College Education for $20 a Month

We’ve written a lot lately on the idea of alternative and open source education. Independent schools and learning centers are frequently being created to serve life-long learners and those who may not be able to afford the rising costs of higher education. And of course, there’s the ever widening pool of educational resources available online. Besides the sea of disparate knowledge comprising the web, there are also numerous instances of more formal offerings of educational materials, such as MIT’s open courseware.

Author John Robb, who has done extensive studies on networks, communities and international relations foresees this critical mass of freely available knowledge along with the increasingly expensive costs of education leading to a future of much cheaper, and more effective educational institutions. Robb lays out a convincing argument that presents a future where schooling is heavily online based, where decentralization and extreme cost reduction could drop quality education down to levels almost anyone could afford – even perhaps $20 a month. Its radical, but inspiring food for thought.

Robb explains the foundations of his theory:

Education, in its current form is an admixture of industrial and artisan processes.  While the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes, the actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!).   Regardless, this process has become an albatross of cost and stagnating quality.  For example, costs for collegiate education have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the past three decades and has now eclipsed affordability for most households (median incomes have stagnated during this same period) with no appreciable improvement in the quality of graduates.  Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree.  Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble.  A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.*

Fortunately, with the implosion of this bubble, the opportunity to introduce improvements will emerge.  The most interesting of these improvements is the ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.

Global Guerrillas: “Industrial Education”