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."

Comments

Community college, anyone?

[SomeGuyFromCA]

This already exists... I went to community college for about $300-$400 a semester, including books, supplies and parking. What, just because it's on the internet, it's a new concept?

Oh. RIGHT...

Re:Community college, anyone?

[Mr. Slippery]

Of course I think most of us who HAVE gone to college realize that's not really the point. College is a chance to be a kid for 4 more years, scoring with women, and hopefully meet your future wife or husband. The reason people remember their alma maters so fondly is because it was the last time they lived without any responsibility.

Funny, I'm more of a "kid" in many ways now than I was in college...sure didn't score with women! (Young geeks - it *does* get better! Have hope!) I was taking challenging classes -- was actually trying to do a dual degree in CS and physics, before my brain started to melt and I decide that was Not Fun. and working part-time, certainly not living with no responsibility.

When I look back at my college days, the thing I remember most fondly is the continual encounter with new ideas. Yes, that is something that you can and should keep going for the rest of your life. And I have, to some degree -- besides voracious reading on many topics, I went back to school a few years ago to study Asian Bodywork Therapy, and in the past few years I also took two semesters of Japanese at the community college.

But as an undergrad, my prime occupation was learning new stuff.

There's a Roger Zelazny novel where the protagonist inherits a trust fund that supports him so long as he's in college -- so he manages to keep changing his major, and doesn't gradate for over a decade. I always thought that sounded like an excellent way to live.

Re:It's more than courses.

[Wonko the Sane]

The fact that the people running the companies that make up most of the economy are chosen based on who they know despite their lack of ability to find their ass with both hands and a map is a large part of the reason that the global economy is melting down right now.

Re:Education shouldn't be for profit anyway

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The thing to remember about absurd tuition is that it is, in effect, more a means of price discrimination, rather than an actual sticker price.

The system is pretty clever: Everybody cranks their rates through the roof; but they all offer "financial aid". Because they are such nice guys, they even have a standardized form(de facto, the FAFSA qualifies). By doing so, the schools can have a sky-high price for cost insensitive students(ie. cost insensitive families) and charge pretty much everyone exactly as much as they can. Even better, doing it this way allows them some pricing flexibility on their side, in case they want to attract a particularly interesting student, while also creating broadly fixed prices, which works to the advantage of the more prestigious and deep pocketed schools.

Really quite clever.

Re:It's more than courses.

[pla]

But work on a team project and make a connection, make friends that can help you later, and people you can help later

You know what I learned from "team" projects in college?

Just do the whole damned thing yourself if you want any shot at passing. Because otherwise, come the due date you'll have your part done, one person with a partially-working-but-incompatible part, and three people with weak excuses.

I learned that "team" really does have a "me" in it, and you can't spell much with "ta". And, after 10 years in the "real" working world, I haven't found much to change my opinion on that matter.



THAT'S why people spend stupid amounts of money on an Ivy League education. "What you know" is assumed. "Who you know" is particular and requires access.

One small correction there - In the case of Ivies, "Who you know" counts as a prerequisite for getting in, not a benefit of going there.

The two tasks of educators

[lexDysic]

As a professor, I have two tasks that I must perform in every class I teach. I must educate my students, and I must evaluate their work. No one has ever explained to me how the 'evaluation' process can reasonably work in an on-line setting. Nothing is stopping me from enrolling my girlfriend's cat in an on-line degree program and taking all his tests. I assure you, Marvin's grades will be very good, but I don't suggest you hire him; he would be sleeping on the job an awful lot.

It's a shame, because I think that for many students, these kinds of programs could provide an education as good or better than a traditional classroom for a much lower price. But until there is a good reason to take the final transcript seriously, I don't think it will ever really catch on.

Re:You get what you pay for

[thesandtiger]

Need for work? No.

Potentially benefit massively from in ways completely removed from work? Yes.

More education gives people a more broad experience of the world in that it opens up areas they may not have otherwise been exposed to. Sometimes this is frustrating (witness many /.ers bitching about how they had to take english lit classes when they just wanted to be engineers) and obnoxious, but it helps folks to avoid the tendency to becoming hyperspecialized drones.

A lot of people who were self-taught think that anyone who wants to know about something will just go look it up - but usually these self-taught individuals are completely unaware of huge swaths of ideas and terrain that have been explored because they weren't required to take classes in subjects that initially didn't interest them.

Full disclosure: I was sort of like that myself - I absolutely loathed the idea of certain classes that were just not interesting to me. Then I grew up, and discovered that there's more to conversation than whatever was on TV last night, there's more to life than work and talking about work, and in fact, I've been turned on to many new activities and interests thanks to some of those "useless" classes.

It also wound up having a TREMENDOUS impact on my career: I used to work in tech, and when I went back to school I wound up surveying a couple of psychology courses, and it turns out that the "expreimental design in psychology" course that I took was INCREDIBLY fascinating. Trying to design experiments with human subjects - subjects who can and will lie, try to wreck the experiment, or otherwise do the least amount of work to get their pay - is VERY challenging, VERY interesting, and VERY fun. Even better for me, I was able to bring my technology skills into a field where there is not a lot of technological know-how, and so some incredibly obvious things I developed and implemented wound up being very valuable to my lab, and helped to really accelerate my career; despite coming to the field I now work in so late in my life/career, I've been promoted several times and in the 1.5 years that I've been out of school since getting my new degree, I've been made a director at my lab.

The point to this is that we are not insects, we are not our jobs, and learning new things - even things that are possibly frivolous - is tremendous. EVERYONE in the world can benefit from learning new things, especially the people who don't have the finances to attend more expensive schools; I'll say those people are probably the ones who benefit most from exposure to new ideas and ways of being.

If your college degree is only helping in your job, or if you're going to college solely to get a better job - well, that's certainly your right, but you're really missing out on 90% of what an education can (and IMO, should) be.