We Already Have Free College Tuition

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But you have to go online. Can it be that the tuition you pay at the old bricks and mortar institutions is literally for bricks and mortar?

“Within 24 hours of writing about the new online startup onlinedegree.com, I heard about two other private efforts to offer free tuition via online education,” economist Richard Vedder writes. “First, I learned of the philanthropy Modern States Education Alliance, whose Freshman Year for Free program has attracted 60,000 students in less than a year.”

“It has a neat, innovative approach: help prepare kids to receive college credit through AP courses offered at the high school level, with testing done by the College Board, or directly through the College Board’s College Level Examination Program (CLEP), which exams students on numerous subjects, with some 2,900 participating college offering college credit according to whatever criteria they wish to establish. Many of the courses were developed by the open source edX, a cooperative venture of Harvard and MIT. The group is even helping many students pay the $85 fee to take the examinations of the College Board.”