Because the costs are so low, a high drop out rate is fine. Self-education is a different model. It's more fault-tolerant. You fail (as in, don't understand) a

Because the costs are so low, a high drop out rate is fine. Self-education is a different model. It's more fault-tolerant. You fail (as in, don't understand) about 30-50% of the stuff you try-- at least, that's my noncomprehension/loss-of-interest rate when I attack a random-ass paper-- but that's okay, because it just means you fill up the prerequisites and get back to it. MOOCs are making self-education much easier. With lectures split up into 5- to 10-minute pieces (that's good and bad) you can watch them on the train or even at work. I feel like one place where MOOCs are really going to kill is in corporate training; companies will realize that MOOCs provide resources and (for a fee) people to build their in-house "here's how you use our shit" tutorials better than what's out there in most places. Of course, that will also make it easier for people to use MOOCs at work; I like that, but I'm not sure it's what typical corporate managers want. College education is based on a different model with a known, fairly static prerequisite graph and a low tolerance of failure-- but failure (even defined as a grade of D or F, and C for in-major) is also pretty rare. College is this packed-tight model (designed for efficiency in time by providing an immersive community) where you get (in theory) what'd be 8-12 years of self-education in 130 weeks spread out over 4 years. However, the world changes fast enough that this "learn, then earn" model doesn't make any sense. Education has to be more interleaved than it used to be. Also, 18 years old used to be an adult; but our culture is so incoherent and (I can't find a values-neutral word for it) chaotic that adulthood now is about 24-27. I think college was an extremely efficient educational process when it was full of adults; but now it's full of kids, not because admissions changed but because society did.