College business model?
oldgregg: Right now college still has too much residual cachet. New MBAs realize they just got hosed, but high school juniors still obsess over what school they will get into. It will take some time before you have a significant number of people looking for alternatives that they are willing to fund. It's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem.We probably have to eliminate lectures. It's terribly inefficient. Course content needs to be converted into video clips / scannable web content. Get the best teachers in each field and have them create the course content. Everyone else should just be DIALOGUING with students. Answering their questions, listening to understand when they don't understand something, etc.In terms of business models, you're lucky you are in CS where degrees don't matter. Medicine and law are in bed with the government so the status quo won't change for a long time.My Dad was a college president for awhile but didn't like how slow things moved or the pain-in-the-ass faculty. One of the things he is doing now is one-on-one mentoring and it works-- much fewer people, but they tend to really excel in their fields.You can also think about it this way. If I spend 15k/yr in tuition the bureaucracy takes that vast majority of that. The bureaucracy that provides almost no real value! So imagine if you had 10 students that you mentored for 10k/yr with zero overheard... That would be a great deal for both of you! You send them articles and books to read and then dialogue with them individually or in small groups. This does work but you have to really sell the idea to people of an alternative education.The problem is that as higher education has become disconnected from reality many teachers simply don't know how to function outside of the bubble, who knows how to solve that one...