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Unless the online degrees can signal prestige they'll never be seen as official by employers. Traditional Employers don't actually care about what impractical academic stuff you learned. They like that "you're like me" and that's what college really serves as: the Harry potter sorting hat.

It's time we do something else though. Paying 100k just to signal to employers your socioeconomic background is bankrupting everyone.

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Yeah. Some other angles on this would be "people who are able to go 4-6 years without needing an income" and below the top-end "people who have living parents and/or family members/people who receive(d) familial support." The system we have here in the US is a fantastic way to exclude potentially very smart people form non-traditional and poor backgrounds from pursuing higher education. Contrast all this with the Danish model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_Denmark

Seems like there's a lot we could learn from a system like that.

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