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...

If all you want to do is learn

[TheLink]

If all you want to do is learn for free, you can always watch lectures online.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity
http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley

You can even get lectures from Australia or India:
http://www.youtube.com/user/unsw
http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd

And if you want to learn stuff like how to solder and splice try http://www.tpub.com/neets/

Or watch someone make vacuum tubes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-QMuUQhVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S5OwqOXen8

Sure you might not be able to afford all that equipment to actually do everything. But at least you have a better idea of what you might like and what's worth it before forking out lots of money (or going in debt) in fees.

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.