IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

Google's new Career Certificates in "the high-paying, high-growth career fields of Data Analytics, Project Management, and User Experience (UX) Design," which join their existing IT Support and IT Automation in Python Certificates. Hosted on the online education platform Coursera, these programs (which run about $300-$400) are developed in-house and taught by Google employees and require no previous experience. To help cover their cost Google will also fund 100,000 "need-based scholarships" and offer students "hundreds of apprenticeship opportunities" at the company "to provide real on-the-job training." None of this guarantees any given student a job at Google, of course, but as Walker emphasizes, "we will consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree."

Technology-and-education pundit Scott Galloway calls that bachelor's-degree equivalence the biggest story in his field of recent weeks. It's perhaps the beginning of a trend where tech companies disrupt higher education, creating affordable and scalable educational programs that will train the workforce for 21st century jobs. This could conceivably mean that universities lose their monopoly on the training and vetting of students, or at least find that they'll increasingly share that responsibility with big tech.

This past spring Galloway gave an interview to New York magazine predicting that "ultimately, universities are going to partner with companies to help them expand." He adds: "I think that partnership will look something like MIT and Google partnering. Microsoft and Berkeley. Big-tech companies are about to enter education and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to."

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