> Our industry has been so stable for so long that we’ve conflated our model with our mission. This had already become apparent to me long before online educat

> Our industry has been so stable for so long that we’ve conflated our model with our mission. This had already become apparent to me long before online education took off. Back when I called up the local university to ask if I could enroll in a few classes, a la carte, in order to flesh out my knowledge of some subjects that my alma mater's program didn't cover. They informed me that those classes were considered advanced, and therefore were only offered to students enrolled in the college's degree program. In other words, the only way they would let me take those one or two classes would be as part of a package deal for earning a second bachelor's degree, majoring in the same area of study as the one I already had. The only way I can make sense of a policy like that is if you think of the fundamental model of higher education as being essentially unchanged from what it was in the medieval period: A sort of atomic package that's a rite of passage that gains you access to a certain stratum of society as much as it is an education. Under that model, no, maybe it didn't make sense to take just one class, any more than it makes sense to walk into a jeweler's and ask them to chisel a chunk off of a diamond ring and sell it to you. But, nowadays, that way of thinking about education is deeply anachronistic. And classist, too. Failing to meet the needs of people who can't afford to just drop everything and become a full-time student with anything more helpful than, "Well, maybe you can dig a 500m deep financial hole, jump into it, and we'll meet you at the bottom," is simply a travesty.