ITFor a long time, something has been amiss about our attitudes and priorities when it comes to higher education in America. Recently, there’s been a strong counter-trend, leading people to reject liberal arts as useless and to blame expensive for-profit colleges for the student loan crisis.

This seems a bit like overcompensation for past missteps. Liberal arts have their place; society needs academics. And for-profit colleges are only a small portion of the trillion dollars in student debt that has been accrued across the US. But there have been more constructive responses, and you may have noticed them in policy speeches by the president and other leading politicians over the past few years. You may have even noticed them in television commercials.

Our old disdain for community colleges and strictly technical education is eroding. American education policy has specifically promoted vocational education as a means to put citizens, including unskilled or under-educated citizens, on a fast track to a job that will earn them a living wage and help to hasten the country’s economic growth.

As our attitudes about education in general change, so too will our attitudes about online information technology training, with the one feeding into the other. No longer will community college be misconstrued as the pathway only of the D student with limited ambitions. By contrast, no longer will things like ITIL training or PMP training and certification through an online IT training consultancy in California be viewed as the purview of geeks and tech-obsessives who can’t be bothered to acquire skills for a real world, instead of just a digital one.

There’s less and less separation among any of these things. The ability to navigate the digital world is increasingly a prerequisite for navigating the “real” world. And the often industry-specific skills learned in community colleges and trade schools are increasingly likely to dovetail with online information technology training.

If you’re the sort of person who is interested in the kind of education that will lead directly to a job, an associate’s degree from a low-cost institution is unlikely to be looked down upon these days, and may hold more potential than a higher cost option. And that fact is all the more significant because the money saved on such an efficient course of study will leave you better able to pursue the best quality of online information technology training, in line with whatever ends up seeming most relevant to your particular course of study.

IT staffing agencies and online IT training consultancies in the USA are specifically looking to community college students and workers who have put off school until late in life when trying to fill vacancies and provide CBAP training and certification. There is good reason for this shift toward demographics that once would have been overlooked. And those demographics represent a large population of job seekers who could benefit from an expanding and diversifying job market.