This posting from Dale Dougherty brings us the news about Sridhar Vembu, a man who once toiled as a graduate student before earning a PhD and finding enlightenment when he saw his relatively uneducated brother doing just as well. He analyzed what made his brother successful and started a new program that would pay the [...]
The Chronicle of Education’s Jeffery Young focuses on Salman Khan’s ability to produce neat, succinct 10 minute lectures on topics like meiosis. He films himself and puts them up on Youtube for the world to see. Do I need to mention that he’s not charging $200k in tuition for four years? What’s missing? Jetsetting profs who skip [...]
Why pay? Here’s a list of 12 courses hand-picked by the editors at the NY Times. And if you poke a bit deeper, there are even more courses. I’m not sure this loophole will live for much longer, but enjoy the free information while you can. Economics | Yale: My Teacher Is an Index French [...]
April 17, 2010 – 11:37 am
Katie Hafner’s long piece in the NY Times highlights some of the better free courses out on the Internet. It’s a wonderful piece that not-so-slyly concentrates on the real bug in the ointment: the cost. Now I’m sure that the costs of producing some of these courses– $250k in some cases– is puffed out of [...]
Many people I’ve met in the university world like to believe that the Internet should be a pool of free content. The tenured radicals often write long defenses calling in a “creative commons” and the students just swap free digital copies of everything. One grad student I met was watching an unreleased version of a [...]
March 26, 2010 – 11:46 am
We love any alternative to overpriced campuses and YouTube’s collection of videos of professors yakking make it possible to get a top-flight education without spending a dime on anything except, perhaps, a fast Internet line.If too many kids start taking advantage of this, I wonder how universities will react. It’s easy to talk a good [...]
January 18, 2010 – 12:58 pm
Why does an official stamp of certainty on your educational status take 4 years? Why not 3? Why not 30? It’s all just arbitrary. Russell Sage college is going to experiment with a three year program that will reportedly jam the same number of credit hours into three years. The savings? $20k. (Thanks to Scott [...]
December 14, 2009 – 12:53 pm
I feel half-hearted about passing along this article on distance learning through the web from the Baltimore Sun’s Childs Walker. The trend is a good one for everyone and I believe the students quoted in the article saying that the courses were even more engaging than sitting in a stuffy lecture hall. When I think [...]
October 7, 2009 – 12:28 pm
The good folks at Springwise normally cover cool new businesses but this time they report on ways that colleges are distributing free Ivy League courses to high school students taking AP courses. This is probably smart marketing because good universities want to attract the kids taking the AP courses. I wonder if anyone can watch [...]
September 5, 2009 – 4:52 pm
The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Carey wrote a wonderful story about StraighterLine.com, a new service offering all the college you can suck down for $99/month. That’s right. Not $5000/month, the price of many top-line institutions. Not $2000/month, the price of many good state schools. Not $1000/month, the price of many community colleges, but $99/month. They offer the courses that [...]
Don Tapscott runs through a number of reasons why the universities aren’t going to be the best place to get an education in the future. The Internet changes everything. I’m still digesting it but I think he makes solid points that are, not coincidentally, similar to solid points that I’ve made.
The Toronto Globe and Mail notes that Canadian Universities are actively recruiting Americans. And why not? The universities get about $6000 for the Canadian government for educating a Canadian. But they have no trouble charging $23k to an American. The newspaper has a table showing that Dalhousie College in Canada costs $23k but Boston College, [...]
March 29, 2009 – 10:57 am
Sure you could pay $42,000 a year to go to Middlebury, but it looks like you could also just watch “The Wire”. The school is offering a new course devoted entirely to David Simon’s acidic deconstruction of life in post-industrial Baltimore. The professor is one of those trendy types who once devoted an entire paper [...]
March 25, 2009 – 12:10 pm
We’re not sure which genius came up with this idea, but a neat website called Academic Earth is filled with videos of some of the best professors in the world. So let’s see. You could get your parents to pay $50k per year to sit in a lecture hall with your laptop browsing LOLCATS and [...]
Sure you could buy all of the CD and that would run several hundred dollars, but where would that leave you? You might decide to fill your house with memorabilia, vintage vinyl, and other more authentic bits of Beatlemania. If you really work at it, you might spend several thousand dollars. But that’s nothing compared [...]
February 18, 2009 – 12:17 pm
The Washington Post is hosting a discussion about what to do about the binge drinkers at college.We’re all for experimenting. We’re all for a good drunken party. But why should anyone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it? If you’re going to waste a few years of your life, well, just get a part-time [...]
February 9, 2009 – 3:38 pm
I’m not sure of the details, but it seems like Chancellor University, the second oldest business institution in the country, is going to use on-line courses to cut the cost of a degree perhaps even as dramatically as their press release suggests. Read <a href=”http://au.sys-con.com/node/835504″> story here</a>. They certainly understand that the prices are too [...]
December 30, 2008 – 1:17 pm
There’s nothing like a cool phrase to lend legitimacy and make it acceptable to charge big fees. In the past, kids who couldn’t hack the idea of college would sort of disappear into the workforce. Perhaps they didn’t like the place that admitted them. Or maybe they were just turned off by the competitiveness. Sometimes [...]
November 11, 2008 – 12:46 am
Business Week’s Jane Porter takes a good, careful look at community college, a cheaper way to spend the first two years of the rest of your life. It’s a good alternative to many of the bigger schools. But I don’t know if it’s a great idea if your goal is to transfer to a small, [...]
October 24, 2008 – 9:28 pm
CNN’s Jen Haley has a positively scary story about how some people are leaving the US to escape their crushing loans. Don’t miss the music major who ended up with $160,000 in debt from a fancy school and now can’t make the payments. Someone told him it would only be $600 a month to pay [...]
Category Archives: 
BlogoSquare