Free Harvard and MIT Education. Private Colleges
Will Die.
by
Gary North
Tea Party Economist
Recently
by Gary North: Obama
Won. Now What Will You Do?
Ray Kurzweill
invented the technology that reads text and converts it into spoken
language.
His article
on the revolution in online college education points to the future.
How will some
struggling private college with under 1,000 students compete? How
will it get parents to shell out $35,000 a year?
The higher
education oligopoly is about to get broken.
Take the classes
online. Get the degree from an online accredited university for
$15,000.
Education
is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads
edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard
effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with
plans to teach a billion students, Technology
Review reports.
“Massive
open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education
ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent
(see “The
Crisis in Higher Education”) will affect markets so large
that their value is difficult to quantify.
A quarter
of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in
K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures
by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private
education and corporate training.
At edX, Agarwal
says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants
that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT
now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more.
Coursera,
an alliance between Stanford and two dozen other schools, claims
that it had 1.5 million students sign up.
Changing
the world
The rise
of the MOOCs means we can begin thinking about how free, top-quality
education could change the world.
Khan’s
videos are popular in India, and the MOOC purveyors have found
that 60 percent of their sign-ups are self-starters from knowledge-hungry
nations like Brazil and China. Nobody knows what a liberal application
of high-octane educational propellant might do. Will it supersize
innovation globally by knocking away barriers to good instruction?
Will frightened governments censor teachers as they have the Web?
For more details,
click the link.
Continue
Reading on www.kurzweilai.net
November
9, 2012
Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright ©
2012 Gary North
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