College, all you can learn, $99/month | Hacker News Reader

College, all you can learn, $99/month

washingtonmonthly.com

117 pointssethg85 comments

The essential hack:

>So he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become “partner colleges” that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.

Right, so we get more corruption that further invalidates my degree for which I actually had to do a lot of very difficult actual work. As if accrediting places like University of Phoenix and IDT wasn't enough.

How would you substantiate your implicit claim that student in on-line courses don't do "real work".

I can't see the slightest difference between an accredited community college and accredit on-line college.

Of course, all these schools have individual reputations and accreditation doesn't immediately give a school the reputation of Harvard.

University of Phoenix is nationally accredited-- and that's bad. Most universities are regionally accredited, which means if you get a degree from Phoenix and you want to pursue a masters at another uni, you're degree may not count.

While I don't have a degree at all, myself, when I get one, it will probably include quite a lot of distance learning, given that I have a full time job I'm loathe to give up.

Can you explain in what way my earning a degree will invalidate yours?

I don't know what University you went to but having known people who "partied their way through the Ivy league" (by their own admission) I feel pretty confident that people can get through any 4 year university without working all that hard. So even if you did work really hard your degree was probably "invalidated" by those people far before this came along.

Beyond that I'd present the question that's already been asked: What makes you think people who get degrees online aren't working hard? Did you study 18 hours a day like the woman in the article? I suspect not.

Well, not my college and not my degree. For my degree you had to work your ass off and there was no way around that. My major started with more than 200 people and about thirty something of us graduated. In some of the early classes professors would fail half the class without batting an eyelid.

And it was not considered a super elite school or anything. It was just an engineering degree in a school where the faculty took the subject seriously. So, I am very sure nobody in my major partied through it, in fact I was probably the biggest partier of them all but i still had to work my ass off for the difficult classes.

Of course there always are majors that can be partied through, we all know the bs majors out there.

Well it is possible that people with on-line degrees are in fact working hard, but it is very hard to believe. What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly? For reputable universities this usually comes down to the personal integrity of the professor. They have academic reputations to defend and make sure that their students know what their supposed to know or don't pass. For on-line colleges the "professor" is a random badly paid employee, and the student is a customer that will stop paying if he/she gets pissed off.

The woman in the article studied 18 hours a day because the on-line school offered a flat fee per month so she just decided to take as many classes as possible to get her money's worth.

You know, the best programmers/engineers I have known did almost no course work. The material was so easy they breezed through, while reading papers of interest or doing extra research projects with faculty.

If you are truly interested in your field, you should rarely cover new material in undergraduate courses.

> What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly?

Keeping their job?

If a company like StraighterLine wants to be taken seriously, they'll need to ensure people that they are giving quality classes and only passing people who learn the material.

My guess is that they'll end up some how auditing the professors, maybe randomly looking at tests to see if the people understand the material, etc... Maybe they'll find some other mechanism, but as long as a good education is valued by employers, StraighterLine will need to find a way to prove it is giving one.

To be honest, my only real issue with treating these courses as accredited is the difficulty in validating who took the class (e.g. making sure someone didn't ask their friend to take the exams for them).

further invalidates my degree for which I actually had to do a lot of very difficult actual work

If your degree is all you've got going for you, you're already in trouble. A degree should be viewed as a means to get your foot in the door for your first real job. From then on, it's all on you. (Admittedly, there is research that shows that the higher up the totem pole you start your career the better you'll do for the rest of your career, so Ivy League is still a good deal for many people.)

You're bringing up some of the same points I did when I made the claim that college could be a bubble, except you were disagreeing with me back then.

But there I only disagreed with a specific point. That, by definition, you cannot apply the term "bubble" to college. I fully agree with you that many colleges are overpriced and/or worthless.

This type of smug response to online education (or alternative education) is frustrating.

It still seems that for-profit and education is taboo in American society...

If Apple can be for-profit and dedicate itself to quality technology products and services why can't a similar company apply their focus to quality, technology, and education?

I see StraigterLine as a small step in that direction. If you don't like where this is headed, I suggest you start donating more money to your Alma Mater - to secure your family spot the old fashioned, nepotistic way.

More importantly, this is going to be a long, iterative process with some missteps along the way (UOP et al).

A case can be made that UOP and its peers invest more money in maintaining enrollment pipelines than the actual education technologies and infrastructures. Which is all the more reason for other upstarts to take advantage of an opportunity...

Online access to higher education has huge potential to redefine the status quo, and that evolution in education requires hackers to keep pushing the needle.

One can very well argue that accreditation system is very biased against new entrants, that's why the hack had to be devised. Whether accreditation system should be changed, is another discussion.

Personally, I see StraighterLine as Netflix of online learning. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Then again, it sounds like StraighterLine is currently a PG-13 version of Netflix with a selection of 100 DVDs.

"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and--most importantly--fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

This is the opportunity for Web-based services hackers in this industry. There are huge amounts of spending devoted to "education" (currently defined mostly as school attendance), and anything that can make that massive spending more efficient has got to be good for society, and good for the early promoters of the new efficiencies.

Especially anything that reduces the expense of higher education should be appealing as student debt continues to pile up.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405297020473180...

StraighterLine sounds as close as you can get to David Gelernter's "Tracks and Clusters" concept within the framework of traditional courses and credits. See Gelernter at:

http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#gelernter

A couple days ago there was some complaints that technology hasn't actually changed anyone's lives, and I made the claim that while we may be paused now while we consolidate some things, the changes are coming. Here's one for you now: In twenty years (by the time my son would be graduating), the centuries-old idea of college will probably be gone.

I've been thinking about the implications of this article for the past couple of hours (since my previous posts), and I think it could very easily cut far deeper than people realize. Once we have ~$100/month college education, why wouldn't an advanced high schooler opt for that instead of standard high school classes as we see them now? And once the mental block of "schooling must take place in a school" is gotten past, what's going to prevent that from going ever-lower in age? Why wouldn't even a middle-schooler prefer to learn math at their own pace instead of locked to all of his or her classmates?

And... once "school" consists to some significant degree of distance learning, what is the purpose of clocking in at a school building? Now, there are answers to that question (two-working-parent households using it for child care, for instance), but it's going to radically rewrite the school social contract.

If this sort of thing even remotely succeeds it'll start rewriting more than just the college social contract, it's going to extend way down.

(Of course today it's just introductory courses, but that is very, very correctable over the timespan I'm looking at here. This is a game-changing price point even if they triple it.)

I think the interesting point to look at is the 'traditional' non-university institutions teaching university-like courses (Nursing, IT, etc.). They tend to move faster then anyone else because of size and their economy is more straightforward in most places. They provide education & accreditation in exchange for tuition. For this reason.

They are moving towards self paced learning via the kinds of 'modules discussed here. They still have buildings and teachers (standing around or answering questions). But the distinction between this and online schooling is much harder to make.

In twenty years (by the time my son would be graduating), the centuries-old idea of college will probably be gone.

The idea of college as it exists now isn't very old. The idea of centers of study and learning predates not just computers, but also books.

College, and going to school in general, isn't just about taking classes. Getting the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of people helps broaden enriches their education and is great preparation for the "real world."

While some of this interaction could be moved online, I suspect that it would make it easier for people to seek out people that are similar to them since they're not being thrown into a environment where you would have to see your classmates every day whether you find them agreeable or not.

Interesting. But the classes are all fairly low level. I need someplace where I can finish a BSCS for $99 a month :)

Same here. I'm only roughly 30 quarter units from my CS degree ... but I don't live near my old school nor do I have much desire to be on campus a lot.

"Low-level"? More like scam. The "College Algebra" [1] covers what high-school curriculum covered in either sophomore or junior year (depending on whether they were in the "AP track"). Claiming that "learning to graph linear, quadratic, absolute value, and piecewise-defined functions, and solve and graph exponential and logarithmic equations" is "college math" is plain false.

So not only are the classes "low-level" (because, at least in my Math courses, we didn't get very far before high-bandwidth back-and-forth interaction with the professor becomes essential to the process), but it completely misses the point of college for most people who attend it. No online course could have replaced the socratic questioning my PolySci professor gave us (he told us he modeled the teaching after his professor who would use it to make students cry, but toned it down a bit), or the vigorous debate with a Elizabethan poetry professor about whether the themes in Shakespeare were comprable to modern soap operas, or the engagement in political and academic groups.

Sure, it might replace crappy community colleges or degrees for middle aged people seeking to improve their career, but it won't do much for the 17 year olds who are looking to form an identity and foothold in the world.

(OTOH, the undergrad CS program at Rutgers could mostly have been replaced with online or self-study. I think that's because the undergrad CS program is so pressured into training tech workers that they can't be nearly as selective as the Math dept).

1. http://www.straighterline.com/courses/descriptions/algebra/

I guess you think the University of Maryland College Park is a scam school too? The MATH 115 Precalculus course I took there actually covered slightly less material than my Algebra II/Trig course I had taken several years earlier in HS.

Why did you take that course there at College Park?

Because I had been out of school several years working, I had nearly flunked the course in HS, and I needed the review. For that matter I have been gradually working through another precalculus text recently for a review, it has again been too long since I have actually used much of it.

If that class counted toward a math major, then yes. At Rutgers, while those classes exist, they are there to prep you for requirements, but don't count for anything on their own.

I think if you try hard enough you can get a degree from a "real", heck even "established" college with stunningly little math.

And indeed personal interaction with a professor is essential to get to a certain level,But if you can not afford that, then the much worse alternative, is still INFINITELY better then no college.

And not a single one of my professors at my real and established university used the Socratic method of teaching, not even once.

Then again I didn't take any polysci courses, just cs, math, stat, etc.

And the ability to pay a lot of money just to get the opportunity to discuss Elizabethan poetry with someone else comes from wealth. Not form talent, or hard work, but the wealth of your family.

Apologies if you actually come from a poor family and made it to college on scholarships and tips from waiting tables.

But the vast majority of the time, people who discuss Elizabethan poetry in college don't really need college as an essential economic opportunity opener.

In short, you are not the target demographic of that $99 college.

Every time an article shows up on the (fascinating) topic someone pops up and starts swinging. "Personal growth. Face to face interaction with brilliant professors. Discuss with like minded talented youths. Completely misses the point of college... and on"

The reality is that no one would even consider paying private universtity equivalent fees to achieve those things in any other case. They are peripheral. Like air conditioning in a car they are inseparable from a good university.

You can't ignore the fact that "They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilising lows."

In any case, assume andreyf is correct and the peripherals make all the difference. That is still a big deal. Universities may need to compete explicitly on that advantage, without the pretence of a better education. That world would look very different. Perhaps as this article and discussion on HN suggest, online is more suitable for basic courses while advanced courses still need a building. Maybe this is on to a decent idea: $99 per month online study of all basic courses, 1-2 year. 1-2 years in a building for advanced courses.

Universities may need to compete explicitly on that advantage, without the pretence of a better education.

But that is what makes a better education - a well-rounded view of the world and a deep understanding of the material. That's the distinction between "University education" and "community college education". At least in high-level math classes, the "read the book and solve the exercises" is only the first part of a lesson. Understanding the meaning of the concepts, the epistemological implications, and discussing how it related to other areas of math is the true value-add.

a well-rounded view of the world and a deep understanding of the material

The deepest level of understanding may only be achievable through peer and superior face to face interaction. But a deep understanding could be within the reach of an extraordinary autodidact. Especially if the tuition fees are out of his or her reach.

A well-rounded view of the world on the other hand, is more social stratification then education. Or it's education only as much as certain knowledge is essential to truly belong in certain strata of society.

You don't have to be wealthy to attend college and study poetry or other liberal arts. I went to my state university with no financial help from my parents, just federal loans. I ate plain rice many days and pay $300 bucks a month on the loans, but I did it and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

But did you really go into significant dept to study liberal arts? Just liberal arts, nothing more... easily monetizable?

Maybe 3/4 of it is from just liberal arts. My degree is in philosophy with concentrations in peace studies and religious studies. As much as I loved the experience, it was certainly not easily monetizable. The remaining 1/4 is from taking computer science classes after struggling to find interesting work with a philosophy degree. I love the structured nature of coding, but the world isn't always so black and white. Liberal arts teaches you to explore and analyze the fuzzy, murky, gray areas.

I think because of your educated background you vastly overestimate the number of people that are taught algebra well in college. Even the people that did take real algebra sometimes don't cover all the content necessary for a strong base.

You also overestimate the amount of socratic questioning that goes in college, even at the top ones. Socratic questioning doesn't exist around 80% of the engineering classes at my school (UIUC), and we're ranked 1-5 in basically every engineering field. The advanced math here is pretty much the same, although I think our math department is only around average. The point being, the lack of socratic questioning in the classroom isn't a disqualifier for a beneficial education. Sometimes just presenting the material and giving someone a problem set is the right thing to do. The benefits from socratic questioning can be achieved elsewhere. Hacking on an open source project, posting in online forums, or speaking with professors, for example.

All of that being said, I'm not convinced of the benefits of this online system. The only way I could see it being even remotely useful is if most participants transfer to a public institution of decent caliber after taking basic general education classes.

"Low-level"? More like scam. The "College Algebra" [1] covers what high-school curriculum covered in either sophomore or junior year (depending on whether they were in the "AP track").

So, funny story. My friend just started at the local community college yesterday. He isn't very good at math, so they placed him in a below-level math class.

They learned about number lines today. Oh and also the difference between "greater than" and "less than".

Wow.

So I'm assuming that you're calling it a scam because they offer very little value in terms of the information provided, and that this high-school math is put off as a college course?

But universities do that now. They offer remedial math and reading, and "Strategies for Student Success," which allows people to retake high school material in a college setting. Because undergrad tuition hours are all charged the same.

"College Algebra" always seemed like an oxymoron to me.

Have you seen algebra?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach_algebra

Funny story: my roommate (much smarter than me) focused on algebra in undergrad and now grad school. Always poke fun at him for studying x+3=5 ;)

Sure Artin's Algebra has a prominent place on my bookshelf. That class was by no means called "College Algebra".

The "College Algebra" [1] covers what high-school curriculum covered in either sophomore or junior year

College math should go back over high school math for the first 6 month or so, because chance are you where taught the math in an incomplete way in high school. The first 6 month or so of math when I was at university was basically starting back from square one and being re-taught everything we thought we already knew. But this time we where taught it correctly with formal proofs and everything put in its right context, and I'd certainly consider that not only college level, but also very useful.

So that means the CollegeBoard is a scam too? http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/ex_ca.html

Furthermore, AP is college level material.. http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html

But seriously, what you're essentially saying is that higher education only really matters when it's for the wealthy and/or elite...

Four full courses in 2 months... amazing. I wonder how many of these credits are transferable?

Edit: It appears there are currently nine courses that can be taken for transfer credit. http://www.straighterline.com/courses/

EDIT: accreditation via some partners, varying flexibility: http://www.straighterline.com/about/partners/partner-college...

Personally, I don't care too much - this is very interesting to me. I have thought about completing my education for years but been put of by the time commitment and cost. For me it's about gaining academic and self-disciplinary skills, not so much about the letters. I am bad with long-term horizons, so the ability to focus on the goal rather than the time commitment - and save money while doing so - is huge to me.

Thanks, sethg.

College is as much about the experience as it is the education. It is a time for many kids to get out on their own and learn to be independent.

It is also one of the last chances for you to be around many people your own age (and one of the last chances you will have to be around many single men/women).

Once you start working, it's different. It's more difficult to meet people and you have an entire set of new responsibilities.

Although I don't think it will completely replace college, it might work well for people already working (and don't have the time to actually sit in class for a few hours a day).

Yes, that's the talking point we'll be hearing from the colleges.

I have news for you. There's no way in hell people are going to value that "experience" to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year when a credible alternative emerges. And you see, that's the real problem. People don't spend money by deciding whether a thing is "good" or "bad". People decide whether something is the best thing they can do with their money. There is no way blowing that much money on an expensive college that produces the same degree as the much cheaper alternative is going to be a popular choice. (Might I add that the online college will also let you go at your own pace, and is even quite likely to have superior courses, once all the tech and experience is in place.) Arguing that college is "good" won't win. You have to establish it as the best choice. There's no way it will meet that bar.

You can berate them all you like for making choices you feel are wrong, but it's hopeless. Live-in colleges are doomed.... long term, anyhow.

Other things will spring up to fill the social void. They won't be the same. There will be a chaotic transition period. They'll be worse in some ways and better in others, and old-fogeys will bemoan the ways in which they are worse without seeing (or comprehending) the better ones. All terribly predictable. All but unstoppable.

We've had an acredited distance learning university in the UK for 20 years - the degrees issued are considered equal to the equivalent course in normal universities (although less prestigious). The idea was copied/partnered in the US - I think in the early '80s, but it never took off there. I do agree that live-in colleges will likely be overtaken by some form of virtual equivalent, but it's not a 100% done deal that this will happen.

A year ago I'd have agreed with you. I just changed colleges and spent a short gig at Princeton, and now I wouldn't doubt that what we think of as colleges today will remain in some shape.

The college experience is about independence and about sharing independence. It's not about the classes so much as it's about what comes out of those classes - what thoughts, what productions, etc. I just had my first video production class. I'm certain that the various technical lessons are ones that I could get for cheaper, and the various artistic lessons I'll skim over. What I wouldn't get is the feeling of community and collaboration and togetherness, the almost-fantasy of being alive and alone and at the same time together with everybody else. I'd also probably be hard-pressed to get the high-level gear that I get to use.

Granted, I'm in a unique position now because I'm at an art school rather than a generic lib-arts college. My student body is all geared towards certain things more than others. The result is that I'm in a community that feels uniquely welcoming of me, and it's a physical community, meaning that I'm living in the midst of these people, and it's a personal community, meaning I'm making, hopefully, lifetime connections and profoundly changing my life and my worldview. I get to live in the middle of extremely over-the-top people, extremely ambitious people who are ambitious in a way you can't find online. (There are two big tenants of ambition that I identify: One sort you find online right here; the other sort might be impossible to move gracefully online; in any event, it hasn't been done yet.)

I'm in the same position learning-wise that I was last year: All my classes feel beneath me, and in the areas of my expertise I'm quite a ways ahead of most of my peers. So last year I was considering dropping out rather than transferring and paying a shitton of cash - If I'm not learning, I reckoned, surely I could survive for a decade on the same amount of money and learn on my own?

Yes, but I'd lose a few instantly material things. I'd lose access to the career drive that my university provides: I'm expected to leave here with a portfolio good enough to land me anywhere I want to go, and the university will insist on my making it as good as possible. I'll lose the creme-de-la-creme of the professors here: Right now I get tutelage under Emmy Award-winners and studio executives and all sorts of people whose experience is much more useful to me when delivered in person over hours-long conversations. Finally, I'll lose the access that I have now to thousands of talented beautiful people looking for a way to spend an evening. Two days ago on a lark a kid and I finagled our way into an interview with a bestselling author and a movie star. That's quite an experience, and it's one that wouldn't have happened without the particular synergy of the guy I worked with to get the interview (I wouldn't have had the ambition to secure my way in, he wouldn't have known what-all to ask about). When you're with a unique group, there's a pulse that colleges are specifically designed to attract. Not all of them do this, and I don't know which ones do and which don't (I have my doubt about the Ivies, actually), but the ones that do will find themselves prized as always.

Now, what I do think will happen is that live-in colleges will change their path. We're going to see education happen faster and more in-depth at younger and younger ages. I suspect colleges will respond by specializing more and more, which is a good thing - it will create stronger and stronger communities of people. College sizes will shrink, as large schools become more difficult to keep interesting. College may also not be viewed as an essential part of finding employment, which is also good - it will strengthen the value of the experience for the people that choose to go.

I don't see why colleges have to beat every other option. That's like the argument that one form of entertainment will rule supreme over others, that books will be killed by plays will be killed my movies will be killed by video games, with all the other little anal arguments in between. For college to survive, all we need are a few dozen thousand people to decide that the fantastic experience of college is worth quite a lot of money, and I suspect it won't be hard to find them. There are enough people who've had real college experiences (now myself included) that the core ideas that made the experience so good will continue for a long time to come.

The problem with that idea is that it takes more than just people waving money to make something happen; it also has to be economical. There has to be a solution to the "money flow in > money flow out" problem. And due to the enormous fixed costs a college campus implies, if demand drops far enough, you may not be able to make the numbers work for much more than the very, very highest demand people. And that says niche market, which is going to be a big transition away from where we are now.

There's probably some convenient economic term to describe this.

Ultimately, you sort of missed the point of my message, which is that it isn't enough to merely establish that these are good or desirable qualities of a college. You have to establish that there's enough people who think it's the best choice to make it economical. Colleges have to beat every other option from the point of view of enough people that they can turn a profit because colleges are in a free market, and will very soon be facing stiff competition from a new competitor that will undercut their prices by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously providing services that will be in many ways superior, probably superior enough to make up for the ways in which they are inferior.

A few art colleges will survive and a few music colleges will survive, and I tend to agree the Ivy league will survive (but they will bleed), but at the end, nobody is going to look around at the landscape and say that "colleges have survived". It's going to be a bloodbath.

Try to cut out the emotional overtones and just imagine a market where someone comes out with a competitive product that is orders of magnitude cheaper, while being fairly substitutable for the original product. Technically, there are still people who make shoes for horses, and they come out to your house to do it. They aren't gone. But they aren't a significant industrial force, either. That's where colleges are heading; just enough left over that you might be able to come up to me in 2030 and say "Look, Harvard's still there! It's all OK.", but you wouldn't be fooling anyone.

It is a time for many kids to get out on their own and learn to be independent.

Or alternatively, to experiment with everything from sex and drugs to business models in a curated environment, with partial financial support and liquidity provided by parents and/or the taxpayer. Your point is good, but perhaps live-in college fosters interdependence as much as independence.

one of the last chances you will have to be around many single men/women

There are these things called nightclubs :)

Nightclubs, yuck. I prefer a more non-hostile environment like a university. :)

Well, there are also cons, but I hear that the single women at these events are under-represented, and a lot of the single men have good reason to be single....

Then there's an opportunity for other entrepreneurs providing a complementary good: Ways to meet and spend time with other "students" in a post-university world.

Just because the lecture hall and the social environment are currently bundled into a single "product" doesn't mean you have to give one up when they become un-bundled.

Well put - it's so easy to stare at the status quo and assume that's the only way to do things.

It would be nice if this could caused colleges to focus on the experience more - have more face-to-face seminar style courses where people learn to think on their feet, express themselves verbally and dissect the material they've already gone-over on-line.

But it seems more likely that result will be just the death of another dinosaur...

If I'm gonna spend a couple years doing college I might want to move somewhere with other people my age whom I can study with. More concretely, I might move to Portland with all the other unemployed 20-somethings, or Boston, or the Valley. Doesn't mean I have to get accepted to an actual school in those places if I can college on my own time.

"It is a time for many kids to get out on their own and learn to be independent."

College is completely unnecessary to do that. Going out and living on your own does that just fine! And if it's the time to make connections & socialize & party, then not going to college, living in your own place and doing a ton of social things will achieve that way better than college, for a significantly cheaper price. Hell, it will cause more people to do that, since they would be less likely forced to stay at their parents place in order to afford college.

Also I found it difficult to socialize and make friends in college vs. high school. People are focused on their classes, math & comp sci. people are not the most social types, and unless your in the dorms, it's difficult to make friends.

Too bad that there was no URL of StraighterLine on the first page of article. In a quick glance, it was hard to find which site/service they are talking about. Here is it for your convenience - http://StraighterLine.com

Oh, yeah, that was tough. It was only the top hit in google for the first thing I tried, "straigherline" (note the typo.)

If there's is a higher education bubble, then this is what might burst it. We desperately need cut throat price competition between colleges.

I don't think it will be this; rather, it will be the free and open accessibility to knowledge and discussion via MIT OCW, Stanford lecture youtube channels, etc.

As great as those are, they still don't provide a replacement for student interactions with a professor and/or tutoring, which are things a site like this could conceivably provide for a monthly fee.

This was a pretty good article. It's long, but if you read the whole thing, you'll see that the biggest challenge these newer institutions face is the accreditation problem.

The hack they used to get around that was clever, but as we could've guessed, it didn't last forever. I believe the only long-term solution to this is to encourage people to bypass accreditation entirely. Yes, many jobs still have legal barriers (i.e., you can't be hired unless you have a government-approved credential), but for those that don't, the barriers are only psychological. I am working now to help eradicate these barriers. But whatever I do personally, I am confident that the situation will change in the future.

(Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645523)

Damn, I read the whole thing to find out what happened to the woman and her four courses that would cost "roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university", but it doesn't say. So she spent $200, learned some maths, and then... What happened?

My impression was that it was a developing story: they only told it to the point that events had progressed to. It mentioned her getting laid off, so this seems likely.

But, but, isn't part of the point of college to keep 18 to 22 year olds out of the job market? And perhaps more to the point, the real function of college is supposed to be creating citizens, not just employees.

That said, it's pretty clever. Even smarter would be finding a way to accredit classes that use Berkeley and MIT's online course material, including their YouTube lectures. Add on a virtual TA and you could get to $49 a month.

I think the debates about online education confuse the different roles that educational institutions serve:

1. Impart knowledge. And when it comes to teaching grammar or differential equations, online education is probably a more effective delivery agent than classrooms ... sorry guys.

2. Train people in face-to-face social skills. Much important work is done in an educational environment by teaching people how to behave in their later professional careers. This goes FAR beyond technical skill, into things like how to make appropriate jokes, how to drop names, how to socialize off work, how to dress at what occasion, how not to expose the fact that you came from a poor background, etc, etc. I think high level centralized education is probably pretty good at this; some of this can be done online, but online interaction doesn't give you practice at face work.

3. Grow social networks with a high level of emotional charge. One goes to Yale largely so that one can become a Yale Alumn and mobilize those networks. This network building doesn't work without an emotional attachment to the university, though, and this is probably more easily cultivated when people are there in person, lose their virginity on campus, go to rituals together, etc.

4. Control the flow of people into various levels of the elite. I think there are a lot more capable people in the world than there are open positions, so education partly serves to withhold training and entitlement by imposing fairly arbitrary cutoffs for admission and by making people feel personally responsible for their prior lack of training (a lack which is generally due to their bad luck in being born into a less fortunate segment of society). Better to have unemployed pissed off illiterate peasants than unemployed pissed off educated folks -- the latter organize and execute revolutions while the former just break windows and make a lot of noise. This categorizing based on supposed talent begins at a very young age -- google "Pygmalion effect". Choking off the flow of talented people who might make trouble will be harder if education escapes its current stranglehold by the academy.

5. Provide physical equipment. If you need to provide access to lab equipment and libraries, it is more efficient to put them in one place and share them. This is obviously changing rapidly, with central libraries becoming obsolescent in many ways (not all though -- browsing the shelves is a good thing and impossible to do in the same way online).

So, if we are discuss the pros and cons of online versus offline education, I think we should do it broken down more, either my way or some other.

Two more comments -- it is pretty funny to hear professors going on about cheapening the value of a degree from Fort Whatever in Kansas. And as far as I am concerned, the sooner the internet bomb goes off in academia, the better.

1. Good, but you definitely don't need college for that.

2. Potentially useful, but most people can easily absorb this on their own, and colleges don't (or at least didn't when I was in) actually provide any help for those who really do have trouble with this.

3, 4. Evil, but conventionally accepted.

5. Nonsense. Unless you're doing graduate research in science or engineering, lab and shop equipment is a small fraction of the cost of attending college.

My point wasn't that college is the best way to do numbers 1,2,3, just that it DOES provide these for better or for worse. If we are going to talk about alternatives, we need to talk about how college can provide these.

I agree that on #1, online learning is probably better than classroom. I was just saying that classroom usually provides it today.

WRT #2, I disagree that people can easily absorb it on their own, otherwise there wouldn't be so many lonely socially awkward people in the world. And yes, if you have real trouble, college won't help. But if you are sort of graceful when you arrive though, college can help polish that gracefulness even more, with very real benefits in the real world.

I disagree that #3 is evil. Again, my point is that people need it, so if we shift away from conventional universities we need to provide it somehow.

I DO agree that #4 is evil. I just wanted to call it like I see it, and explain some of the resistance to really opening up education.

WRT #5, I wish the OP would refrain from using words like "nonsense", which seems a little antagonistic. I think my point still holds. Part of my point though is that efficiency is changing, especially with shifts from print to electronics.

Actually I don't think online learning is better than classroom, I wrote two blog posts (the more recent is http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/overcoming-bias-an... and links to the earlier) claiming that the Web is NOT adequate for serious study. Books are the thing.

The nonsense was a bit strong, but I have seen this claim over and over, and equipment suitable for learning is much less expensive than tuition. If you REALLY want to learn, you can even build large amounts of the equipment yourself (that is also the ultimate test - Pass/Fail - does it work or not). I don't know if they still do, but the UMCP had a required physics shop course where you learned to use machine shop and electronics tools to make specialized equipment you may need.

Your blog posts are comparing surfing the Internet and using Google to reading/studying textbooks tailored for college courses. You're comparing Apples and Oranges.

The general Internet is only the access point for serious online education - the actual teaching happens within private web applications. Furthermore, online courses or degrees still require the same books, you just might buy them (for a lot less) off Amazon or Chegg instead of the college bookstore.

Could you imagine someone with no need for #1 (say she already got it from an online classroom) paying tuition to get 2-5?

I suspect that if getting #1 from an online classroom or other bare-bones service becomes commonplace, then other institutions will evolve to provide 2-5.

I can't visualise these institutions.

Great article. Accreditation has to evolve. At www.nixty.com we are working on a form of open accreditation - or personal accreditation - that employers/peers can look at to assess a person's competencies. Degrees are still somewhat valid indicators of a person's knowledge, but their predictive value is steadily decreasing for a number of "anonymous institutions". What is needed, instead, is a form of personal accreditation that is based on test scores, work display (papers the individual has written that others can download/comment on), resume, and recommendations. We hope that this type of open accreditation will yield strong results that can help support the current form of accreditation.

My college costs $-957/month.

I hate to be so smug, but Scandinavian-socialism really does rule.

It must be quite an education-system to teach math like that. Elsewhere, one might be taught that a variable in calculating those costs would be the taxes paid to fund the college. Maybe you haven't paid much yet but I suspect that your parents may have and that you will (unless you emigrate soon after graduation.)

It's a real shame that the established players can use accreditation so well to prevent competition.

I briefly taught at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumont_University, which used a more expensive hack to handle the accreditation problem: they bought an existing college. (Neumont is VC-backed; obviously that's not something you can bootstrap. It's also probably not something a $99/m model can afford anyway...)

The question is though, If I were to take one of these degrees on this website and pass it, how would it compare in a perspective employers mind to a 4 year cs major degree?

This specific website? Or just a degree delivered online?

In general, the only thing a CS degree tells me is that you had the fortitude to complete a CS degree, and perhaps (it's not a given) you might be able to practically apply some of what you learned.

Things higher up on the list of considerations include experience (side projects count for graduates), natural ability, hunger, and cultural fit.

Many in our technical team don't have even have a degree and of those that do, around half are not CS or IS degrees.

I've found iTunes University to be a great resource for education, top level schools offering their course material is just great in so many ways. It's also interesting to see how courses at MIT compared to the same courses I took at my state university and realizing they are really not that all different.

Another point about online courses, it's would be like working from home as a one man startup. Unless your very driven, have good support around you or know friends doing the online courses as well, it could be a very lonely experience.

Really, higher ed needs a major overhaul! Straighter liner is a start, but there needs to be more flexibility, less hyperbole classes and lower cost.

This is cool, but I think it's missing something. My startup will address the something that it's missing. :)

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