College ‘screening’ to lower student debt

Silicon Valley is building an ivory tower.

As banks wrote off another $3 billion in student loan debt in the first two months of 2013 alone (a 36 percent jump from last year, according to a study by Equifax), a movement to bring top-notch college courses online, for free, has been gaining ground in academia.

Dubbed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the classes range from physics to philosophy and come courtesy of schools like Columbia and Duke, attracting enrollments that can easily reach 100,000.

New York has not been left behind. The State University of New York recently announced that it would tap its top faculty to create a MOOC-style platform of courses for the fall, and may begin awarding credit for free MOOCs students take from other schools.

“We’re very focused on lowering student debt, so the quicker we can get students out of school and into the work force, then the less debt they’ll carry,” said David Doyle, a spokesman for SUNY.

Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera, a Palo Alto, Calif., company that hosts MOOCs from 62 universities, says his mission is to democratize education by providing people of all economic backgrounds with free access to the world’s best classes.

“When the technology exists for one professor to teach not 50 students but 50,000 at a time, the economics of higher education change,” he said.

In short, as MOOCs are adopted on a for-credit basis, they could also end up lowering the cost of earning a traditional college degree.

The hitch? While 86 percent of professors teaching MOOCs believe they could lower the cost of college, according to a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education, 72 percent don’t believe their students deserve credit for the courses.