The High-Heel Bubble never popped, and the Education Bubble may not either

But I suspect the result won't be a bubble popping, but merely a leveling off at a higher level.

I merely used the term "education bubble" as a way of referencing a continuing conversation.

Part of the reason I believe the education bubble is a bubble and will pop, is that the entire point of an accredited degree is to have a recognizable proxy for someone's intellectual capability. The ease at checking a person's ability prior to the internet and social media was in checking with their alma mater if they had the degree that they had and therefore if they were as capable as they claimed. Now it's even easier to check if someone has the intellectual capability by looking at their blog/github repo/facebook/twitter.

With that in mind, I think its only a matter of time before that starts to translate into educational institutions competing with industry for students.

A number of people made more money by being in the housing market than was made by those who sat the whole thing out. The bubble was a loss in total but applying an overall process to an individual decision is not the easy-call that the author glibly claims it to be. A person can easily determine that wearing high-heals will be harder on their body than wearing flats. The calculations concerning a house in 2004 were much more complex and the calculations concerning whether to get a college education in 2011 are also more complex.

It's a transparent abuse of analogy.

"Bubble" is short-hand for a self-reinforcing financial/psychological dynamic which drive irrational investment patterns. Not every trend is a bubble, not even every exponentially-expanding trend is a bubble. Cigarette smoking, for example, expanded exponentially to virtually every nation on earth once tobacco was moderately widespread level. Epidemics often follow exponential growth patterns too but are not "bubbles".

Bubble are specific to the investment process because the investment process is where prevailing beliefs can drive short-term prices but long-term prices requires more "fundamental" qualities. Just as much, since a bubble dynamic requires not just high but expanding prices, bubbles are limited, at the minimum, that total amount of investment funds of a society.

Now, it should be noted that the investors driving an "education bubble" are not the "education consumers" - these consumers don't even have any money! The real investors are the government and the educational institutions. Together, this group is shoveling money into the education system with the expectation of getting more back later, with interest. For-profit educational institutions add to this dynamic by allowing unlimited further money to enter into the equation. That government guarantees this racket and doesn't, itself, expect a profit, only heightens this "problematic dynamic" (like the home-loan scam only "pre-bailed out").