Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.
Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what will happen...or how close we are to that point.
So we could have a startup that administers 3 day quals and hands out a degree based on passing our rigorous tests? Like passing the bar but from a private firm giving a certification, the education is on your own.
There's a bunch of testing centers owned by companies like Sylvan or Prometric and used for professional certification courses by companies like Microsoft and Oracle.
It's looking like the kind of pilot program we need to get more enterprising self-taught people into dev interviews: backed by big companies to instill faith in the smaller companies, teaching new/relevant skills, capstone project to show off and discuss in an interview.
It does cost though ($200/month), which can be significant out-of-pocket if you're in a low-paying job, and you may not need whatever service that $200 buys you. It's unclear what that goes to, but I'm assuming it's to the coaches.
Wrap a tutor contact service - sort of Uber for teaching - so that when candidates need a bit of one to one or to have a small group seminar about an especially tricky part of a given online course they can.
You then have something close to the original Universities around 1100 ad or so!
Coursera + the CLEP exams = real, tested learning, and college credit on the cheap. (Not that you can get a full degree just on the basis of CLEP tests, unfortunately...)
On their other hand it is bizarre to come into a thread about how teachers aren't getting paid despite school costs rising and present as an alternative paying teachers even less.
On the gripping hand I'm not entirely sure what you think the welfare theorems have to do with this but its worth remember that they do not and quite likely cannot actually describe reality.
The article wasn't just about the poor teachers. It also complained that students aren't getting value for their money.
But my main point is this: given that good competition exists, if colleges don't fix this quality issue, enrollment will drop and the situation for their teachers will keep getting worse.
(But professors at Coursera could get paid well for their efforts, if Coursera ends up with an effective business model.)
