A new form accreditation is really what's holding back a huge change in higher education. MOOCs right now, at most, can replace only traditional professional development classes. They're still not a drop-in replacement for college degrees. That's because of accreditation. Bachelors degrees are valuable, in large part, because they're a common currency: employers know when they see a potential hire has bachelor's degr…
> "so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé" Well this is not a general solution, but for Coursera's Probabilistic Graphical Models, I remember someone in the course discussion board said that this was such a demanding course that he would hire anybody, who passed the course with good points, to his company.
I think most wise recruiters will look for evidence of being smart, of getting stuff done, and of being a good fit.
Unless you're in research, serious jobs are project based, not learning based.
If you spend three years learning all you can about CS and making an Awesome Cool Thing, I don't think many employers are going to think 'Meh.'
The situation in the UK is that degrees are getting more and more expensive and less and less valuable. It's making more sense now to go straight into work, even at intern level, than to lose three years and rack up tens of thousands in debt for no obvious benefit.
If the teaching and learning were truly worth the cash, it would be no contest. But outside the Big Name universities, they really aren't. And even there, a big part of the benefit comes the networking opportunities.
In middle league universities you don't get the networking, or the teaching, or the experience, or the industry connections. So what are you paying for?