In this article, entitled "Internet to Bring Down the Sky-High Cost of Higher Ed, Experts Say," Blake Snow ignores reality in a way I think Fox News is only capable of.
Similar to how media began “supplementing” printed newspapers in the 90s with free online editions -- which transformed business models and made the news largely “free” on the web for consumers -- free online courses might (perhaps unintentionally) ultimately force tuition closer to zero.
Exhibit A is Stanford's new "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” class. It’s entirely online. It’s free. And it even promises student feedback, in addition to an unaccredited but still résumé-worthy “Statement of Accomplishment.”
Resume-worthy? Uh...sure.
Does anyone in their right mind think that the private university system is going to move to low-cost model where current costs would have to be slashed? The analogy to the newspaper industry is dumb; newspapers are all genuinely for-profit, and the sole purpose of reading a newspaper was to learn what happened in the world. There's a prestige in reading The New York Times, I suppose, but it's not something you put on a resume and you get the exact same pseudo-intellectual cred by reading the online version.
In contrast, people don't take college classes to learn whatever is being taught. If that were the case, non-profit education would be dying simultaneously with the newspapers (if not sooner given the prevalence of libraries). But they're not. That's because people don't really go to college to learn. They go to be credentialed. You can learn whatever it is they teach in the Stanford English or Political Science departments for a very, very, very low cost. Yet people still pay tens of thousands so they can tell everyone they went to Stanford, that Stanford accepted them, and that Stanford put its silver sword on the student's shoulder.
That is the commodity, and until that is offered for free, there's no revolution forthcoming, and students will pay ever-more-insane prices for their "top-tier" degrees. It won't matter if hundreds of other colleges go to cheap online models and teach the same thing. If the only way to get the stamp is to attend the school (and there's no incentive for the elites to do otherwise), people will attend the school and pay out there nose, alternatives to the same practical end be damned.
The article seems to realize that these sorts of free online courses are nothing more than cheap marketing, and yet it retains this optimistic tone that soon our educational costs will be drastically cut by the internets. Bullshit. If that could change the current model, it would have changed 10 years ago. Places still offer actual credit classes online for identical tuition as their brick-and-mortar stuff. Why? Because they can, and no misreading of the economics at work will stop them.
Specifically to the case of law schools, all it takes is an accrediting organization to say "no" and any cost reduction by internet technology would be instantly nipped in the bud. Don't you think the same protectionist measures will surface the second any serious movement happens that threatens professor and administrator livelihood?
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