How Can a University Education Be Free?
Chris Anderson
FREE The Future of a Radical Price.
You don't have to enroll at UC Berkeley to watch Richard A Muller deliver his popular "Physics for Future Presidents" lectures. They're on YouTube, along with talks from more than a hundred other Berkeley professors that have been collectively watched more than 2 million times. And Berkeley is not alone: Stanford and MIT also release lectures on YouTube, and MIT's "OpenCourseWare" initiative has put virtually all of the university's class curriculum online, from lecture notes to assignments and demonstration videos. It can cost $35,000 a year to attend these universities and take these classes. Why are they giving them away?
Lectures aren't a university education. Aside from the small matter of a degree, which you can't get via YouTube, a college education is more than lectures and readings. Tuition buys direct proximity to ask questions, share ideas, and solicit feedback from academics like Muller. It's access to the network of other students and the idea exchange, help, and relationships this provides. For universities, free content is marketing. Top students get their pick of schools. Sampling the mind-blowing fare of a particular program or professor can win them over.
Create demand for expertise. To date, one of Muller's lectures has garnered 200,000 views. That's three times the capacity of the football stadium at UC Berkeley. After becoming a Web celeb of sorts, Muller secured a book deal to write a popular hardback version of the textbook he penned for his class. Released in the summer of 2008, Physics for Future Presidents was widely reviewed atop one of Amazon's best-seller lists. It's easy to see just how good Free has been to Professor Muller.
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