I think the points here are pretty interesting. Related to this, I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the federal government to create a national publi

I think the points here are pretty interesting. Related to this, I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the federal government to create a national public online university. There's a lot of talk about online education being the future of education on the one hand and a lot of talk about "College For All" / cost of education / inclusivity on the other hand, but it seems like the people who care about the two things are disjoint. I used to teach physics, and every semester it was the same thing: confusion about the right-hand-rule, rotational motion, Gauss' law, ..., and every year I explained things the same way (and so did all the other teachers in the classrooms next door.) Why not record these lectures in some ridiculously high-end way, blowing $10M on that one course, make it epic, and then just be done with it? Imagine the amount of money that's spent every year teaching stuff over and over again... The federal government should allocate something like $1B-$5B toward building out a virtual course catalog and open it up for free to the public. I feel like it could fill the need of community colleges / public four-year institutions quite well. In fact, I could see community colleges basically transition into a set of distributed testing facilities where you go to take your final exams or something.