The University of California at Berkeley is working with America Online. Many other universities have taken on corporate partners as they head online. If Microsoft and America Online can make a bundle by expanding educational opportunity, more power to them. Noble draws a comparison between today's infatuation with online education and the fascination with correspondence courses that swept the educational world in the first half of this century. You get a high rate of sign up.
Students pay tuition up front, and the instructors are paid on the piece rate.
It was education combining the methods of the huckster and the sweatshop. Students got wise first. Noble says dropout rates approached 90 percent. Then many of the best universities got wise, removing themselves from the business. Given the ever more tangled interdependence between corporate America and universities, and the nonstop euphoria about the Net, such a decision is difficult to imagine today.