With college increasingly derided as a pricey con, it's no wonder America's parents worry their kids will skip higher education entirely and try to get rich programming social networks or iPhone apps or whatever. Scary!

Remember Daniel Brusilovsky, the 16-year-old startup CEO and TechCrunch contributor with 120,000 Twitter followers? The poor kid just threw it all away for a MacBook Air.

That 16-year-old TechCrunch writer with 120,000 Twitter followers, who we wrote about yesterday, is part of a burgeoning child punditocracy. Children are operating in virtually every facet media — and doing so successfully. Fear for your job.

Dear redundant old-media bigwigs: Meet your eventual replacement, a 16-year-old with gigs as a professional journalist for TechCrunch, a marketing evangelist for Qik and as CEO of his own startup. Also, he's been officially endorsed by Twitter.