The wave of the future? College at $99 a month?

This is from a post I wrote in February:

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I have blogged in the past about the problem of rising cost of a college education. In a nut shell the cost of college education has climbed twice as fast as inflation for decades. It has gotten to the point that a college education is not an economic benefit for many.
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We may be seeing the beginings of a solution.

College for $99 a Month has an interesting answer to the problem of outrageous college tuitions:

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The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?
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One of the girls who use to be in a homeschool band with Janine and our oldest daughter did a variation of this. This girl found an accredited university that would allow her to challenge out of classes. In 20 months she challenged out of 90% of her classes. I think she spent one semester in classes. She ended up with a Bachelors degree before she turned 19. While many students her age are taking remedial courses, she is now able to start on a masters degree.

Has anyone tried StraighterLine? I wonder if it could be a university killer?

(Hat tip: Hacker News)


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