re: Ben Nelson is starting up the Minerva Project without a real business plan

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So I guess when you come down to it, the education field looks a bit like this right now:

(1) You have the elite traditional schools like Eton, Rugby, Exeter, Groton, Andover, etc.

(2) You have the elite traditional colleges like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Cambridge, etc.

(3) You have the new online university MOOC platforms, like edX, Coursera, Udacity, etc.

(4) You have the whole alternative certification system, like what Paul Wilmott is trying to do for the field of quantitative finance.

(5) You have the for-profit online schools at the low-end, like U. of Phoenix, ITT, DeVry, etc.

(6) You have the traditional SAT/ACT/whatever test prep companies, and those that offer after-school tutoring, such as Sylvan, Kaplan, The Princeton Review, etc.

(7) You have a few select players that dominate the creation of standardized tests, like College Board, ETS, etc.

and I'll include this just because it's near and dear to my heart...

(8) You have some traditional schools trying to fight back against some of the more troubling currents of mainstream culture, such as Grove City College & Hillsdale for college, along with a whole homeschooling subculture that exists for K-12 education, and also on the side of all that, traditional military prep academies (that have often morphed into athletic prep factories) like Fork Union, Hargrave, Valley Forge, etc.



xxx



Okay. So what needs to happen?

I think that for right now, the business model just doesn't exist for displacing traditional education, especially on the university level. There is too much easy money sloshing around and too much bloat and excess of which society is not yet ready to let go.

The industry certificate field, particularly on the high end with things like Wilmott's QCF certificates, are a great thing, and when this finally meets at the lower end with things like the Khan Academy, we might witness the birth of an organic system of learning with a huge web-like map of individual modules (sort of like civilization advances in Sid Meier's Civilization game series).

From this point, the MOOCs would be huge in making this modular system of learning available to the global masses, and smallish schools with individual tutors helping students prepare for these MOOCs would become the norm.

At this point, the elite schools could prosper once again, not as debt-financed and morally bankrupt behemoths, but rather as preservers of culture and tradition that also serve as places for like-minded people to study for MOOCs, supplanting their certificates with an overarching philosophical/political/athletic/religious worldview that ties all their learning together into a unified whole. This was, after all, the whole idea behind the medieval creation of universities in the first place, and this is what was advocated by John Henry Newman in the 19th century.

But none of this can come to fruition of course, until the whole usurious student loan system falls into utter ruin... which it surely will eventually. Then, there will finally be lots of money to be made by small operators who can manage small schools that can outperform other small schools located throughout the world.