This is the third or fourth such article I’ve seen in recent days, all of it quite welcome. I’ve thought, and said, for years that the higher education system in this country needs to be completely upended, revolutionized, even scrapped and begun again.

We live in this great communications age, so why not make better use of it? Identify the select few very best professors in each field, pay them handsomely, and then transmit their lectures into college classrooms all across the country. As for the 95% of professors who wouldn’t make the cut, let them go out into the real world and try to get real jobs. (Would you like sprinkles on your sundae?)

Better yet, eliminate the whole idea of college and instead focus on the mastery of a certain body of knowledge. If a person manages to acquire a prescribed body of knowledge, however it is done, even from just their own reading and study, why shouldn’t that person be entitled to a credential equivalent to a degree?

Everybody now recognizes that many campuses are chock full of teachers who are incompetent and students who are unqualified and uninspired. Meanwhile out in the real world there are thousands, maybe millions of self-educated people excluded from certain jobs, or hamstrung from advancement, simply because they lack the ol’ sheepskin.

It’s crazy.