> The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. You think it hasn't been tried? First, there's a chic

> The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. You think it hasn't been tried? First, there's a chicken-or-egg problem. By virtue of being one of the oldest universities in America, Harvard was originally an elite institution that was powered by the tuition paid for by the children of elite parents. To start a new "Harvard-but-bigger", you need to figure out where the "elite" part comes from. In the absence of a pre-existing elite alumni body, you need to enforce rigorous academic standards on your early graduating classes and let your reputation grow from there. But, you also need to deliver the rigorous academic standards at scale. MOOCs were one attempt, but it's impossible to defend against cheating online. It's hard enough to stop cheating in real-world exam rooms, letting people go through examinations at home makes it impossible. If you require people to show up in-person, then you reach physical limits to scale very quickly. Even if you try to combine MOOC-style lectures with building out a network of controlled examination centers in the real world, the attempts to expand American standardized testing abroad show that you begin to run into problems of corrupt test center administrators. It's like the fast food franchise model, where the restaurant corporate headquarters finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the same standards across all of their franchised locations, except that with examinations, your day-to-day users want your standards to be compromised.