
In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero - JournalistHack
http://mashable.com/2009/07/24/education-social-media/
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asdlfj2sd33
The cost of education TODAY is essentially zero. There's a huge amount of
knowledge in the public domain, and libraries aren't expensive, and neither
are computers, and then there's also the internet.

But you don't go to college for the education. Well it's definitely part of
it, but a small mart. The big parts in no particular order are:

1\. Social signaling that are you at least resemble a functioning adult. A
college degree is a kind of societal hazing showing you're kind of OK.

2\. Making connections with other people, other people who are very likely to
be successful because of their education or their family's money or what ever,
it's nice to have them in your social circle.

3\. 3-5 or how ever many years of a fun and/or somewhat challenging experience
that's shared with many other young single people all living and partying in
close proximity. It's almost like a cruise with homework. Oh guess what they
have those, you can actually take that as real college class.

How much would a 4 year vacation like that cost you? What if a large section
of society had taken that vacation and not shared the experience made you
somewhat of an outsider. How much would the travel agency be able to charge
you then?

Tuition costs make more sense now?

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aharrison
This reminds me of Good Will Hunting: "You dropped a hundred and fifty grand
for an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public
library"

A professor of mine is very interested in solving the cost problem of
education, but internet-based learning is weak in a number of areas. He is
well known for having an extremely painful automated grading system for Comp
Sci homework, but that does not work nearly so well for other course (e.g.
higher math or essays). The article claims they have solved this by peer
review, but I would be interested to hear how they are making that work.

One of the other problems is the questionable value of degrees and grades in
the first place: we as a society need to start evaluating people/employees
based on prior results, like internships.

So yeah, more online learning is a good thing, but I doubt we will have online
universities truly overtaking four year brick and mortar universities any time
soon.

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billswift
I am a serious autodidact and have spent some time thinking about how the web
can be useful. Unfortunately, it isn't yet. I wrote two blog posts about my
thoughts.

[http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/web-is-still-
not-a...](http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/web-is-still-not-adequate-
for-serious.html) \- The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study

[http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/overcoming-bias-
an...](http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/overcoming-bias-and-learning-
from-www.html) \- Overcoming Bias and Learning from the WWW

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ramidarigaz
It's paying people to feed the information to you that's expensive.

