

Why isn't University free? - michael_nielsen
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=321

======
mattmaroon
I think the main problem is that this presupposes that people go to college to
learn. Most don't. They go to get a degree.

Degrees act as passports to jobs. Employers value degrees because of their
scarcity and the work/selection involved in getting one. Give away too many,
and they won't anymore. No brand name school could risk this.

For example, someone with a Stanford MBA can get a high-paying job pretty
easily. Employers value the Stanford MBA because it does much of the pre-
screening for them (it's hard to get into the program, and presumably hard to
get through.)If Stanford churned out 1 million MBAs a year, they would become
useless.

I think this would dilute the brand beyond meaning.

~~~
davidw
See signaling theory of an education:

[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html)

~~~
mattmaroon
Pretty neat. Thanks.

------
Alex3917
Ivan Illich actually writes about a plan for education via online social
networking in his book Deschooling Society. He talks about finding other
people with similar interests using a computer and then meeting up to study
with them. He actually describes it as a web, which is pretty impressive
considering he published in 1970, 20 years before the term was even coined.

I think it would actually be a fun experiment to get a bunch of people on this
site together for a week or so in summer, maybe read through five or so books
over the course of a week living together. I think that would potentially be a
better model for education than just putting lectures online.

------
edu
Last week I was talking about the same topic with some friends, they didn´t
like it very much.

My idea was to free the students from the need to go to class and the live
classes. My idea was publish free all the material, like MIT´s OCW, and let
the students study by themselves for free and setup a forum (in the broad
sense of the word) to talk and try to resolve the problems. The students will
be able to buy consult time with professors to work on the most difficult
parts or when guidance is need.

Finally, the University would offer a couple of times each year the
possibility to take the exam for each course.

This system is by no far new, a lot of language certificates out there
(Cambridge, TOEFL...) work in a similar way.

IMO this will democratize the knowledge, but is quite difficult to build.

------
pg
Virtual wouldn't be the same. Most of what you learn in college, you have to
learn in person.

~~~
michael_nielsen
The article doesn't propose a pure-virtual model, for exactly this reason. But
imagine that for your favourite Harvard class, there is a corresponding
regular meetup taking place in your hometown (and maybe other associated
social events), and an online forum where the 20,000 people taking the class
can discuss what's going on, seek help, and so on.

~~~
pg
In my hometown there were only a handful of smart people my age.

In fact, it wasn't till I got to college that I understood what smart even
was. Till then my sample had been so small that I couldn't distinguish
smartness from the idiosyncrasies of the few individual smart people I knew.

~~~
michael_nielsen
It's true that what I propose is not an optimal solution for the very
brightest students. For such people, if they wish to develop there really is
no choice: they need to move to the centers of world learning, and seek out
the brightest people they can, to challenge and teach them.

But for people who are merely bright and interested, and perhaps not able to
afford Harvard's fees (or otherwise gain acceptance), what I propose might
have some considerable value.

------
xirium
From the article: build an online audience in the millions, sets tuition to
zero, starts broadcasting (and archiving) every lecture at the highest
possible quality

This has been running in the UK since the 1970s ( <http://www.open2.net/> )
and enrollment was free. 180000 students are currently enrolled.

------
mattmaroon
"They can make the same revenue with 5 million regular viewers, each worth $40
to advertisers. Given Facebook’s admittedly somewhat ludicruous valuation
($300 / user), that seems a trifle."

That doesn't make any sense. Nobody thinks Facebook should be able to make
$300/user. They're valued based on future growth potential.

Making $40 in ad revenue per user is pretty tough. If you assume $10 CPM,
that's 4k impressions per, or 11 a day. Not impossible, but not trivial
either, and totally unrelated to Facebook.

~~~
michael_nielsen
Fair enough, although it wasn't my intent to imply an apples to apples
comparison. I admit that I don’t have a great sense of what reasonable numbers
are here. Certainly, the type of site I propose ought to get far more
attention from its users than your average internet site. Whether this
translates into > $40 / year advertising revenue, I don't know.

------
Prrometheus
David Friedman wrote about disaggregating and decentralizing the functions of
educational institutions, and the positive effects thereof, in his seminal
book "The Machinery of Freedom". I believe the relevant chapters are called "A
radical critique of American universities" and "The impossibility of a
university".

Of course, this was pre-internet.

Someone needs to tell Mr. Friedman about the open access movement so I can
stop telling people about his works and start linking to them.

------
aneesh
It's not even about revenue. Harvard doesn't set tuition to maximize revenue
-- it's only a drop in the financial bucket.

As for offering content online, MIT has been pretty progressive in this
regard, and they offer ocw.mit.edu. But having advertising would undermine the
credibility of a university. I think it's better just to take the (small) hit,
and make it ad-free.

~~~
tim2
It's not about profit? For virtually all schools, it is.

I think these discussions are highly distorted by just focusing on the top
couple schools that are the exception to the norm and affect very few people
anyway.

------
mixmax
In Denmark university is free. You even get a state grant of about $1000 a
month to live off while you study.

As we have no natural resources we have to fall back on a smart population.
And since, according to numerous studies, we are one of the richest and
happiest countries in the world it seems to work pretty well.

------
bluelu
Wrong topic, should be "Why isn't University in the USA free". In many other
countries, university is free, or so cheap, that nearly the entire population
can afford sending their childs to university, without going into debt.

