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.

Somebody is stealing my thread ideas.

See AlaTiger's " College Bubble About to Burst? Ga Tech's $7000 online computer science masters."

Anyway, this reminds me of a thread from last December (JollyGreenGiant's " I want to learn the Java programming language.") where I mentioned the article, " 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free."

Of course there are online programming courses & tutorials (for things like C++, Java, PHP, etc.) all over the damn Internet, but I suppose two things worth mentioning are Udemy (see a C programming language course here) and codeacademy.com.

No, too rich to waste time reading all that shite.....

Well the packaging of the information might be a bit off, but there are few subjects more important than this when it comes to upcoming huge social/economic transformations of big industries. I'd say maybe health care is more crucial, and that's about it, with fin-reg and telecom slightly behind in importance.

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I hope most with kids are turning their attention to getting whatever they can get right now and bailing to some nice tropical isle to live out the next 100 years.

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Ha! Believe me, I've thought about this, and have considered things like how feasible it would be to open up a quant finance / banking school somewhere like the Caymans, or whether or not a prep academy might be opened in some crazy place like Ghana or Botswana or Zimbabwe. Ideally, however, I think the Gulf Coast is the place I want to be.

As for the order of all this stuff, the best I can imagine, it has to go like this:

#1. work on elite prize competitions first and foremost--things like the AMC. that's the only way to distinguish a school from the rest of the crowd these days.

#2. wait until a modularized system of MOOCs is up and running, which will take some time. this is where industry certification standards and collegiate accreditation organizations will come into play. you just have to wait for all this painfully slow regulatory change to take place, for all the people to fill in the gaps with these massive online courses & tutorials, and then you just fill in the niche with little schools where students preparing for these types of massive online tests can congregate.

#3. integrate schooling across grades K-12, so you can weave in a coherent cultural/historical perspective that you're trying to teach. that's where schools can become more like hillsdale and grove city in sticking to particular principles and virtues that they would like to teach alongside the more objective MOOCs--but it would have to be an almost separate side-by-side curriculum, because cultural inculcation can't be graded. it has to be socially ingrained through pass/fail activities.

#4. then you might be able to scale the model to something bigger than just a school, like starting a new Caribbean microstate or something crazy like that... but that's where it all gets hazy.

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Indian Reservation FTW

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I never thought of that!

Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indian Industrial School closed down in 1918. Somebody needs to make a Carlisle II on an Indian Reservation somewhere, except that it admits more black athletes, Chinese programmers, and Korean mathematicians.

Accreditation doesn't seem to be necessary for private prep schools: LINK.

Some articles I haven't read but will come back to sometime later:
Business Insider (Oct. 16, 2012): " The 50 Most Expensive Boarding Schools In America"
Huffington Post (Aug. 8, 2012): " 10 Of The Most Expensive Schools In The World"
Business Insider (Sept. 21, 2011): " The 37 Most Expensive Boarding Schools In America"
Forbes (Dec. 11, 2006): " America's Most Expensive Prep Schools"