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All-You-Can-Eat College For $99-a-Month
theodp writes "Writing in Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey has seen the future of college education. It costs $99-a-month, and there's no limit on the number of courses you can take. Tiny online education firm StraighterLine is out to challenge the seeming permanency of traditional colleges and universities. How? Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of its competitors' business: freshman lectures, higher education's equivalent of the classified section. It's no surprise, then, that as StraighterLine tried to buck the system, the system began to push back, challenging deals the company struck with accredited traditional and for-profit institutions to allow StraighterLine courses to be transferred for credit. But even if StraighterLine doesn't succeed in bringing extremely cheap college courses to the masses, it's likely that another player eventually will."
The UK, of course, used to be home to another interesting idea - free university education for everyone who could handle it, all the way up to PhD level if you qualified. But a few years ago our enlightened government realised that the money would be much better spent on exciting new concepts like the invasion of random countries that our US friends didn't like the look of, and this silly idea was consigned to the dustbin of history (except, obviously, in backward places like Scotland).