the necessity of college?

A post about families being forced to choose between paying for college and retirement savings.  This post concludes with easy acceptance of this situation.  I was in a homeschooling conference group talking about credentialing and monopoly many years ago and we were far more critical of the situation. 

Now that a college degree is a prerequisite to obtaining a decent job, voters should support candidates who will make increasing financial aid a priority and who are committed to investing in our nation’s higher education infrastructure.

We do not have to accept that the BA is a standard prerequisite to a good job.  In fact, accepting that a BA is a prerequisite to a good job, i.e., a job that can support a family, means accepting an unsustainable system not driven from the grassroots but from a corporate-school alliance that makes good jobs manufacturing people.  It means citizens will not only pay taxes for a public system of education, expensively run with a top-down design and funded by compulsory attendance laws,  but we will all pay additional private money for job training (college is not free in the US unlike in other industrialized countries) for the first time in US history. And it won't end there: next will be more degrees ...  

I posted about Zoho's experiments in this area here.  Many businesses already do extensive training.  Advanced training is not the same as a degree, whose many requirements only serve to fund schools.

And with increasing numbers of young people unable to afford college or being drained of their slim financial resources by community and state colleges that never graduate them, there will be a great number of people who can educate themselves online. They will have to pioneer alternative ways of providing qualifications and look for alternative hiring practices that will allow them access and a chance to perform.

UPDATE: via Joanne Jacobs, no money for all these degrees