<p>Why isn’t lunch free?</p>
<p>It helps if there are some big local businesses that will invest in the community college. That’s what has happened in our case, and why the CC has done so well. BIG campus renovations in the past couple of years, additional food options on campus, an outdoor theatre, and a beautiful new auditorium. There is also a museum and a theatre associated. </p>
<p>There’s a few more Junior Colleges not to far from here that actually have dorm facilities.</p>
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Cobrat, what lower tier publics were free in the 50s and 60s?</p>
<p>Why can’t everything be free? House, food, vacation, cars, etc. Heck, we don’t need to work and study anymore if everything is free.</p>
<p>Nothing can be free for long, because eventually you run out of other people’s money</p>
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<p>Education has been free for everyone ever since the invention of the public library. The internet, Google, and wiki just made access easier.</p>
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<p>The UCs have never been truly free, but they were tuition free until relatively recently. It was written into their charter to provde education for California residents tuition-free. But eventually the financial realities forced them to start charging “fees” but theoretically not tuition. </p>
<p>In other words, they would charge you a sort of users fee to support the school’s infrastructure but not for the actual instruction. As “fees” continued to rise they got increasingly creative in moving costs out of the tuition bucket and into the fee bucket. Sometime in about the 90s or early 2000s they quietly dropped the fiction that they didn’t charge tutition.</p>
<p>Hmmm… Maybe if they sell advertising … 17 minutes of commercials for every hour of lecture …</p>
<p>Of course it takes money to run a college, lots of money. We as a society used to believe that providing a relatively low-cost education at a public university was a good investment in our future. We believed that everyone benefited from an educated population. We no longer believe that.</p>
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<p>Even free access to the public library is no more “free” than public K-12 education. The user may not be paying for it, but trust me, someone else is…</p>
<p>Internet is not free either. Google is a for-profit company. And wiki subsists on voluntary donations.</p>
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<p>The CUNY schools including 4-year ones that were top-tier in that period like CCNY. They were free for city residents until 1975.</p>
<p>In the UK, higher education used to be free (well, funded out of general taxation). Students had all their fees paid and were given a maintenance grant to pay for room and board. </p>
<p>The flipside was that hardly anyone got to attend, because if everyone did it would have raised taxes to a potentially punitive level.</p>
<p>We now have capped fees, which are covered by a Government loan, and which students don’t have to start paying back until they cross an earnings threshold. If they choose to work in a low-paid profession and never cross the threshold, the loan is wiped after a certain number of years.</p>
<p>I’m no great fan of tuition fees, but I’m a huge, huge fan of higher education for people who want it. And mass higher education doesn’t come for free.</p>
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<p>You’re arguing semantics, I was speaking from the point of view of an average person looking for an education. Yes, obviously running those things take money (though Google and Wiki ARE free, since they monetize, through advertising and donations, a function you couldn’t otherwise, there is no net loss to you from any viewpoint).</p>
<p>I think most of you are missing my point. </p>
<p>It ALREADY is free. Anyone can go out and take the classes. They are ALREADY funding the website and instructors and grading tests etc. They just dont give anyone credit for doing it. </p>
<p>I see this as a huge contradiction. Either the education truly is the same (as MITx claims) and witholding credit is just a way of purpetuating our class structure or their model is flawed and online education has no purpose.</p>
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<p>Let’s go for door #3. The university wants to develop online curriculum as an extension to its current educational offerings. Making lectures available online makes it possible for students to review what they heard in class, or catch up on missed classes. Providing instant feedback quizzes and reviews that are automatically graded online so that students can quickly determine if they are understanding the material is similarly useful. Ditto setting up online discussion groups among class members, a central location for distributing problem sets and solutions, sample exams, and so forth. Making all of that available to the general public requires more money for additional servers and some administrative costs. The university or donors cover that. So far, everything is the same. </p>
<p>Other things cannot be handled online. Labs, small discussion groups, grading essays or non-multiple-choice tests are e parts of an education where economy of scale buys you nothing. If there are several hundred more tests to be graded, you need more humans to do that. </p>
<p>There’s also the issue of making sure that the person who is being given credit for the class actually did the work. The free courses are being offered for the benefit of the students. It’s assumed that people take part because they want to, so no one has any incentive to have someone else do the classwork for them. If the universities offered actual credit, they would need to have some kind of way of checking for cheating.</p>
<p>Bottom line: some of online education is the same as in the flesh, some is different. A hard-working individual who really wants to master the subject material covered in an online class can certainly do so. I’d bet that some could even manage to convince an employer to hire them based on demonstrating what they’ve learned.</p>
<p>" I see this as a huge contradiction. Either the education truly is the same (as MITx claims) and witholding credit is just a way of purpetuating our class structure or their model is flawed and online education has no purpose. "</p>
<p>If MIT (and aother elite school) just wanted to “purpetuate our class structure” they would provide so much financial aid and would never have adapted the “wholistic” admissions process that is used to gather talented students from outside the wealthy class into these schools. So, it must be something else.</p>
<p>@mitchklong,
How is it in the elite schools’ interest to give credits (i.e. credentialing) away for free?</p>
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<p>Some gas stations ALREADY will give you free compressed air to pump up your tires, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to give away the gasoline too. If they did they would very quickly be out of money and out of business. It’s the same with colleges. They may choose to give away one or a few courses online, as a nice gesture and to introduce and experiment with a new way of learning. But that doesn’t mean they can afford to stop charging for everything.</p>