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I really think I thought people just died if they didn't finish college. That kind of crazy superstition is how bubbles are made. For a time, we collectively seemed to believe that people might die if they didn't own their own houses. So we plowed money and faith into that conceit, and look what happened.

Colleges are raising tuition and fees every year, at a rate of increase that far outpaces any reasonable expectation. One might think this is the kind of thing that couldn't continue forever, but that's precisely what has been happening over the past several decades. Prices have gone up, and buyers have poured in anyway, buoyed by a flood of seemingly cheap government money in the form of student loans. As with any bubble, there are doomsayers who are mostly ignored and cheerleaders who say that this time it's different. But-as with any bubble-reality is starting to intrude.

"Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did."

"The Pew Research Center"

Rabbit hopes it can stand out from the pack. Its distinctive features include simultaneous video-chat and content streaming and little on-screen bubbles that can hover atop other applications, showing who is participating in the chat.

" The local cohort and the "massive" cohort don't interact at all.  In other words, as the hype about classroom use of MOOCs is beginning to hit the inflection point, we find that MOOCs in face-to-face classrooms are essentially being used as OER and OCW. For various practical and pedagogical reasons, classes using MOOCs are not in sync with the online cohorts, and frankly the instructors of these classes don't see that as an issue."

The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America's soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down - some to a point even lower than where they began.