Does anybody remember the plan to establish a free online
college? It was the brainchild of Internet
billionaire Michael Saylor, the president and CEO of MicroStrategy, Inc. About 7 years ago, he planned to spend $100
million of his own money to create a “world class” university online, complete
with courses and video lectures. The
college would have issued degrees, offered Ivy League-quality education, and
they would have been completely free to students who successfully completed the
coursework.
When I first heard of this plan, I thought it was a great
idea. There are plenty of people who
want a college education that can’t afford one.
Such a college would pose no threat to the traditional brick-and-mortar universities,
because many students will always have a preference to take their courses
in-person. Online learning isn’t for
everybody.
So, here we are, seven years later. I can’t remember what made me think of
Michael Saylor’s plan all these years later, but something reminded me of
it. With the power of Google, I decided
to find out whatever happened to the Free Online Degree.
About a week after announcing he announced his bold plan to
start the Free Online University, Michael Saylor lost about $6 billion (on
paper)…in one day. MicroStrategy had
been accused of cooking the books to make it appear as if it had been making
more money than it actually was. In
fact, at the time, the company had been losing money. Following an SEC
investigation, Saylor and other executives reached a settlement and agreed to
pay fines totaling about $11 million.
Unlike other companies that fell victim to the dot-com bust,
MicroStrategy is still around today, and Saylor is still running the show. Last year, the company earned a profit of
about $313 million, according to figures on Wikipedia. That’s still a far cry from the billions the
company supposedly once earned.
So what happened to the idea of the Free
Online University? I searched and searched, but couldn’t find
much mention of it past 2001, other than to find an article which read
something like “remember the guy who pledged $100 million to start a free
online university?” Apparently, when you
lose billions of dollars in one day, you stop thinking about plunking down that
much money to start a free degree program.
But that doesn’t mean that Saylor’s plan didn’t have
merit. Since his brash pledge of making
free education available online, universities and colleges that once scoffed at
the plan are now making many of their courses available online…for free. And yes, that includes Ivy League
schools. Columbia,
Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, MIT and Tufts are among several institutions
which now make open courseware and video lectures available online.
Of course, one can’t earn college credit by taking these
courses, and that means no free degree, either.
But that doesn’t mean one couldn’t get an actual education from taking
these courses. Perhaps someone could
utilize all of these free lectures and courses and then enroll in a college
like Excelsior, Thomas Edison State College or Charter Oak State College and
test their way through a degree. Right
now, that’s about as close as anyone is going to get to Saylor’s vision of a
free virtual university.
Will we ever see a truly “free” online university which
features courses and lectures and ultimately awards an honest-to-goodness
degree after all is said and done? My
guess: not as long as students are
willing to pay for one.