Universities don't need to be more affordable. They need to not exist.

The vast majority of people that attend university do not need to do to get a job. They go because they feel it is a necessary step to become an "adult", or because they don't know what else to do with their life. Education is important to a certain point; but past that it is a system of hazing and initiation that exists largely to create network effects and signal. <br><br>The sooner we as a society can acknowledge that universities are a waste of time for the vast majority of people that attend them (and for the world at large) the better off we will be. Instead of trying to fix a broken and archaic system we should be working on destroying it. <br><br>The vast majority of people that get degrees from universities will never use them. This applies for everything outside of technical degrees and maybe some humanities, though that is questionable these days. <br><br>Most people that get degrees will neither earn anymore money, nor get a job that requires that degree. If you need a degree to get a job, it's usually because the degree is some technical skill (like engineering or Yoga, I guess).<br><br>I will go a step further; most people that have a job that requires a degree, do not actually need that degree. It is simply a filter that employers can use to make hiring a simpler and more cost effective process. <br><br>Hell; a college education doesn't even correlate with success. The most successful people in the world are often uneducated as hell, or have been kicked out of school because it was too tedious for them. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard. <br><br>The most valuable thing about Universities is access to education. With the advent of the internet, there is no reason that anyone can't self-direct their own education. Most people that attend university don't even do this anyway, they go to college and then realize they have no idea what they want to do with their life and then change their major Y times until they either graduate with a degree in something they have no desire to do or they dropout. <br><br>Why bother? If you want to learn about a topic you have an infinite amount of material and information available to you at any time to do so; you don't need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for that access. <br><br>At this point, I feel like the only reason we keep universities is for the social and cultural experience that they provide. We need to stop glorifying them as bastions of knowledge, and start viewing them for what they are: a place for young people to go to YOLO the first time they are away from their parents while meeting new people and making friends and connections that they will have for life. <br><br>The signal that universities provide to employers also needs to go. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out. Right now, employers view a college degree as a way to filter out people that are lazy or stupid or unmotivated; because "anybody can get a degree". The problem is that anybody CAN get a degree. Many people that are not clever enough or not driven enough or do not have the support necessary to get through college still manage to get through it. On the other hand; there are plenty of people that don't have the money or the desire or the support to go to college, but are very intelligent and hardworking. <br><br>In an ideal world; an employer would Y on the job training to anybody they hired that could demonstrate that they had the capacity to learn and were motivated enough to work hard. They would pay them for the time they were in training, just as they would pay a student, and then they could see how valuable that person would be as an employee by assessing their actual job performance. <br><br>In my opinion; this system would be better for everyone. The student wouldn't have a massive amount of debt as they entered into the workforce, which would help the economy as a whole and would encourage them to take more risks with their career. The employer could hire more people, because it would be cheaper and would allow them to be more selective with their hiring. The education system as a whole would benefit, because there would be more money available for students that actually wanted to "learn". Employers would hire more apprentices instead of students.