All these free education movement is revolutionary. Knowledges had never been so easily accessible. It used to be that education was only available to the riches. Now with people like Thrun, Ng and Khan giving quality education to anyone, anywhere in the world for free. I can only see the world becoming a better place as more people get educated.
This would be a great tool to help with hiring. 100k students means 100k candidates who have completed the exact same exams and problem sets, providing a common basis for interviews. A company would know exactly what was taught in the course, and have a more objective way of evaluating certain skillsets.
Ah, this explains why they're a for-profit.
Also, just checked Udacity's site--they have a whole host of new courses slated for 2012 besides the Search Engine/Robotic Car competitions.
If Sebastian is able to maintain a high quality offering, then it should be fairly easy to become a for-profit operation - one could for example offer the testing results to various companies for a finder's fee if they hire someone (as the article alludes to), or perhaps offer a class first at a low cost of $10 (with 100K students, that's not bad beans), and then offer it for free, or perhaps (always my favorite to figure out how to apply), let students do a dutch auction bid for the class, etc.