A past student of mine (and now a good friend) Alankar Pednekar shared a video with me recently.

Alankar mentions how at around the 10:15 mark in this video, an article is cited which speaks about how a certificate like this could potentially disrupt the college degree.

He had some questions about the video, and about the article. I answer them below (please note that I have lightly edited his questions for clarity. Any confusions that remain are down to me!):

1. Logically speaking this sounds true, but is it really possible? Do you see this happening sometime soon, maybe?
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   It’s already happening, of course. I wrote about it earlier, and you might also want to take a look at Lambda School, or STOA School. In different ways, the idea of college is being challenged. And if you ask me, it is high time it was challenged! Higher education has remained far too hide-bound for far too long, and technology, resistance to outdated ways of teaching and weirdly, the pandemic have made all of us aware of what is possible, if only we kept our minds open.
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2. Will there be any scenario where – there won’t be any “Middle Men”- The colleges – in the education sector (As Professor Tyler and Professor Alex debate about in one of their “Duels”), and companies would prefer to educate (or should I say ‘Train’?) to people who are willing to learn and hire them directly?
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   Part of the answer lies in we not being clear about what we’re buying when we pay money to a college for higher education.
   For some folks (in many places, at least in India, these folks are the majority), higher education is about a job, and that is it. Of course, it is impolite to admit this in public, but this is the stark truth: higher education is about a job. Contrast the enthusiasm with which placement talks are planned and attended with regular classes in your own college if you are a student, for example.
   For other people, higher education is about higher education – that is, about learning for its own sake. Until colleges, students, parents and firms acknowledge that this difference exists, we will have the confused system that we live in right now. This really deserves book length treatment, but I’ll stop here for now.
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3. Assuming this happens in reality, will that be an end of colleges and universities, or they will get replaced by training centers (which we already see in today’s markets). Will there be any existence for pure joy of learning and immense pleasure of understanding things around us (even though they might not directly help us in anything)?
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   Training centres exist today to train people to write exams to get into colleges. And colleges are viewed as a way to get jobs. So why not have training centres to get people jobs?
   That then leaves us free to have colleges be about “the pure joy of learning”, as both David Perell and Alankar point out. The trick, if you ask me, lies in unbundling college. You should be able to purchase courses rather than degrees.
   The trouble is that a blogpost is easy to write, and to change a system that we are all so used to is all but impossible to do.
   But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. College as it exists today solves efficiently neither the problem of training people well for jobs in the real world, nor the problem of delivering quality education for its own sake. And the growing discontent is palpable.
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   Palpable to me, at any rate.