Posted on 10/15/2012 6:35:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Higher education is in transition and with a coming proliferation in online courses could be totally free for many within a decade. The status quo won't yield easily. But this is looking like a real answer to runaway student debt.
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NANTUCKET, Massachusetts — As few as 10 years from now, quality higher education will be largely free—unless, of course, nothing much has changed. It all depends on whom you believe. But one thing is clear: The debate about financing education grows louder by the day.
Experts with a wide range of views on the subject, including the always-interesting Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, weighed in last weekend at the Nantucket Project, a big-think conference in the spirit of TED and Aspen Ideas Festival. The most provocative, though, were hedge fund billionaire Peter Thiel and the author and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa.
Thiel has gotten a lot of attention for his view that higher education is broken, and that many kids would be better off saving their money and going straight from high school into a trade or developing a business. His “20 under 20” fellowship grants high school graduates with a sound business idea $100,000 if they agree to skip college and go right to work on their idea.
Wadhwa’s views are less well known, even though he served as a counter-point interview last May on a 60 Minutes segment featuring Thiel. Wadhwa has unwavering faith in the power of technology to fix much of what is wrong with the world, and he believes that online courses will revolutionize higher education and cut the cost to near zero for most students over the next decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyland.time.com ...
If by “free” they mean “worthless” than, yes, it’s rapidly approaching that point.
Ive always said education should be free, as long as you can maintain a good grade point average and be taking classes that lead to a specific degree.
Free? That means money’s just gonna fall from Heaven to pay for any stupid courses any doped-up kid wants to take? Yippppeeee! What a glorious idea! Free! Free! Free!
Students know it.
What we need are test (think bar exam) to perform the accreditation process.
... just have to spend another minute running the printing press, or sell another bond that our kids pay.
So many people think the only way to learn something is to sit in a classroom.
If standards in education were as high as they were 50 years ago, this wouldn’t be an issue.
People would rather see 80% of adults with meaningless degrees than 40% with sharp intellects and genuine knowledge. The universities are obliging, because who doesn’t like to make money?
Sounds good. The endless Geico ads interrupting the online class will be VERY annoying, however.
There are a lot of young people who are going to college who have no business in college. I’m not saying they are stupid; its just that college isn’t for everyone. Yet our society mindlessly pushes everyone to go to college. Most entry level jobs do not require college. And most people who advance in their positions can learn on the job. I have always been in favor of most young people — probably 2/3rds — going directly to work or being in a program where they work and go to school at the same time. And a lot of people would be better off going to trade school too. Trade school has an unfairly bad reputation. Some are rip offs but many are very good and kids would do a lot better spending two or four years working and going to trade school part time than four years of college.
Never, it's a government program. The closest thing to eternal life. (Reagan)
If public schools merely taught kids critical thinking and how-to-learn, and the go-to points in history and literature, then they would be able to balance the nonsense on the internet and news media and be productive citizens whether they knew algebra or not.
By teaching and testing “facts” kids are given the impression that they have are sufficiently omniscient to have opinions and insight that are important, when they are not. yet.
Yeah, sure. You can take free online courses, but will get NO COLLEGE CREDIT. So that’s great if you’re just seeking knowledge—not so great if you actually want a degree. When Massive Online Courses are offered free for no credit, the drop out rates are horrendous. Even for a good class, people will lose interest if there’s no “Vig” at the end.
As long as colleges offer credits, they will charge. Online courses might be cheaper for colleges to run, but they will pocket the difference. Count on it.
drip...drip....drip....drip
They have been setting the stage for a Student Loan Forgiveness proposal for several years. I expect Obama to pull the trigger on this any day now.
I knew it was coming several years back when an engineer I know told me of a fistfight that erupted at his workplace. Several of his colleagues who were $30-40K in debt for their Masters Degrees ended up having to work with an engineer here on H1B who got his Doctorate 100% paid for by his home government.
When they learned this it was explosive. As it could be at the ballot box.
Messy last sentence above due to publik skool education.
Any argument that starts with the contention that something is free is a losing argument.
Any higher education should start with the lesson, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." If you are incapable of learning that lesson, then anything more is a waste of time. Trying to teach a horse to sing just wastes your time and annoys the horse.
FREE? Are you f##king nuts? Who pays for the physical plant, the teacher's salaries, the course materials, etc.?
This article is about universities going to the accreditation business and learning online. Still, he admits that
Wadhwa allows that there will always be students able and willing to pay for a traditional college experience and for them it will be a worthwhile investment. But for the vast majority, from a financial standpoint that kind of education makes no sense and is fast becoming unnecessary. He believes the higher education revolution is coming soon and will happen fast—perhaps fast enough to keep the next generation from finishing school with debts they may never be able to pay.
There are over 900,000 foreign students attending US colleges. Why? Because they pay full tuition costs--some even supplemented by the USG.
How about getting the government completely out of education and educational funding. Then people might actually learn something useful or something at all.
Government schools are a failure. They are calling for more government involvement in higher education as the call for free healthcare for all started.
Slines -- from "baselines". These are low-performing people who lack the ability or skills to be productive members of society. Think "white trash" or "ghetto trash". If someone has potential, then they are not a Sline. If someone is a hopeless drain on society, then they are a Sline.
Thetes -- from "aesthete". These are earthy-crunchy artistic hippies who don't think productive work is worth their while. They want to be artists, writers, or deep thinkers. They might be able to contribute to society, but they choose not to. Instead, they might become community organizers, or writers for Time magazine.
I see a lot of people in college who are either Slines or Thetes. As far as I'm concerned, people with real potential should have a better alternative, where they can really make something of themselves without hanging out with such losers. Education is a good thing -- but we waste a lot of it on people who will never be productive.
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