College Tuition - Not

College too expensive? Try YouTube

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu ).
More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and the first university to join YouTube: UC Berkeley.

To see how powerful a notion this is, play Lecture 7 of Leonard Susskind's Modern Physics concentrating on General Relativity. Recorded November 3, 2008 at Stanford University. This Stanford Continuing Studies course is the fourth of a six... Note: Susskind, is a Noble Laureate

Better yet, check out MIT's amazing Open Courseware initiative whereby all of MIT's 1800 courses are online and free for all to download and learn from. (BRT 01/19/2008)

When MIT did the deed in 2002, they open up a Pandora's Box to encourage countries and their colleges and universities to get into the act and they did, in spades. To see how this concept has taken hold, click on the Open Consortium logo seen below.

IMHO, this movement will become one of the prime drivers of higher education because Fred and Susy will no longer be able to send Harvey to Harvard when it costs a cool $70,000+ a year to do so. No doubt, well-off parents will continue to do the drill but it's clear colleges are going to take a hit because increasing tuition costs at a greater rate than that of inflation is a really bad idea in this tanking economy and, more importantly, given how fluid tech, science and the web are, the ability to solve complex problems is becoming more important than having a degree stating that one can so because having a degree does not confer competency in any given field, a fact well known to anyone who has had do the unpleasant task of firing a college graduate who could not get the job done.