<p>I could see a tuition war breaking out---all it would take is one incredibly rich donor determined to make a difference on a grand scale at one key top ranked university. </p>
<p>MIT is a logical candidate. There is already a very strong freeware/open-source/software-should-be-free ethic there to begin with. The book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software gives a good account of that culture. (Not too surprisingly, that book is itself available for free on the Internet: <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/%5B/url%5D">http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/</a>.)</p>
<p>And MIT's Open CourseWare project is a logical outgrowth of that same philosophy. </p>
<p>Free tuition for face-to-face education at MIT is simply the next logical extension of the MIT's philosophy that intellectual resources should be made freely available.</p>
<p>Philip Greenspun is an MIT alum who has been arguing at considerable legnth for a number of years that MIT should be free. He even went to so far as to put his money where his mouth is: when he guest-lectured in an MIT class, he insisted on rebating the prorated share of tuition attributable to his lectures, handing out $100 bills to the surprised undergrads in the class. (He also founded a tuition-free university, Ars Digita, which was staffed by various MIT alums and faculty members on a pro bono basis for a year or so.)</p>
<p>For more info--check out:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mensetmanus.net/inspiration/tuition-free-mit/%5B/url%5D">http://www.mensetmanus.net/inspiration/tuition-free-mit/</a></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html%5B/url%5D">http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html</a></p>
<p>I feel reasonably convinced that there are more MIT alums as passionately devoted to the idea that MIT tuition should be free running around out there. </p>
<p>If any of MIT's alums ever strikes it wildly rich, I could see one of them (or a coaliton of them) giving MIT a sufficiently large endowment to drive tuition to zero. Many MIT alumns are passionately devoted to their alma mater and to its mission to make the world a better place. (Greenspun's business has been reasonable successful, but not nearly on a scale that would allow him to endow MIT with fund to drive tuition to zero in perpetuity. Stallman, of the open source movement, won a MacArthur genius grant, but otherwise generally seems to live like someone who's taken a vow of poverty.)</p>
<p>But yeah, I could see it happening at MIT. And if MIT goes to free tuition, that would put heavy pressure on their top competitors (Harvard, Stanford, Princeton) to do the same. And who knows what would happen next?</p>
<p>We're used to education prices going in only one direction: upward. But there ARE prices that have come drastically down over the past few decades---long distance phone service, airfares, computing capacity, calculators, etc. Price wars and competition did it. Indeed, think of the HUGE quantity of information that is now available for free on the Internet--unimaginable a few decades ago.</p>
<p>It may be time to rethink educational pricing and delivery. A huge part of the value of an MIT education is NOT the professors lecturing in the lecture halls, but rather it's MIT students working collaboratively together to help one another learn in informal interactions outside the classroom. So a whole lot of the most valuable "teaching" at MIT is not being done by the "paid" faculty; it is being done by the students themselves. Perhaps the price structure should better reflect that reality.</p>
<p>Beyond MIT, it's worth noting that there IS precedent for quite prestigious private schools to be free--not just but Berea, but consider that Rice University did not begin charging tuition until 1965. (It was set up in 1900 with a charter that did not allow tuition to be charged. Sadlly, their charter also prohibited admission of nonwhite students. Both charter provisions were finally modified in the mid-60s.) </p>
<p>Much more recently, Olin College, in MIT's backyard, started up a few years ago with very generous funding that allows it not to charge tuition. (Indeed, Olin's first entering class even got free room as well, though current students must pay room & board.) There is very heavy recognition in Olin's philosophy that IF you have a highly select group of students, a large part of the educational process will come from students collaborating with one another--very much in the MIT tradition.</p>
<p>So, yes--if some fabulously wealthy donor wanted to make a first-rate college tuition-free to all admitted students, I think MIT is the logical place to make a real splash. It just fits so well with their culture.</p>
<p>And if MIT did it....I think their top competitors would be forced to match it, unless they totally want to fold their hand and cede the top math and science students to MIT.</p>
<p>It wouldn't even cost as much as one might think to make MIT tuition-free. After all, MIT could save a lot of money---they could drastically shrink the financial aid department. (They would still need some financial aid people---since there would presumably still be room & board and some students would need help with that too, in the form of grants & loans.) And if MIT had free tuition, they might not need to spend quite as much money on advertising, marketing, promotion---the world would automatically beat a path to their door even more than they already do! (Indeed, there would probably be a huge increase in application fee revenue, under the circumstances! )</p>
<p>So yeah, you heard it here first--if there's going to be a large-scale undergraduate free tuition war at top universities, I predict that MIT will be the one to make the first really dramatic large-scale move.</p>