The less traditional your career path, the more flexibility you have for how to get there. Advances in technology, particularly computers, have certainly lowered the costs of start-ups and forming new businesses.A nice essay by Paul Graham about the effects of making start-ups easier says that one effect will be changes in our education system:
Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think [correctly] they need to get good grades to impress employers.
A world in which lawyers are forever judged by the law school they attended, which greatly surprised a lawyer friend of mine. If you can leave college to start a company, your professors have less power over you. One more way the Web is like the printing press, which led to a vast reduction in the power of the Catholic Church. The printing press made it much easier to start new religions.
As anyone who has taken Econ 101 can tell you, lower prices mean greater frequency. As tuition prices rise and the price of starting businesses falls, I'd expect to see more people trying to start companies and fewer people in school. I think Arnold Kling made this point once, but I can't seem to find the link.
Read Seth Robert's post For whom do colleges exist? and see my previous post The Value of Formal Education.
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