This would save young Americans from going into crippling debt, but it would also make a university degree completely unaffordable for most. However, in the age of the Internet, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t get an education.
Consider the long term impact of this. There are a lot of different ways such a situation could go, for better and for worse.
I want to add:
Most books have never been digitized. Most information that you would learn in college is still in books and not on the Internet. You can’t replace access to information (and reading that information) in college with lack of access to information (and thus not reading that information) online.
In addition, the Internet doesn’t give you access to passionate subject-matter experts who are necessary guides to help us travel down the path of acquiring the knowledge that they have. Sure, there’s recordings of MOOC lectures, but they become outdated and you can’t ask them questions or have them help you by giving useful assignments and answer your questions and give you constructive criticism.
If higher education is going to work we would do better to pay those experts (the poor teachers) a fair living wage so that they can focus on the quality of their teaching and not be desperately trying to survive and navigate departmental politics while hoping that bureaucratic administrators don’t cut the library budget (again) while dumping money into a new football field (why is sports part of college anyway? Why can’t there be a separate and unrelated sports-academy system for the sports people so that it’s impossible to misappropriate from academic budgets in favor of sports?).
Totally agree.
In addition, the Internet doesn’t give you access to passionate subject-matter expert
You can find them on Discord servers, message boards, and YouTube channels. But knowing who is actually an SME, and who has a great line of believable bullshit, is quite challenging. In a university system, you have a group of peers that are making that determination.