Insight — which is more than mere knowledge — generally comes through personal connections, Cringely argues, rather than books — and so far we’ve had to create campuses and pay $50,000 per year to enjoy such personal connections:
That no longer makes sense.Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else. We should have a marketplace for insight. Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference. Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached. The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.
Remember, all lectures are also available online for free. What costs is the personal touch.
Say a particularly good professor wants to make $200,000 per year by working no more than 20 hours per week or about 1000 hours per year. That gives them a billing rate of $200 per hour.
Now look back at your university career. How much one-on-one time did you actually get with the professors who really influenced your life? I did the calculation and came up with about two hours per week, max. Imagine a four-year undergraduate career running 30 weeks per year — 120 total weeks of school — times two hours of insight per week for a total of 240 hours. At $200 per hour the cost comes to $48,000 or $12,000 per year.
That’s a huge savings compared to the $200,000+ an MIT-level education would cost today (remember the MIT online degree — there is one — costs the same as if you were attending in Cambridge). And ideally the pool of insightful experts would be far greater than any one university could ever employ. And that’s the point of this exercise; it can’t be an emulation of a traditional university, because that would inevitably disappoint — it has to be in at least one way clearly, obviously, stupendously better than what’s available now.
This brings up the subject of Straighterline, a new online quasi-university charging $99 per month for “all you can eat“:
Straighterline has a problem with accreditation — they can’t get it. So they cut deals with no-name schools to effectively launder their credits, passing them on to third-party schools. I see nothing wrong with this but in time Straighterline or schools like it will have to take a more direct approach to the problem of gaining acceptance. The University of Phoenix did that through the simple expedient of offering real classes all over the place and charging a lot more than $99 per month for all-you-can-learn. Exciting as that price is, it is precisely what scares the crap out of many established colleges.If I were running Straighterline, then, I’d get ready to file a big restraint of trade lawsuit against some big vulnerable school caught up in, say, an NCAA athletic recruiting scandal. ”Pick your targets carefully,” Pa Cringely always said.
The other thing I would strongly recommend is that Straighterline put some big bucks into recruiting its own stellar faculty. Spend whatever it takes to get the top people in some discipline to start. Hire academics if you can and lay practitioners if you can’t. Most academic contracts don’t prohibit teaching part-time elsewhere and if they do try to stop the practice, well that’s just a further example of restraint of trade.