New online courses open to all constitute a thrilling collegiate coup, reports the Wall St Journal.
Turn down the Rihanna. No more bikinis and beer. Spring break is winding down, and college students are heading back to campus—which, if they're at a name-brand school, is the one place, whatever their actual smarts or behavior, that guarantees them approval. Kids don't put Harvard stickers on their rear windshields, parents do.
But for how long? These schools have much to recommend them: impressive students, organic dining halls, presidential alumni. To maintain their reputations, however, elite colleges have long relied on limiting access—Harvard's class of 2015 is about 1,700 students, Yale's is 1,300—and that may be coming to an end. Revolutionaries outside the ivy walls are hammering their way not onto campus but straight into class.
Elite schools have long relied on limiting access—but for how long? It's a thrilling collegiate coup. Last fall, a couple of hundred Stanford students registered for Sebastian Thrun's class on artificial intelligence. He offered the course free online, too, through his new company Udacity, and 160,000 students signed up. For the written assignments and exams, both groups got identical questions—and 210 students got a perfect overall score. They all came from the online group.
So if you bluffed your way into the Ivy League with plumped-up credentials or an essay edited by somebody else, it's time to start breaking a sweat…..
Read all about it at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577293430981335366.html?mod=WSJ_Careers_CareerJournal_4
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