Last Friday, the Pope Center held its annual Milton Friedman Day event at Pinehurst and our speaker was Isaac Morehouse. He’s the entrepreneur behind Praxis — a new educational venture that really develops skills rather than just handing out diplomas, and his talk was superb.

Alas, we don’t have video, but we have the next-best thing — an article by Isaac that hits the main points in his presentation.

Think tankers and academics like to write and talk about what’s wrong with the world, but all of that has little impact. Think about how we free market proponents blasted restrictions on city transportation — alternatives to licensed taxis — for decades. And nothing changed until Uber (and its competitors) came along and Just Did It. They started competing and people quickly saw that the innovations were an improvement upon the old system.

The same will be the case with higher education, Morehouse argues. Traditional colleges and universities are selling a very costly product (degrees) that do a poor job of signaling the individual’s competence. What will really bring change, he contends, will be the Ubers of higher education — innovations that haven’t been approved (accredited) but will succeed just because they offer better value.

One of Isaac’s points is that employers who have established college degree “requirements” will drop them when an applicant comes along who doesn’t have the supposedly necessary education, but shows an ability to do valuable work for them.

“LinkedIn pages, GitHub profiles for coders, personal websites, and modern communication tools make it easier than ever for young people to create value, build a network, and make it easily accessible and verifiable to the world. No longer are they confined to purchasing prefabricated credentials from large institutions,” Morehouse writes.

I think he’s right and this means a tidal wave of change in the fat and lazy world of higher education. Since a very high percentage of students don’t really want knowledge but merely the credential, there will be a lot of Schumpeterian creative destruction in the coming years.