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One of the boldest proposals of President Obama’s recent State of the Union address was his $60 billion plan to make community college free. And, yes, it’s also one of the most controversial.
Some, like The Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter, have likened the idea to the G.I. Bill, calling it “a powerful engine for restoring the American middle class.”
Others, like Republican Representative Bradley Byrne, have decried the proposal, saying it would saddle states that “are already stretched far too thin” with an undue financial burden.
It’s a debate that will likely fester in Congress for years to come. And that’s one reason why Steven Klinsky—a philanthropist and founder of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital—is taking matters into his own hands.
This month, Klinsky and the non-profit he founded, Modern States Education Alliance, announced the launch of a new initiative called Freshman Year for Free, which aims to make a full range of freshman-level college courses available to anyone for free online. Unlike most so-called massively open online courses or MOOCs, which have sprouted up over the last few years, these courses will directly prepare students for accredited exams like the Advanced Placement test and the College Level Examination Program (or CLEP) exam. That way, after completing the courses, the students can get real college credit—potentially, even a full year’s worth.
Patching the Hole
With Freshman Year for Free, Klinsky is applying a neat little patch to a gaping hole in online education. Today, thanks to the rise of MOOC providers like Coursera and edX, millions of people have taken free online courses online from leading institutions like Harvard and MIT.
Many of them never complete the courses, but those who do have no way of getting college credit for the work they’ve done. As Klinsky put it: “It’s like giving out free Cadillacs, but no one can get a driver’s license.”
But changing that would require broad systemic change. It would also require universities to cannibalize their own businesses by giving the same credit to those who do pay tuition as they to do those who don’t. So Klinsky, who has funded education reform for decades, came up with a clever workaround. By using these courses to prepare students for exams that colleges already award credit for, Freshman Year for Free would help students lop off an entire year’s worth of enrollment, without asking universities to overhaul their business models.
“It’s not meant to attack the traditional system,” Klinsky says, noting that he expects most students will be people who either never went to college or who dropped out and want to go back. “What we’re trying to do is have an onramp that helps you with the initial costs.”
No More ‘Hierarchies of Privilege’
So Far, Klinsky has donated $1 million to edX, which is now working with top colleges to develop a series of courses specifically designed for the Freshman Year for Free program. EdX already offers 10 AP and CLEP test prep courses, and the funding from Modern States will help create 20 more, all of which will live on the so-called Modern States Portal.
Already, top university administrators are eager for a chance to participate. According to Caroline Levander, vice president of strategic initiatives in digital education at Rice University, a program like Freshman Year for Free could help level the playing field between incoming students who had access to AP courses before starting college and those who did not.
“Those students have a strategic advantage that I hope our AP courses will help to equalize,” she says. “It’s our goal to get all students through the undergraduate degree in a timely fashion and not perpetuate inequalities of access or hierarchies of privilege.”
‘New Age Public Library’
Klinsky is fully aware of the criticisms about the MOOC model. Plagued by low retention rates, MOOCs have been lambasted by critics, who say students aren’t really learning as much as the MOOC providers say they are. But Klinsky believes that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Instead, he thinks of MOOCs as a new age public library. Lots of people leaf through books, and not everyone reads them, but having the library there to begin with is the first step.
Klinsky says he’s been thinking about a project like this since long before the president’s big pitch to Congress. In fact, he wrote an article for Barron’s on this very topic back in 2012. But the timing of the President’s proposal doesn’t surprise him.
“There’s a clear need for wider universal access to secondary education, and a lot of people are thinking about how to solve it,” Klinsky says. “The revolution started totally separate from us. We’re just trying to make it useful for people.”
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