There may be a cost reducing technique (technology) in the way education is conducted. But it's optimizing something that's not the bottleneck.

My take. I think the main reason for increasing costs is loans. Loans that cannot be escaped through bankruptcy. Colleges can raise tuition at rates much faster than inflation because everyone has access to unlimited student loan money. They name a price, all students can access money to pay it.

One way to bring prices down is to allow prices to grow so high that people balk. Even when provided access to unlimited loan money to pay it. Waiting for this to happen doesn't require any special activism or groups though. But it might just be the actual way it plays out. A natural bubble pop.

If you don't want to sit on the sidelines and wait for things to pop naturally, you could raise awareness about loans. Try to make people balk at the prices sooner? Or try to promote a change in the law allowing bankruptcy to be an escape from loans. Once bankruptcy is introduced you will see access to money plummet sharply and college tuition prices along with it.

The longer this goes on, the more people unwittingly commit themselves into life long indentured servitude.

TOO LONG DIDN'T READ: I don't think you will successfully leverage your skills as a programmer to reduce college tuition costs. Even if you optimize a piece of the puzzle (online MOOC reducing the need for staff/land/buildings)

There are several people working in ED-Tech, most of it K-12, on HN; the issue with University level is not access, for example I'm currently enrolled in Master level Supply Chain certification courses at Rutgers and CU Boulder via Coursera, it's accreditation.

That's has been the reason why, even someone like myself, we've had to relent to the gatekeepers. What's fascinated me is how quick the race to the bottom has happened since COVID sent most programs into an Online only format, a BSc in Comp Sci from the College of London can be had for 10k GBP, and a MSc from CU Boulder in Electrical Engineering can be had for 20k, a Bsc and MSc for a total of ~35k USD, which is nearly half of what I paid for my BSc in Biology in 2009 in what is supposed to be the most affordable University system in the US (CSU/UC) as a local CA resident/student. And it's entirely online, which if we had UBI, would be to totally doable for just about any family and would allow for PT work and community volunteering/tutoring as well.

It's a noble thing to be able to dedicate your time and labour towards this end, so here are some software roles listed on their Coursera's website [1].

If you want to chat about end-user feedback, and some possible improvements, I'd be open to set that up as I think this is the new model we should usher in to disrupt the monoliths in Academia.

1: https://about.coursera.org/careers/opportunities

Higher education is complicated to analyze partially because it fills so many roles simultaneously, the big three probably being network-building, credentialing, and teaching. Others in this thread have pointed out that there are increasingly many low-cost options to replace the teaching component, but to my knowledge, nothing has really stepped up to provide near-free networking or credentialing.

I suspect that if there were a demonstrably more reliable way to quickly judge employee quality from a resume than looking at alma mater, employers would eventually switch to using that, but it's not clear to me what that would be.

If you want to make higher education, its worth looking running some regressions on what drives cost differences between educational institutions. The community college I worked for a decade ago now charges 223 per credit hour, while the flagship state university I attended now charges 841 per credit hour, using out of state rates as a proxy for the cost to provide service. I don't think anyone can explain what makes the flagship's Chem 1 offering 4x better than the community college. Yes, the instructor is more involved in research, but often that's more of a distraction to the core instructional job students pay for (or, conversely, the matter of undergraduate instruction distracts world class researchers from their pursuit of science). In fact, a great many students of nearby flagship unis took classes at my CC employer, and transferred the credits to save money.

The key is to figure out how to provide the thing people _are_ paying 4x for at a cheaper cost. IMO, what is paid for is prestige, in the form of admission selectivity, and the privilege of making connections with people who also passed the screening filter. That prestige is what you put on your resume, even after the GPA becomes irrelevant. It's why students transfer credits from CCs and don't list any affiliation.

From that POV, the most useful thing you could do is convince employers that community college grads are worth hiring, and convince students that the associate's degree isnt' a black mark on a resume.

Become a politician and remove government backed student loans. Since the government has backed the loans, prices have gone up tremendously.

I am working on a non-profit and open source idea[0]. It is at a very early stage. Let me know what you think. Happy to chat. My email id is in my profile.

Just last week the project was invited to participate in Mozilla Builders Open Lab. Let me know if you want to join me in making education completely free and at the same time increase income of education institutions and its staff. This is not very easy to achieve, it will take a very along time and lots of efforts. But with technology it can be achieved. The stakeholders in this project are government(education policymakers, politicans), education institutions, students and businesses.

[0] https://bsldld.neocities.org

I'm in the OMSCS program. It sounds like you might want to be involved in an Educational Technology project. David Joyner [1] is a professor in the OMSCS program and does a lot of research into MOOCs. You might want to look at some of the research groups / projects his lab is involved with as a starting point.

[1] https://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/david-joyner

I'm thinking about it too. I would also work on this idea. In general online higher education is something not explore fully yet and the margins are out of space..

You don't need to pay monthly fixed salary - you can have everybody on hourly rate. There are many educators which would like to have additional money by doing 2hrs open online office and up to 4 exams onsite.

IMO the for any education level online school (higher edu is easier to do online) it's a neat idea!

Sign me up

I'm going to take a different take, and say there are a lot of opportunities to apply CS to education and have a meaningful outcome.

I think we can break higher "education" down into three roles:

1. Getting someone from skill state A to skill state B in a time efficient way

2. Verification and credentialing for skill state B

3. Providing a safe environment to meet like-minded, intellectual folks and have fun

The hardest part to automate is #3, but there are plenty of challenges in #1 and #2. One idea is to create a system that can break down a syllabus of information into bite sized chunks that are automatically ordered appropriately for the user based on some profile or assessment data. This will likely involve some NLP.

It's not a technology problem; higher education is free in my country.

I would look into the effective altruism community and see what things people have already tried there. You might also find the work of the https://www.povertyactionlab.org/ useful because they use RCTs (randomized controlled trials) to see what interventions work. These aren't direct answers to your questions but I think they're useful to consider as what the best, most effective application of your time is.

Online material is already affordable. Convince employers a degree isn’t required for employment, and the cost of education will decline.

Could you reach out to the Georgia Tech OMSCS program? They have 9,000 concurrent students, and a $7,000 Master's in CS Degree.

Don't have groups/projects I know about, but if you'd like, I would love to have a further conversation about education. I'd rather converse rather than post because most of my thoughts are still half-baked (and because I have quite a lot of thoughts about education). Feel free to contact me through the link in my bio.

More affordable? Maybe join UoPeople [1], and try to engage into making them regionally accredited. UoP is doing lots of good stuff, but is not regionally accredited and so the degree won't have a lot of value in the US.

[1] https://www.uopeople.edu/

Wasn't the MOOC supposed to address higher education as a problem? No traction on that front?

Make a site for searching online classes and degree programs

Higher education is already affordable. The problem is that people aren't looking in the right places for it

> more affordable

Great question. Public education should be free everywhere, and so should public transport.

If you want to make university education affordable, it might be a good idea to look at places where university education already is affordable, and see what they are doing differently.

   I. Staffing

Let's take a look at Heidelberg University.

2,608 Academic staff

1775 non-academic staff

28,500 students

annual spending of $100,000 per staff or $14,000 per student.

(All numbers are excluding medical school/medical students).

Now let's look at a US university: Penn State.

5946 FTE academic staff

24422 FTE non-academic staff

76,219 FTE students

spending $32,406 per student or about $100,000 per staff.

So both Penn State and Heidelberg spend the same per employee (roughly), but Penn State costs twice as much because they have so many more non-academic staff per student.

What do these 24,000 non-academic staff do?

Well you have 48 executives, (the president earns over a million per year in salary) all the way down to armies of bureaucrats.

If you want to know what those bureaucrats do, look at their jobs page (https://psu.jobs/jobs).

I found some gems: (All full time jobs)

  * Military Marketing Manager
  * Workforce Education Outreach Coordinator
  * Student Advocacy Specialist
  * Proposal and Award Generalist
  * Coordinator for Academic Success

Then take a gander at the Heidelberg jobs page: https://adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_LS$.Startup

Night and day difference.

   II. Years to completion

Once you limit your staff, you can also limit the amount of education you provide. Do you need your students to spend 6 years studying majors or can you have a slimmed down curriculum?

In Germany you finish in 3 years. That cuts costs in half over a 6 year time horizon. There are fewer electives outside of your main area of study, fewer optional courses, etc.

   III Stricter Entrance Requirements

Having an aggressive schedule requires restricting yourself to good students. It also eliminates wasted resources on studies where students drop out or don't finish. Heidelberg is very selective. Penn State is also selective in some sense, but not nearly as academically selective.

So these three tips is why in Germany you can provide an undergrad education for about 30-40K total, and it takes 3 years, whereas in the US it costs 30-40K per year and can take 4-6 years.

So those are some things you can do to cut costs.

get into politics

Lambda school ?