5 Reasons Why Your Kid Won't Go to College
March 03 2008 / by Alvis Brigis / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Social Issues Year: 2020 Rating: 19
As accelerating change transforms the way we learn, innovate and
network, traditional social institutions will be forced to adjust.
Some will successfully make the transition, most won’t.
Universities, in particular, will need to completely re-think their models as youth are lured away by new income and actualization opportunities.
While it’s possible that some schools will be able to change with the times, here are 5 compelling reasons why your kid (born in 2002) probably won’t be going away to college in 2020:
1. Prevalence of Teenage Millionaires: With more and more people making money online, an explosion of user-generated content platforms like Second Life and Spore and the ongoing rise in value of human capital, a boom in teenage millionaires will be old news by 2020. Pressured by their peers to roll the dice and strike it rich, kids will opt out of college and probably even high school. Parents will be loving it.
2. Distributed Distance Learning: People are already taking classes via virtual worlds. By 2020 there will be millions of rich, interactive courses offered online. This will allow kids to learn from anyone anywhere and will moot campus-based learning.
3. Pervasive Education: The advent of the semantic web, Artificial Intelligence and new learning software will mean that kids are effectively attending college at every moment of their lives.
4. Corporate Poachers: Google is already tapping into the middle school market via contests. 2020 will see companies more aggressively recruiting kids straight out of high school and paying them to learn while on the job.
5. Enhanced Info Input: Brain implants, new attention mastery techniques, powerful learning software and better understanding of brain development will conspire to let kids learn much more in a shorter span. To the average future kid, the current notion of college will feel like swimming through a pool of molasses.
While this doesn’t mean you should hop on a plane and go blow your kid’s college fund in Vegas, it does suggest that at some point you may want to consider allocating some of it to alternative learning programs and new technologies. As our environment undergoes changes, so too must the methods and structure we employ to teach our youth to navigate it.
