A master degree for $ 100?!

Forbes re-ran an old piece of theirs yesterday.  The title was How Would You Like A Graduates Degree For $100? It's not talking about the online scams, though it is an online course.  To summarize a Standford professor, and inventor of google, realized that the traditional way to teaching in college wasn't cutting it.  A few star students excelled and the rest seemed to languish. So he decided a new method had to be discovered.

Well leave it to the inventor of Google to come up with a new concept of education, and applying market economics to it.  Rather than charge thousands of dollars per class for degrees that have dubious value, he decides to offer degrees at a significant discount using online teaching as  a way to reach a broader audience and increase instructor efficacy.  A masters in English for $ 40,000? ludicrous. A masters for a few hundred? Well that seems more in line with how much such a degree is really worth in the market now ad ays.

Of course such a move will cause tension amongst traditional academia. But universities are going to have a much tougher time dismissing an online program created by an inventor of google, and a Stanford professor.  I wish Sebastian Thrun luck.