Business Idea: Self-Education University

The spread of broadband Internet connectivity means that more and more people have access to a fantastic amount of freely available educational material.  Stanford Engineering is putting classes online for free.  MIT has put a number of their courses online, also for free, as part of their Open Courseware initiative.  Khan Academy offers a huge number of video tutorials.  There are several groups approaching the idea of Open Source Textbooks. The democratization of information that began with the printing press has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is now possible for someone with the determination and focus to get a really great college level education almost entirely for free.

Furthermore, as the economy stagnates, the pursuit of education during periods of unemployment or underemployment offers people with spare time an opportunity to fill their hours at minimal cost with activity that offers potential long term returns.  Even if you can afford to "go back to school," you can keep learning without the benefit of a formal university structure.

One thing that a university degree offers, however, that you can't get on your own, is verification of an education.  When someone has a diploma, it means that they were able to at least meet the bare minimum requirements for issuance of a degree by that university.  If the university is, in turn, accredited, then you know that is has been scrutinized to insure that the curriculum meets at least minimal agreed upon standards of quality for a college education.  The accredited university degree implies a great deal of backing.

When I'm interviewing a candidate for an engineering job, I want to know that they have, at least at some point in the past, acquired general engineering level math skills, such as an understanding of differential and integral calculus.  If they have an engineering degree, I am usually safe to assume that they have had that exposure.  I don't need to ask them specific calculus trivia to make sure.  Likewise, an engineering degree implies a certain degree of breadth and exposure to structured problem solving that I want.

So what then of my self-educated candidate?  If someone has taught themselves calculus by working through a plethora of online tutorials and work sheets and downloaded text books, how can I know that they really have the skills?  And that's the business idea here... A series of testing centers which provide people the chance to demonstrate college level proficiency in a number of topics, by taking written tests in a secure and controlled environment.  Essentially, it is like the AP tests, although you would be able to take them at any time you want.  When you take a test in a topic, you receive a numeric grade, say from 0-100, indicating how you did.  The test would be designed such that a reasonably high score, say 80, would indicate general proficiency, essentially a high likelihood of passing a college course in that topic.  If you pass enough subject tests, they can be clustered together into a portfolio that essentially becomes your college-degree transcript equivalency.  This would provide something that can be validated by the testing center to employers or other schools, indicating that you have the education you claim to have.

There are some obvious shortcomings between this and the real college experience.  First off is the social.  You know that someone who has gone through college has probably managed to work at least a little bit with other people, whereas someone could work though a degree worth of college level material, testing along the way and never talk to another individual.  I don't really see any quick ways around this.  This certification simply lacks any useful social metric.

Another limitation is project work.  Often in college classes, the final product of the work is an almost incidental part of the process, which is the real learning experience.  The product that results from a project course is also difficult to objectively evaluate in the way that this testing center approach would need to do.  Furthermore, an important part of this testing center concept is that you clearly know that the person who walked in the door is the person that did the work, because they took the test there while you watched them, after you fingerprinted them, or did whatever other level of validation was decided appropriate to match the person with the educational certification.  With any submission of outside materials, the provenance of that material is open to question, and brings into question the integrity of the resulting certification.

Even with these and other weaknesses, it seems that this is something that could be really big, especially for people who are motivated to get a degree-level education but can't afford the money, or perhaps even the structured time, of attending a college or university.  Key to the acceptance of an approach like this would be maintaining the integrity of the testing.  And there would be skepticism at first.  But in time, I think, it would become at least as accepted as a "college level GED," and possibly eventually seen as a perfectly normal alternative to the "traditional" college experience, in some ways all the more impressive for the level of self-motivation and personal drive it represents.