In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero

The cost of education TODAY is essentially zero. There's a huge amount of knowledge in the public domain, and libraries aren't expensive, and neither are computers, and then there's also the internet.

But you don't go to college for the education. Well it's definitely part of it, but a small mart. The big parts in no particular order are:

1. Social signaling that are you at least resemble a functioning adult. A college degree is a kind of societal hazing showing you're kind of OK.

2. Making connections with other people, other people who are very likely to be successful because of their education or their family's money or what ever, it's nice to have them in your social circle.

3. 3-5 or how ever many years of a fun and/or somewhat challenging experience that's shared with many other young single people all living and partying in close proximity. It's almost like a cruise with homework. Oh guess what they have those, you can actually take that as real college class.

How much would a 4 year vacation like that cost you? What if a large section of society had taken that vacation and not shared the experience made you somewhat of an outsider. How much would the travel agency be able to charge you then?

Tuition costs make more sense now?

This reminds me of Good Will Hunting: "You dropped a hundred and fifty grand for an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library"

A professor of mine is very interested in solving the cost problem of education, but internet-based learning is weak in a number of areas. He is well known for having an extremely painful automated grading system for Comp Sci homework, but that does not work nearly so well for other course (e.g. higher math or essays). The article claims they have solved this by peer review, but I would be interested to hear how they are making that work.

One of the other problems is the questionable value of degrees and grades in the first place: we as a society need to start evaluating people/employees based on prior results, like internships.

So yeah, more online learning is a good thing, but I doubt we will have online universities truly overtaking four year brick and mortar universities any time soon.

I am a serious autodidact and have spent some time thinking about how the web can be useful. Unfortunately, it isn't yet. I wrote two blog posts about my thoughts.

http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/web-is-still-not-a... - The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study

http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/overcoming-bias-an... - Overcoming Bias and Learning from the WWW

It's paying people to feed the information to you that's expensive.