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Get a Free MIT Education

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can-i-get-an-honorary-degree-instead dept.

dhollm writes "Well, at least the course materials will be online, for free, for all. The article gives a brief description of the program (evidently costing MIT $100M over 10 years) and the key drivers behind it. So start reading up!"

4 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where is the $100M coming from? by MaxwellStreet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, student tuition is probably the -last- place the money is going to come from.

    MIT ranks right up there with Harvard and other Ivy League schools when it comes to endowments. Basically, alumni give the school lots of money, which gets reinvested in all sorts of things - including projects of strategic importance like this.

    Interestingly, MIT also derives significant revenue from the pseudo-business ventures and inventions created there. Inventions that turn out to be revenue-generators, created on-campus using their facilities, must pay a percentage of those revenues right back to the school.

    I remember this causing quite a flap with a guy whose last name was Bose - son of the guy of Bose audio fame - who had an invention and was fighting with MIT over these fees.

    At big-name schools like MIT, and Ivy League schools, student tuition is just one tiny piece of the financial machine.

  2. I feel sorry for you americans by redhog · · Score: 5, Informative

    cause here in Europe (at least in my country, which is Sweden), you don't have to pay for education. You pay for books (or lend them frome someone), and you pay for your apt and food, but not for your education as such. And there's a student loan with kinda nice repay-plan (at least partly based on your income) you can get for paying your rent and food. You don't need to be rich, only smart, to get a good education...

    --
    --The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
  3. Link to previous slashdot story by Jish · · Score: 4, Informative
    As many of you realize this was mentioned before on slashdot. I found the old story (which was not so easy cause searching under slashdot's "older stuff" doesn't return any results for MIT???)

    Anyway:

    The other story

    Check out some of the information/comments from that...

    -- Josh

  4. Another MIT perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    This program will not be all that useful in the long run to end-users. At MIT, I have learned very little from the course material. Most of the learning comes from being exposed to the really cool professors and the other self-motivated learners on campus.

    This is not to say that the program will be useless; the people who really benefit are professors at other institutions who are looking for innovative approaches to college level education. Because this is the primary benefit to a program like this, it will in no way replace an MIT education with a self-taught system.

    (at lael (dot mit edu))
    MIT Mechanical Engineering '03