Funny how Corporate America loves the term “free market” except when they are under threat.
Author misses the point here. Corporate America loves the term "free market" only when it is under threat. A "free market", as we know it, is anything but free. It is regulated into existence by "free trade" agreements and the like.
If the community source model proves viable, it will do so because it is an economically efficient coordinating mechanism for software investments in higher education as an industry. An analysis of any historical software system—online card catalogs, Web-based registration, course management systems—over a five-year period will reveal that individual institutions separately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in home-grown or commercial software. Can that flow of higher education resources be harnessed to create better economics and shared innovation outcomes for everyone?
takeaways: community source needs to be an economically efficient coordinating mechanism for software investments. instead of each institution separately investing, these resources can be harnessed to create better economics and shared innovation outcomes for everyone
As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.
If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.