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Is the Future of College $99 a Month?

Last August, I shared with you the story of the young woman who is suing her Alma Mater for $72,000 because she has failed to land a job. While opposed to the woman’s decision on political and philosophical grounds, I said at the time that it was a harbinger of things to come for colleges and universities because I’m convinced more and more young people will begin to question the wisdom of spending an increasingly exorbitant sum for an undergraduate education.

I recently came across a fascinating article in the Washington Monthly entitled ”College for $99 a Month.” It profiles the rise of a relatively new company, StraightLine, which is delivering introductory college courses for a flat, monthly fee of $99. Students of Clayton Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation” model will immediately recognize how dangerous Straightline is to traditional colleges and universities—especially non-elite, middle-of-the-road 4-year institutions.

If those institutions hope to survive and still be around in 10 to 15-years time, I’d suggest they “jump the curve” and begin radically transforming their existing educational models for the 21st Century. At the same time, politicians and community leaders would do well to heed the warning implicit in the article which states that traditional colleges and universities still add a great deal of value—in terms of scientific research and transferring knowledge from generation to generation—to local communities, and that this is at risk of being lost because undergraduate programs (which are the “cash cow” of many colleges) will no longer be around to subsidize other programs and goals which have societal worth.

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