Obvious follow up: Are there state universities using these techniques to drive down costs and be more flexible?
Some flagship state schools (example [0]) offer free tuition for lower income students providing they maintain a certain GPA.
But middle class families have a hard time as they are usually above the threshold for aid, and yet tuition (and housing) is a huge financial burden.
Florida is weirdly enough a good example as the sunshine state scholars program provides a reasonably approachable way for any student in the state to enter high school with the intent on going to university and graduate with the criteria to get 50%, 75%, or 100% tuition and fees covered under the sunshine state scholars program.
Then you have states like Virginia who have some of the fastest rising costs of attendance in the country and where cost of attendance at state schools (which are generally supposed to be cheaper) actually ends up being comparable or even more than cost of attendance at private universities.
Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
The ecampus tuition (~13K/year) is still substantial compared to the in-person tuition for out-of-state students (~38K/year), and nearly identical to the in-person tuition for in-state students (~14K/year) [2].
[1] https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/news/2023-ecampus-enrollment... [2] https://financialaid.oregonstate.edu/cost-attendance
This will make a huge difference in the market for degrees.