Is a college degree still valuable? The castle on the ground vs. the castle in the sky.

Once upon a time, there existed a castle, and it was well guarded and heavily locked up. All the secrets to success were in this particular castle and people travelled far and wide, paying huge sums of money to enter the castle and even more money and time to get to the inner sanctuary where the special treasures lie.

This castle was the public education system and it had set up systems and sub systems to keep those with money educated and those without money, for the large part, stuck in abject poverty. It hoarded knowledge and handed out degrees as a means of showing competence. It shunned creativity and individuality seeking to put everybody into a box and make them believe that success was dependant on working according to a system.

However, after a long time of being the only source of success a new castle was build, a castle in the sky, a castle on the cloud. This castle was a place of freedom, a place of inter connectivity, a place where people could openly share ideas and information, insights and experiences in a way that was truly community building and forming. It is a castle build on the joint collective conscious of everybody.

The castle I am referring to here is of course the internet with online learning and lifestyle superseding that which occurs within the public education system. The rate of growth of websites offering educational courses of all types is simply staggering. The amount of video and written content, daily divulging new insight is immeasurable. The amount of opportunity and connectivity provided by online life truly provides individuals with the ability to be immensely successful without a formal education, doing what their gifting is. The castle in the sky is a place of immense freedom.

In order to explain this phenomenon we need to look at knowledge creation structures. When considering knowledge creation structures it is important to understand that there is a difference between the castle on the ground and the castle in the sky. The castle on the ground placed knowledge in closed off libraries, with isolated intermediaries such as lecturers and sought to keep that knowledge as its own. The structure dictated that knowledge was worth paying for because it was hard to access.

However, the knowledge structure of the castle in the sky is based on connectivity, the more people connected and adding to the system the greater the value of the system. Initially there were great gaps in understanding, as it was only the minority in the world that sought to leverage the world of online life as a means of advancing their career. This left huge gaps in understanding, which of course meant that universities were still largely relevant.

In order to understand this, I want us to consider that each area of access to knowledge has an intermediary or guide, somebody to give that knowledge. The foundation of the castle on the ground was that there were only a handful of intermediaries, within a small amount of areas, universities. Therefore, there was no overlapping radius for knowledge. However, as more people came online and the ways to connect to people became many, there arose a greater number of intermediaries. A quick search online reveals that one can find, teachers, chess coaches and fitness instructors from all around the world. One can also find information on all of these and a plethora of other topics as well.

Therefore, through interconnected knowledge building the gaps between these intermediaries have closed. This overlapping effect creates a platform from which it is easy without any financial capital investment to be able to become an expert on a topic, just by gleaning daily off of this overlapping knowledge platform. This completely removes all of the importance from the castle on the ground, as an open knowledge sharing platform has been created which costs no money to access. The very basis of the idea of the castle on the ground was restriction of access to knowledge.

However, there are some things to be careful of, the castle in the sky might give more freedom, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. The responsibility to regulate your own learning experience, the responsibility to sift through valid and invalid information and finally the responsibility to ensure that you are learning everything you need to know to be successful in a topic.

The game has changed, online intermediaries, through course creation and knowledge sharing have made education much more accessible. However, it remains to be seen whether or not we will take the responsibility to educate ourselves, manage our freedoms and ensure that we use what we have learned to maximum effect.