May 15, 2013
THE SOUND OF A BUBBLE BURSTING::
Massive (But Not Open) (Ry Rivard, 5/14/13, Inside Higher Ed)
Academia is just a market, a degree just a commodity. Economics does the rest.The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master's degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master's degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master's program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2013 3:27 PM
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