[Noozhawk’s note: Former Noozhawk staff writer Ben Preston covered the recent Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. Second in a series sponsored by the Foundation for Santa Barbara City College. Click here for a previous article.]

At this very moment, you may be looking at institutions of higher learning for your teenage son or daughter. Or, you may be a teenager trying to decide which school you’d like to attend.

With the economy spiraling downward and tuition prices shooting steadily up, it’s not an easy choice to make anymore. Is college worth it?

They say you need a degree to be competitive, but which one should you (or your child) aim for? An associate’s degree? A bachelor’s? A mishmash of professional certificates?

Many people begin college and don’t finish, receiving the debt, but not the diploma. That seems counterproductive.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted a discussion about the value of a college education at the recent Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. While many of the initiative’s members are focused on worldwide problems and issues in developing countries, there is also a strong contingent committed to helping solve America’s education challenges as the global economy changes and technology demands a more skilled labor force.

Public-private partnerships — or cooperation between government agencies, nonprofit organizations and corporations — were at the top of former President Bill Clinton’s list as he described approaches members had taken to solve a variety of problems. President Barack Obama stopped by to give a short speech, asserting that education should be a national priority, particularly when so many technical jobs are becoming available.

Anya Kamenetz, a writer for Fast Company, tech writer and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, brought up a point many of us miss when we’re looking for an affordable university for ourselves or our children to attend. Back when only a small percentage of the population went to college, it was cheaper for the state to provide universities. Now that many more people are attending post-secondary schools, it’s much more expensive to provide education at that scale. You need more professors, more buildings and more infrastructure to support more people. That costs a lot of money.

“Online classes are good and are going to get better,” she said in an interview with Noozhawk. “You want a model that doesn’t waste students’ classroom time on lectures that can be done online.”

Kamenetz did not advocate doing away with universities any more than she suggested dispensing with Ivy League prestige. But she said the educational process, as it stands now, should be streamlined, and the focus should be more on the individual learner than on the institution. Having face-to-face class time and discussion sessions is important in any educational environment, but by using online videos to broadcast large lectures, more people could tune in without using up valuable building space and requiring students to travel. As in any well-run company, production savings are passed on to the consumer.

But for some students, Kamenetz said that a self-researched, a la carte approach to coursework could pay dividends. On her Web site, the Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential, she explains how a disciplined student can put together a useful course of study. It goes something like this: read two poems per day; go jogging or practice yoga three times per week; read a book per week (refer to online suggested reading list for ideas); take online course. Although it looks a bit like one of those lists people put together for themselves when they’re unemployed, the point is to plan out the schedule to meet the requirements of a future educational or career goal.

“Top-of-the-line schools give a top-of-the-line experience and have a top-of-the-line price,” she said. “Something is better than nothing. In the average person’s experience, DIY stacks up very well against traditional degree programs.”

Educational researchers from one of the nation’s elite universities also took part in the CGI discussion, offering a more traditional, albeit no less future-oriented perspective.

“There are proven cases where entrepreneurial approaches to education work out very well,” said Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “The problem is that the degree is currency.”

Strohl explained that while DIY education may work in specific situations, degrees from accredited institutions give the holder more flexibility.

“We treat degrees as a standardized metric to let us take a risk that a person has the skills to do a job,” he said, adding that the basic competencies required by universities make employers who don’t know a particular job candidate more likely to bet on that person than someone who comes in and says, “Hey look, I put this together myself.”

He backed that up with some data: In 1970, the economy required about 25 percent of the workforce to be college educated. By 2008, the demand had risen to more than 50 percent. By 2018, it’s likely to be as high as 63 percent, particularly because more and more jobs will be technical in nature.

Strohl said that while not all degrees may be worth the money, a cost-benefit analysis of college education indicated that even the lowest-paid undergraduate majors (psychology, sans graduate school), manage to make back the money they spent over a lifetime of earnings. Strohl’s bottom line was that prospective students have more of a responsibility than ever before to thoroughly research their options and pay attention to labor market trajectory before making a decision. In that respect, his message seemed to jive with the spirit of the approach Kamenetz promotes.

“In general, we know that if you have more education, you’ll have more stability in your job and will make more money,” he said.

As an endnote, I’ll share a bit of my own story. When I was looking at colleges, I was still in high school and hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do with my life. Even after receiving a Bachelor of Arts in history, I didn’t find the answer to that question for years. Was college worth it?

Well, I’ve never made more than $37,000 per year, but did manage to gain acceptance into an Ivy League graduate school, which begs the question, was that worth it? The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. While the direction my future will take is uncertain right now, the connections I’ve made from going to an Ivy League graduate school have already proven invaluable. But I wouldn’t have gotten here if I hadn’t received a degree to begin with.

But my situation isn’t everyone’s situation, and as Kamenetz noted, that’s the point. Instead of taking a four-year university as a given and picking colleges with that rigid structure in mind, you have a range of options to consider; mix and match before you decide what to do. In this age of unending supplies of information, choosing your education has become as robust, yet as complicated, as trying to build your own house. But education is not a house. It is, as my dad always liked to remind me, a foundation.

— Former Noozhawk staff writer Ben Preston received his master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2011, and can be reached at news@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.