3 ms·

Why isn't University free?

mattmaroon 19y ago
"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 19y ago
  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.
aneesh 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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.
xirium 19y ago
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/ http://www.open2.net/ ) and enrollment was free. 180000 students are currently enrolled.
Alex3917 19y ago
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.
pg 19y ago
Virtual wouldn't be the same. Most of what you learn in college, you have to learn in person.
- michael_nielsen 19y ago
  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 19y ago
    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 19y ago
      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.
- tim2 19y ago
  Maybe for art school. Wasn't the case for engineering. Real people may be nice to have, but I learned basically everything from the books/internet and reviewing homework/test solutions for what I got wrong.
  - pg 19y ago
mattmaroon 19y ago
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 19y ago
  See signaling theory of an education: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...
  - mattmaroon 19y ago
    Pretty neat. Thanks.
Prrometheus 19y ago
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.
edu 19y ago
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.
mixmax 19y ago
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 19y ago
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.

"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 19y ago
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.

aneesh 19y ago

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 19y ago
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.

xirium 19y ago

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/ http://www.open2.net/ ) and enrollment was free. 180000 students are currently enrolled.

Alex3917 19y ago

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.

pg 19y ago

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

michael_nielsen 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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 19y ago
    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.
tim2 19y ago
Maybe for art school. Wasn't the case for engineering. Real people may be nice to have, but I learned basically everything from the books/internet and reviewing homework/test solutions for what I got wrong.
- pg 19y ago

mattmaroon 19y ago

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 19y ago
See signaling theory of an education: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...
- mattmaroon 19y ago
  Pretty neat. Thanks.

Prrometheus 19y ago

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.

edu 19y ago

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.

mixmax 19y ago

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 19y ago

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.