Why Online Education Won't Replace College—Yet

"It's happened before. A college education used to be a rare thing. It was so rare that having one guaranteed you a job. But as incomes rose, more and more people started going to college. A bachelor's degree isn't exceptional anymore; it's expected."

This is a pretty common notion among those who have gone to college or are planning to. It's also definitely not true. While the latter part is, college degrees are often expected, I don't think anyone can frame ~30% of the adult population as any sort of overwhelming majority.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Education...

That said, the relative effects of the consistent increase in supply of college educated adults has clearly had an effect on the job market, and Bachelor's degrees are increasingly used as filters in hiring where they may not have been before, but it's fairly common to take this data point and extrapolate into unwarranted places, like arbitrarily reducing the number of people who go to college to enforce scarcity.