NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Modern States Education Alliance, a philanthropic organization dedicated to making college more affordable and more accessible, has pioneered "Freshman Year for Free," through its website ModernStates.org. It provides more than 30 top quality online college courses to anyone for free, and can lead to a full year of real academic credit at more than 2,900 traditional colleges and universities, from Purdue to the University of Wisconsin to Morehouse.

The courses are taught by top university professors, and include free online textbooks as well, with one course for every subject tested by the College Board's well established College Level Examination Program (CLEP). The CLEP exams have been around for more than 50 years, and are particularly useful because they can be taken by people of any age, any day of the year, at 1,800 different assessment centers worldwide. 

Students can now go to ModernStates.org as easily as they visit Netflix. They then simply download a course, pass a CLEP exam and become eligible for credit when they enter any of the thousands of traditional four-year universities that accept a passing score on the CLEP exam for credit. Modern States spent more than three years developing the website and courses in partnership with professors from Columbia University, Purdue, Johns Hopkins, SUNY (State University of New York schools) and other leading universities. It is also itself paying the College Board's $85 per course exam fee for the first 10,000 test takers.

That's where the opportunity for governors comes in. For $85 per CLEP exam, far less than the cost of tuition for college credits, governors across the country can enable students to take a CLEP test for free and earn college credit. 

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