Does more affordable college = more degrees = less value?

[Foxscotch]

Maintaining a robot isn't exactly the same. Even maintenance requires some sort of schooling. The robots are taking all the entry level jobs.

right, and with affordable (or better yet free) college education, more people will be able to do those jobs who want to do them

I think that the end result we should be looking for is a world where the only work people have to do is work they want to do
we've certainly got quite a ways to go, but every step towards that is a good step to make
nobody's passionate about serving food to people through a drive-thru window*. but the person who was doing that before a robot took their place may very well be passionate about machines and computers

*and you know what, if someone is, they should be able to do that too. just remove one of the robots and let them do their thing

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[Kingdaro]

Reply to OP: Wouldn't it instead mean higher education standards? As in, "if you're going in for free, you'd better damn well keep your grades up" is the perspective I foresee from educators. And I didn't really read through the whole of the thread, so I dunno if this has been said already.

[$trinick]

I see your point, however I think that at a certain point it becomes prohibitive to take in more students, because obviously as you increase the size of your campus you need to spend huge amounts of money on construction and upkeep, and more staff, etc etc... And at some point either you won't be able to expand anymore due to either lack of space or costs, and you'll have to either move elsewhere or expand off-campus, which students HATE, and probably will be turned off from the college because of. If you were in an area where you could theoretically expand as much as you wanted, yeah, I could see them getting a lot bigger, but I don't see why they wouldn't have already done that, and I don't see it affecting the number of diplomas given to the point where it would decrease wages.

Colleges are currently experiencing an economic boom. Higher education classrooms across the US are packed like sardines because of the ease of availability of student loans. Online colleges or general low quality colleges are everywhere and advertise everywhere because there's so much money in education. I've never seen a college campus that wasn't currently adding more classrooms or upgrading features of their campus. For colleges, it's a time of prosperity because almost anyone can get a student loan to attend, so they make a killing by filling classes that used to have 50 kids in them with 300. For smaller classrooms that can't accommodate that many, they add three more rows so that you have to walk sideways to get through the aisle to your seat. They bump estimated graduation date from four years to five or six because they accept more people than they can fit in their classes, making it impossible to get into all the classes needed to graduate in 4 years. Plus, it works out better in every way for them because then they get an extra year or two of tuition out of each student.

I seriously doubt that scam colleges would become a big thing too. If they're properly regulated and only give accreditation to non-scammy ones, I don't see that being all that profitable. Yeah, you'll catch a few people but most are going to see right through it.

Scam colleges are already a thing, and they're difficult to argue against legally because they are providing an education, it's just that the quality of their education is as low as legally available.