I think higher education in the near future might begin to look a little different than it does right now. People are starting to realize that going $100,000 into debt for a degree that is barely worth the paper its printed on might not be the best way to go. As evidence of this, look at the news stories lately with law students suing their schools because the job market is so poor that their degrees are useless to them.
As a practical matter, most college grads get jobs that do not require college education in order to perform. The vast majority of sales/management positions are “on the job” learning. Really, besides technical degrees, not many jobs actually directly use what is taught in the classroom. Between high school and college, I’ve probably taken thousands of hours worth of upper level math that was a pre-requisite, and it’s all totally useless to me. Anything beyond basic algebra is probably never going to be used by anyone besides an engineer or a programmer. Yet we have every student in the nation taking these classes for some reason. In the future, this will change.