Sometimes people end up saying the most ridiculous things – often because the base their positions on faulty assumptions.

Today’s New York Times tech section runs an article  NYT Beware of the High Cost of Free Online Courses that cites work and the opinion of MIT Professor Michael Cusumano, including the following:

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.

The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”

But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said.

I was struck by the elitism and irrationality of the comment so I read the underlying article that Cusumano wrote; it is here High-Costs-of-Free-Online-Education.  This article is much more nuanced and primarily suggests what we and others have said, technology is disrupting higher education and the existing institutions will need to change to survive.

The fundamental problem (to me) with Cusumano’s work and conclusions, is his explicit assumption (as stated in his article) that if something is free it has no value (FREE=VALUELESS)  – can he really believe this??  If so, let’s save a lot of money by abandoning free public education now and start charging for air.

MIT must be an interesting bubble.