One of life’s most enjoyable satisfactions is watching prosperous tax-addicts being hoist by their own petard. Professional academics nodded wisely as waves of automation washed jobs away from whole areas of the economy. They pontificated profoundly when tractors, cotton-pickers, and combines devastated whole areas of agriculture. Their wise pronouncements continued as television decimated the movie industry. Scholars never complained when automated assembly and production techniques left millions unemployed. They didn’t worry when computers destroyed the employment of typesetters. Nor were they upset when the state-run news media began losing readers and viewers to the internet.
Now, it’s the academics’ turn. A new on-line school, StraighterLine, offers as many high quality college courses as can be taken for an amazing $99.00 per month. Increasingly, students in ordinary colleges and universities, often paying fifty thousand a year to hear lectures from sub-standard teaching assistants and aides, are realizing that they’re being bamboozled.
Some employers may be bright enough to conclude that only the least intelligent students would pay four thousand dollars a month for what they could have gotten for $99.00.
