A yacht packed with vacationing millionaires off the coast of St. Bart's is an unlikely laboratory for social-policy reform. So perhaps it was the Caribbean sea breeze or the free-flowing 1945 Mouton-Rothschild that got Michael Saylor, the 35-year-old CEO of the high-tech company MicroStrategy, thinking about how to amend the inequities in higher education. He shared his thoughts over sea bass and chocolate souffle. "And by the end of the evening," he recalls, "I knew I'd hit on the next big thing in education."
Back ashore last week, Saylor took his idea public, pledging $100 million to create a nonprofit "online Ivy League-quality university." And then came an even bigger revelation. He says it will allow everyone, from cabbie in Bombay to housewife in L.A., to earn a top-notch degree--for free. "If you put a professor's best performance of his life online, you can make something even better than Harvard," says Saylor, an M.I.T. graduate.
The number of schools granting online degrees has doubled in the past year, according to a study released last week. The distance-education craze has spawned cyber-only schools like Jones International University, whose Colorado-based operation offers online courses to 500 students in 30 countries. Traditional campuses are also getting wired. Stanford offers a virtual master's degree; the University of Chicago and Columbia, among others, have signed up with the Internet start-up UNext.com to create a for-profit online college. Saylor's announcement ups the ante considerably. He is banking on replacing the world's "10,000 average professors" with an all-star faculty (think Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger), all of whom he expects to teach pro bono.
With warp speed, Saylor's proposal became the talk of the highest ivory towers. And the reactions were mostly of the unpublishable kind. "Saylor's naivete is breathtaking," says David Noble, a history professor at Toronto's York University and a sharp critic of distance learning. "It's the quintessence of counterfeit education." Adds Carole Fungaroli, an English professor at Georgetown: "It's the same as sex on the Internet. You can get it online, but it's not as good as in person."
Scholarly studies on distance learning thus far are scant. But several high-profile distance ventures have flopped, and research has shown that chat-room courses tend to be more costly and have higher attrition rates than lecture-hall classes. And there's the prickly legal issue of ownership: who retains the rights to a Wordsworth lecture once it is let loose in cyberspace?