Re: Better-Than-Ivy-Education: $7,376 a Year

Writing in today’s (08-July-2008) Inside Higher Ed, Vance Fried proposes a new business model for a college that would provide undergraduate students with “value – a high quality product at a relatively low price.”

The article makes interesting reading, as do the comments.

What follows is the comment that I left:

Vance Fried provides a welcome addition to discussions about changes needed in higher education. The specifics are not so important as the mere fact that an entrepreneurial effort was made to imagine a different future for undergraduate education.

Like several of the people making comments, I disagree with the details. But I think it’s a wonderfully refreshing approach. There should be more efforts like this and some kind of opportunity (a wiki maybe?) for people to comment, build on the ideas of each other, and try to carve out a future for higher education that is better than what we have presently.

The technology exists to create colleges and universities unlike any we’ve ever seen. What’s missing are the social innovations needed to tie the possibilities together. One very large innovation concerns the price and cost issue that Vance Fried addresses.

I applaud Vance Fried for creating a new business model and making it public for discussion.