Education is Free as in Speech and Beer

By: Cory Lancaster

“My dream is to be able to give every human being a chance and the best way to do that is through education. So, we built Udacity to offer free education. As machines are becoming smarter, people want to become smarter. It’s hard to make a contribution today and it’ll be even harder in the future. So, we really have to go and do something for ourselves and the best way to do that is through education.”

-Sebastian Thrun, Lo and Behold

Sebastian Thrun is an entrepreneur educator and computer scientist. In the beginning of his journey to understanding the impact of education he was teaching a 200 student class at Stanford, and a free online class of 160,000 students from the open world. At the end of the class, the students from the online course were ranked against the students of Stanford. The top Stanford student ranked 413. There were 412 students from the open world that ranked higher than the highest ranking Stanford student.

Sorry Bernie, the debate shouldn’t be whether or not higher education is a privilege or a right. It shouldn’t even be whether or not college tuition should be free. It should be how can the government accredit free and low-cost higher education courses online? The internet provides free education, but degrees and the subsequent acclaim are expensive…