Unpaid media internships have long been a stepping stone to a career, but it looks like their days are numbered. Yesterday Erik Maza broke the news that Condé Nast is discontinuing its traditional of unpaid internships, presumably because of a spate of lawsuits from interns who were paid less than minimum wage at W and The New Yorker.

There is still room for legitimate unpaid internships, but the labor laws are clear: to be legal, unpaid interns must be involved in educational activities, and explicitly not performing work that benefits the company by avoiding pay to some other worker. So using interns to fetch coffee, run marketing campaigns, or drop off dry cleaning is verboten, and many companies have been stung, like Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar, Fox Searchlight, and many others.

No surprise, when companies abandon unpaid internships. However, many companies are embracing paid internships, like Gawker Media, but at the same time are facing lawsuits from former unpaid interns.

This raises a central question about American employment trends. Companies are increasingly unwilling to train employees, even new graduates (see Business and academia pointing fingers: who’s responsible for graduates’ readiness?). So how can aspiring workers get the job training they need, to either move from college to work or from one economic sector to another?

I could make an impassioned case for the possible role for government — either federal or local — to dramatically expand training programs to get new graduates or other job seekers the training they need. I made the case in Business and academia pointing fingers: who’s responsible for graduates’ readiness? that new technologies could play a role.

But I think the change has to come out of the radical changes going on in the world of education. Aaron Chatterji reported on some of the shifts that could play here:

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the top business schools in the world, recently announced that it would offer four of its “foundation” courses online for free through Coursera; students can receive a certificate of verification for $49 for each course completed.

The drastic reduction in fees — and the elimination of the hurdles posed by SAT, applications, and other college related expenses — means that a relatively bright, self-motivated person could get a certificate from An Introduction To Financial Accounting and An Introduction To Corporate Finance, and a week later could be working as a junior member of the accounting department of Consolidated Widgets.

This disaggregation of the products of education institutions looks a lot like the fragmentation of the music business. The cartel of industrial era music was broken up: not by the government, but by iTunes and Pandora. The collapse, first, of the idea of buying the entire CD, and then the transition to streaming away from ownership of music.

In this case, the unbundling of education away from the four year paper chase and the culmination in a baccalaureate degree is coming. And then the transition to a streamed educational experience, where Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) provide anyone with virtual access to the very best educators.

And an 18 year old high school graduate could simply get those accounting certificates, start work, and then continue to add more courses, leading to a portfolio-based education, instead of a Bachelors’.

Is there a way to create a MOOC that imparts the kind of understanding that comes from working as an intern? Participating virtually in business activities, like hackathons or open crowdsourced innovation experiences run by companies to find the best and the brightest?

I wrote earlier this year about the idea that In an open business, people will just show up and start working, but there is a lot of room for experimentation in the interstices between full-time employment, internships, and the role that education is supposed to play in preparing people for work. Increasingly, in a freelance-trending world, the burden is going to fall to us, as individuals: to dig your own hole, and sharpen your own shovel.