Comment by 9rx

> or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential

Employers haven't recognized such signalling in my lifetime, if ever.

However, there are a sufficient number of professions (e.g. medicine) where it is legally required to attain accreditation through the college system to keep the aura of being job creators. The average teenager, with no life experience other than sitting in the classroom for the past 12 years of their life and playing soccer on the weekend, deciding what to do after high school doesn't know the difference.

To make matters more complex, said teenagers don't recognize that not all people are equal. They hear things like "high school dropouts make x% less than college graduates" and think that means they must go to college to not suffer the same fate, not realizing that the high school dropout cohort is dominated by those with disabilities and other life challenges that prevents them from earning more in industry. Surprising to many, handing a Harvard degree over on a silver platter to someone with severe autism will not cure what ails them.

So there is really no risk to the system. The incentives are by and large already based on misunderstandings with so much religion in place now to keep those misunderstanding alive and are otherwise driven by legal requirements that aren't apt to go away.

Besides, even if all that is destroyed, the primary reason one goes to college is still for the dating pool. Academic rigour remains necessary to keep the quality of potential partners up. Tinder and the like may have tried to encroach on that, but I suspect it has only made it more desirable to be on/near campus to increase the likelihood of a match. Users of those services aren't searching the world over to find "the one".