#College 2.0: College is expensive and not delivering for a broad swath of people

Hybrids and solution tests are starting to pop up. Here's one from Ohio: https://aleteia.org/2022/07/31/the-story-behind-the-new-catholic-college-that-helps-students-avoid-crippling-debt/

In order to offer degrees, Colleges themselves must be accredited. There are state regulations, regional accreditation bodies, and Veterans Administration, and Department of Labor may get involved. These accrediting bodies look backward to seat time in front of a PHD as the gold standard. This means learning can be disrupted but degrees are more difficult. Imagine, for example, a few dozen doctorates each with their own business banding together on a platform. They could offer great courses as a fraction of the price, but to offer degrees they would have to be supervised and managed by an accredited college. And the bureaucracy and overhead returns. See outlier.org as a promising effort. Where does accreditation come from? Their courses are blessed for transfer of credit by Pittsburgh U. https://outlierorg.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046734932-Where-do-Outlier-credits-come-from- Pittsburgh faculty have rebelled. And they don’t even allow outlier courses blessed by Pittsburgh U to transfer for credit at Pittsburgh U. https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pittsburgh-committees.

As the most upvoted Unmet Need, we've promoted this to Stage 1!

See https://os.platformstud.io/guild/companies/college-2-0

10-20% of student loans are currently in default. that begs the question, "how many more are not in default, but produced low ROI?". my opinion is that almost all colleges have some degree offerings that have low-to-negative ROI. 92% of the total student loan debt comes from the federal government. because of this subsidy, colleges have little financial incentive to eliminate programs with low-to-negative ROI and adopt new programs with higher ROI, i.e. they get paid the same irrespective of the program ROI.

i believe the first step in offering students higher ROI is to have the colleges loan directly to students for their education (not the federal government). that way, programs with high ROI become a financial opportunity for the college and programs with low ROI become a source of financial risk to the college. one would expect colleges to adjust to this risk/reward landscape accordingly.

Project Euler is a special thing on the internet. It's a simple repository of math and cs challenges. If someone earnestly solves 3-400 of these, I'd hold that achievement in higher esteem than many college cs degrees. Is there some group of Project Euler-like things that would span the full range of core liberal arts disciplines?

I wonder if there's a market for just the residential aspect of college. Something like a coliving space but with more structure and resources. Imagine RA's and Academic Counselors who help support students as they pursue their online academic degrees from the school of their choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/style/college-collab-houses-coronavirus.html

In our recent Guild meetup, we suggested that "College 2.0" may be a misleading framing here.

Much of the discussion was around how to break the benefits of traditional college into their components:

• accreditation
• building a network
• socialization
• etc