just as Harvard, Stanford and MIT are but I think the real juice is in the alternatives for those who don't fall into the top 1% of 1% who simply wish to prove their knowledge and abilities without having to drop six figures in the process.
> However, it isn't unreasonable to see a situation in
> which follower counts on sites like Github, Dribbble,
> Quora, etc. do become scalable ways of signaling. They
> aren't perfect indicators of ability or knowledge but
> then again, neither are college degrees
Just have a look at the SO superstars -- none of them are auto-hires for all situations. You'd need to evaluate them individually and carefully. Presumably to a degree that makes their community rating superfluous.
The problem seems to be that "a Github account" only exists for software development. For almost every other field that college covers, there's no equivalent. And the vast majority of college students aren't CS majors.
That point is pretty high tho'. The thing is, that people who don't hire people usually don't understand, is that programming experience that organizations are interested in is only experience of programming to external requirements under external constraints, because that is what working programmers do, e.g. "write a program to do X on system Y by time Z", where none of those things are what you would have chosen yourself. Which is why it's a really bad idea to put on your CV that you've had 10 years experience when you're 21, the guy interviewing you has 10 years actual experience and he'll not be impressed.
If regional schools received such a blow, why did their tuitions radically increase right in line with the Ivies' increases?
Also in response to, "the reason why it's a bubble is also what keeps it afloat;" there is no quantification there--what would the tuition numbers have to be before this statement didn't apply? Will it key applying no matter what, even if there was an increase that put tuitions, say, beyond the lifetime earning capacity of the average college graduate?
But I agree with you that future online community reputations can improve the situation.