Your fellow students

College for $99 a Month

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.

by Kevin Carey

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig

had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever

since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelorʼs

degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January,

she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasnʼt going to be easy, because

four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didnʼt have: years of time out of the workforce, and a

great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet

and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online

courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions

are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she

wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—sheʼd run into a lot of shady

companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the

courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen

table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to

podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could

collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and

overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail.

And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a

mouse click away.

Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let

students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could

move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete

courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern

Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic

product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or

three times as long to complete.

And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her

daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When

Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning

modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only

difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the collegeʼs

schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasnʼt doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvigʼs

daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the

DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being

tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can

seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain

subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who

revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally

reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various onceproud

industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the

dozen. Itʼs tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and

universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and

knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of

debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. Theyʼre also in the information business in a

time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the

same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval

will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like

Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous

economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the

things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from

one generation to the next.