Bomshell: Drive the marginal cost of education down to zero

When will we see the craiglist effect in education? I think it will happen when the general public becomes aware that many people actually can utilize the internet to educate themselves together with a community, and that they will profit on it. It is like Nigerian youths and parents have learned that if they play a lot of footbal they may one day become extremely rich. Right now it is HUGE windows of opportunities for smart but poor people around the world. More and more of these people are educating themselves right now, and we see poor Chinese and Indian having great success that would have been impossible without the internet and cheap education sources. More and more universities in the third world going from practical training to independent serious research because open access, open source and so on gives incentives to compete on a global level.

"Bing Gordon dropped a bombshell just before lunch when he proposed that we should work to drive the marginal cost of education to zero.

From an economic point of view, I would say the goal... is to figure out how to get education down to a marginal cost of zero. Somebody mentioned Oxford. I think the marginal cost for a student at Oxford is probably $250,000; at a U.S. university it's probably $90,000. That's what it costs per student. That's not what they charge. Public school, I think, they are trying to do it for $6-8000 per student. So, what if we had to get it to zero? We've seen technologies that get the marginal cost [of services] to zero, plus bandwidth.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news."

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2009/05/hacking_education.html