In MBA speak, the central cost driver of a college education is not health insurance, salaries, rising oil costs, or even costly academic journals. It is the four-year, 36-course structure that determines the cost of a college degree. This model, leading to annual tuitions and fees of $25,000 at public colleges and $50,000 at many private ones, crushes families with $100,000 to $200,000 in cost and debt.

Impossible to imagine the end of the bachelor’s degree packaged into four years? Most of us — households or other enterprises — from time to time take a look at the fundamentals of our budgets and ask, “Is there another way?” As an example, consider the bloodless iPod and MP3 revolution. What happened? A demographic cohort, people roughly 16 to 25 years old who wanted access to one song at a time in a form that could easily be shared among friends, revolted and created a new market when the music industry refused any modifications or price breaks.

Could something similar be brewing in higher education? Maybe a better question is whether something similar should be brewing in higher education?

I financed my own four-year degree and two-year graduate degree and saddled myself with $118,000 in student loan debt in the process. At this point in my life, I’m not bitching about the debt – it’s just a fact of life that I live with (and battle) everyday. Frankly, I think I’m doing pretty good in the battle considering that I started repaying these loans some two and a half years ago and thanks to extra payments against the principal amounts I’ve managed to lower my total amount owed to $105,000. Yeah, it’s still a disgusting number that has stifled my ability to do what other people my age are doing, but I’m making progress.

Since I received a Bachelor of the Arts Degree in English from my undergraduate institution I’ve often wondered about what a college degree really gets a person. Let’s face the facts – the world is built on networks, not on pieces of paper. It’s often a matter of who you know and how you know them that supersedes the competition of two equally qualified job candidates. Keeping this in mind, I’ve always considered my Bachelor’s Degree as my passport; in other words, I think that piece of paper is nothing more than a ticket to get on the train.

Going to college doesn’t “make” you smart. Getting a Master’s Degree didn’t “make” me smart. Sure, getting these two pieces of paper greatly increased my knowledge on a broad variety of subjects, but they didn’t create intelligence where it didn’t previously exist! I was always an excellent student and an eager learner. But high school kids don’t have the access to certain networks that college graduates have available to them.

As an Adjunct Professor at my local college, I encourage my students to take advantage of the opportunities that surround them. Become a member of a campus club, join a fraternity or sorority, take up your Professors on their offers to proofread your work or to stop in and have coffee with them during their office hours. I believe that the main purpose of going to college is to develop the types of networks that will get you ahead in life, not to keep your head stuck in a book. Granted, I do believe that college students have an obligation to be actively engaged in their education. However, the idea of what an “education” is needs to be broadened. English majors should be encouraged to take minors in Business or Information Technology. Those in the Business Department should look at minors in the Fine Arts or Art History.

This mixture of disciplines is not only good for the mind, but it vastly increases one’s social and (eventually) professional network. Unfortunately, not many average citizens can live the American Dream these days by simply obtaining a college degree and announcing to the job market that they’re ready to be employed. Let this be a suggestion to all of my college-age and high school-age readers – take advantage of your time on campus and build a diversified social network. Make the investment now and you’ll be glad that you did later.

When I graduated, I had some $49,000+ in NJHESAA loans (a private organization), $59,000+ in Direct Loans (loans from the US Department of Education), and more than $8,000 in a private student loan from CitiBank. Since graduation, I’ve completely paid back the CitiBank student loan and I’ve lowered my total outstanding loan balance to slightly more than $107,000. I’m not sure if someone would call this “significant” progress on paying back the student loans, but I think bringing down my overall balance by about $10,000 in two and a half years isn’t so bad! If I didn’t have to pay any of my other expenses, I could have had more than half of the loans paid off by now, but I’m satisfied with my progress.

My short-term goal is to break below $100,000 by March or April of 2009. I think this is completely doable so long as I continue to not have major automobile problems. If I have to buy a new car, then my goal will be to break $100,000 by the end of 2009. Getting below the six figure range will be a great mental victory in paying back these loans and I’m looking forward to it!

In any event, though, there’s a progress report on my student loan repayments. I’m doing a pretty good job of putting all of my available extra cash into paying down my student loan and not squandering it on unnecessary expenses. I win!

Bear in mind they also took off the first two weeks of July. Ummm…that’s four full weeks off in the summer months. I know that Howard’s brainwashed fans will say that he’s earned the break, but there are many millions more of us who are just fans of the show and feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods with the Howard Stern gang. We were told about commercial-free radio before he made the jump – we now get frequent 15-minute, non-live content breaks in the middle of his shows.

We were told that the show would be in the studio on the occasional Friday to surprise the audience. Bullshit on that! He spent a few Fridays in the studio when he started Sirius – more than two and a half years ago now.

Then we were told about all of the great content that we’d get after Sirius XM and Stern bought back his tapes from CBS Radio/Viacom. What do they give us? A completely randomized selection of shows from all over Howard’s history with no rhyme or reason as to why they were playing certain shows. This crappy “Master Tape Theater” was so poorly received that the Stern folks were forced to move it into some weird Sunday afternoon time slot when no one is listening anyway.

Before he made the jump, Stern sold us on something like 33 cents per day or 45 cents per day to hear him on Sirius. Okay – then let me pay just the 45 cents on each day that he’s in the building. In August, I would have paid $3.60 to hear Howard and his crew.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that the merger went through. I really do like satellite radio and I really do enjoy listening to the Howard Stern Show. But paying the $14 that I pay each month (tax included) is not worth what I’m getting in terms of service. I hear that with the merger there will be an option to get 50 channels of your choice and pay $6.99 per month. Let’s get that figured out and in motion already!

I thought that this post would be most beneficial to share with everyone as this is essentially what I’ve done with Usable Web Solutions, LLC. I created Usable Web Solutions, LLC for a bunch of reasons – one of which was to generate some extra income. Now, with the company at about two and a half years old, I have an additional yet modest stream of income coming my way each quarter. Is it enough for me to break out of the rat race? Not a chance. Is it enough to provide me with some comfort in a bad economy and with a variety of worst case scenarios possible at any time? Yes.

In any event, I just thought that you all would like to read about what other people have done to transform their hobbies into profitable businesses. After reading Roth’s post I thought up an idea for a new company…one that focuses on writing! I might put that one on the sidelines, though, as I’ve been thinking more and more about writing a book lately. So, we’ll see what happens!