My recent conversation with Max Keiser on Summer Solutions (25:45) included three bits of advice:

1. Stop financializing the human experience

2. Acquire skills, not credentials

3. Vote with your feet

Today's topic is acquire skills, not credentials.

I have written two books on this topic:

Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy

and

The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

There is a place for credentials that act as an entry key to a profession: a dental hygiene credential, passing the bar exam, etc.

But outside these licensed professions, credentials such as four-year college degrees are fundamentally signals: they don't actually authenticate real-world skills, they simply signal that the holder of the credential completed the coursework.