Future of Education

Recently tech giants like Google, Apple, Netflix,Tesla have announced that they would not make 4 year college degree mandatory for employment in their companies. This has brought back the debate of relevance of college education in the age of MOOCs, Startups and automation.

While it is difficult to generalize but at least for computer science it seems you can easily get away without a traditional 4 degree college degree by doing the following

1. Programming skills : MOOCs like Udemy, Coursera are best to learn programming languages, frameworks. The online courses are cheap, up-to-date and are best of the best. E.g. a student from India can take Java Master class from Tim Buchalka on Udemy for Rs 500 or less. I bet you will not find a local Java training class this cheap, neither will you find a trainer as experienced as Tim Buchalka.
2. Labs : With hardware becoming cheap and almost everyone having a laptop , dependency on college/universities for labs is almost nil. Students can practice & hone their coding skills at many coding challenges sites. These sites provide you to learn or compete with the best and in a lot ways help you prepare for the job interviews.
3. Books : Today on web for any given topic, you will find tons and tons of resources in form of articles, blogs and books. Imagine a curated reading list of books, blogs available freely to all students who want to build their careers in comp science. For example in this blog, Aman captures a list of comp science books non CS students should read to maximize their chances of getting hired by a tech company. Imagine students taking a course of Software Engineering reading classics like The Mythical Man month along with master pieces like Code Complete , students pursuing Computational theory class reading books like The Information that captures the ‘history of information’ in such a delightful way.
4. Startup : Whether you are pursing an engineering degree or doing your MBA, doing your startup is the best and cheapest way to learn business. A typical MBA in USA may cost you $60K, imagine doing a startup with an investment of $30K, learning from doing this startup would be multi fold.
5. Role of colleges/universities in this new world : Colleges/Universities need to transform themselves as incubation centers promoting high end research and entrepreneurship & Professors need to transform themselves from instructors to mentors.