GET ON YOUR BUTT AND GO TO COLLEGE!

Yale, Harvard, MIT, and other big name institutes of higher learning are now putting some if not all of their college courses online for FREE.  Amazing.

Not to be political, but do we really need a big push for government-backed college loans?  Especially when that debt burden alone is almost $100 Billion?

Feels like Pell grants should shift to Dell grants -- along with free Wi-Fi for the nation.

Partisan for the artisan comments aside, it's thrills us to know all one needs is a healthy internet connection to tap into the biggest brains that are teaching the biggest brains on the planet.  

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/march/online-courses-mitchell-030612.html

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

The implications are pretty huge:

• knowledge is now even more democratized than ever

• there are no place-based boundaries even to higher ed

• there's hope that continued unleashing of knowledge will raise humanity up higher, Guttenberg-revolution style

Of course, motivation, wisdom, and the ability to apply learnings are what make the difference between productive intelligence and well-read sloths.

Plus, these classes are basically online audits.  There is no credit, or diploma given.

But given Zuckerberg, Gates, and other notable billionaire innovators dropped out of Harvard and the like, maybe higher ed is really about learning that you were smart enough on your own to begin with -- and that sheepskin ain't all that it's worth.  

That said, we'd say FREE is worth a lot -- coupled with a motivation to succeed.