Executive Summary

• The 4 higher education solutions of the Nearly Free University
• How higher education can be both cheaper & better than today's alternatives
• The catalytic roles played by both networking & network theory
• Making decisions for yourself/your children in this new emerging education spectrum

If you have not yet read Part I: The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Education, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we surveyed the foundations of Higher Education and its obsolete Factory Model.  We described its predatory reliance on student loans to feed its bloated cost structure and its failure to provide students with the skills needed in the economy of the 2010s; i.e., the emerging economy.

In essence, the foundation of higher education has been completely upended.  Knowledge and instruction, once costly and scarce, are now abundant and nearly free.  The only pricing power left to Higher Education cartel is the artificial scarcity of credentials.

That is not the power of a productive system; it is the power of a predatory system.

The Four Higher Education Solutions of the Nearly Free University

There are four broad technology-enabled solutions that would free higher education from its current cartel limitations on opportunities and accreditation:

1. Accredit the student, not the school.  By accrediting the student rather than the institution, we remove control of the credential supply and pricing from the cartel and establish the value of what the student has mastered by objective standards.

The concept of "accrediting the student, not the school" is well established in the professions.  Obtaining a law or architecture degree does not confer the right to practice those professions in the real world; one must demonstrate mastery of the subject and trade by passing a lengthy examination.

How difficult would it be to transfer this concept to all students in higher education?  In the digital age, there is no technological or cost barrier to establishing a largely automated online procedure for taking exams and making the results available to prospective employers or collaborators.