Right. I get annoyed by articles like this because they get so excited by the technology and the product itself that they ignore the basic issue with Higher Ed - it's not in the business of education, it's in the business of signaling.
I did undergrad at Columbia, a supposedly "elite" institution, and it was a joke. Classes weren't what I would describe as educational - a better image would be some big corporate bureaucratic job where the solution to every problem is obvious but you have to spend a lot of time time figuring out just how, precisely, to flatter your superiors. Maybe if you're being cynical you could say that's the best education you can get, but I wasn't impressed.
What Columbia does give, and what apparently holds a lot of water, is an semi-official grant of being Better Than Everyone Else. It's ridiculous that kids who learned nothing are rented out by consulting firms for a quarter million a year to come into a company they have no familiarity with and have all the answers to everything, but they get away with it because they're Better Than Everyone Else. Of course a piece of paper doesn't make you competent, and the compiler doesn't care where you went to school, but there are so many times you rely on someone else's positive appraisal of you (hiring, funding) that brand name has a massive impact. It's turtles all the way down, too. The University of Illinois is more prestigious than Illinois State, but who actually knows which is better at teaching?
The current problem with higher ed is that for most purposes in the current economy it just functions as a class system. You're the kind of person who went to an Ivy League schol, you get this kind of job. You're the kind of person who went to flagship state school? You can't get that job, but you can get another that's no so bad. You went to University of Phoenix? Let me tell you about this one weird trick housewives are using to make money from home.
The courses you took in a University hold merit in the system. Other people in University can evaluate you better by knowing which classes you pass or fail, because they know the difficulty of said classes. It works well in a closed system. But if you ask someone who hasn't even been to the school to evaluate a student, how are they. supposed do it? Yet so many people do when they hire out of college.
