This commencement season, we’re thinking through the real value of a college education. In a three-part series, we explore whether it’s worth the money, the time, and the trust we give it. Is it an outdated model? Are we nostalgic for something that’s dead and gone? And if so, can college be fixed and modernized — hacked in a word?

We even designed a seal for Open Source’s public-radio college — a lion rampant, not visibly hungover, on graduation day — and a slogan: dare to learn, in spite of it all.

See more at www.radioopensource.org/.

Episode 1: What’s The Matter With Higher Ed?

What’s college really good for, if the cost is out of sight, and your degree doesn’t point you to a job; if there’s too much drinking, cheating and grade inflation; if it’s not safe enough for women? What if the whole bloated model is outdated in a digital age? Does anyone have a better idea?

Episode 2: Colleges Sell Dreams

We’ve got more with Thomas Frank, the founder of The Baffler and a vociferous critic of college. The question, his and ours: how did higher education, in general, turn from the days of the GI Bill — and the land grant colleges long before that — to being a trap for seventeen-year-old kids who are signing away their lives into eternity with student loans?

Episode 3: The View From The Top

Derek Bok, Harvard’s only two-time president, is a highly qualified fixer of the university system. But he personifies the high Ivy establishment and he doesn’t hear the stories of deep debt as cause for alarm.

Episode 4: Becoming Actors

From the general to the specific: Arts schools are some of the most expensive in the country, and their students often graduate with a staggering load of debt. For the perspective of experience and solid accomplishment, we’re asking two local acting professionals — Chris Cooper, the Academy Award winner, and his wife Marianne Leone, of Sopranos and writing fame — in the middle of enviable careers what they learned in and out of school, where they’d be looking for training, and how much they’d pay, if they were starting out again.

Episode 5: Thrun the Disrupter

Sebastian Thrun, the wizard of Palo Alto, took time off from his work on artificial intelligence and the driverless car to become the father of the MOOC and then to step away from the craze. He tells us to focus once more on the experience of the student — and, provocatively, that we must reinvent teaching and learning is to make it as addictive as Angry Birds and the best TV.

Episode 6: The New U.

Finally, we thought through the possibility of starting anew. There won’t be a football team or a building and grounds department and maybe no president and no tenure. Where would you start in reimagining the American university?