alt Hacker NewsYou're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm saying. Maybe you learned that in academia?
You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe.
So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.
Eh, I teach in a university and that experience makes me extremely skeptical of most high-school graduates' ability to get an education from online resources. If you can do that, great, it's certainly a much cheaper and convenient route. I don't think we should discriminate against people who got their education that way. But most people need more structure and expert guidance.