Wal-Mart University: No More Boola-Boola by Gary North

Great ideas from Gary North.

"The free market is perfectly capable of providing a college-level education program for millions of students. There is nothing that the average college offers to the average undergraduate that an online college education program could not offer at half the price..."

"You can learn history, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, business, and most of the other disciplines through today's Internet technology..."

"The difference will be, Wal-Mart University will be offering an equally good education for less money than the tax-subsidized State University will be offering..."

"Wal-Mart University will be granting degrees for education; the state universities will be granting degrees in order to recruit semi-professional athletes, half of whom will not graduate, to entertain the voters. The voters deserve to know this..."

"Why should we believe that the free market, which delivers the vast bulk of the services and goods that we consume, is somehow incapable of delivering higher education at competitive prices? Why should we believe special-interest bureaucrats who claim that higher education is of necessity a nonprofit venture and usually a tax-funded venture?"

"That revolution has begun: the University of Phoenix. The model already exists. It is a highly profitable model. It will take only one major American corporation entering this field to prove that the existing model of tax-funded, nonprofit higher education is inefficient. That model belongs to the past..."

"Students will initially resist this. They want their parents to give up half of their retirement portfolio in order to send them off for four years of partying, and four years of delaying making a judgment about what to do when they grow up. University administrators will also resist this, because they want the students to show up on campus, and they want the parents to write the checks. But, at some point, it is going to become obvious to hundreds of thousands of parents that there is a better way. That better way is distance learning. The technology exists. The model exists: the University of Phoenix. All it will take is the marketing..."

"The free market is better able to deliver high-quality education than the state is. The state has used its power to license and accredit colleges and universities to preserve an educational cartel. That cartel can be broken, and it will be broken. It is just a question of time..."

Wal-Mart University: No More Boola-Boola by Gary North