Too Cool for School?

Is higher education contributing to its own demise? Consider the following:

1. In Brian Preston's most recent Money Guy podcast about 529 college savings programs, he notes that the cost of college went up by an average of more than 5 percent last year. According to some stats he brought up in the show, a year of room, board, and tuition at a public college costs more than $14,000.

2. A story in Slate yesterday pointed out that there was a fantastic new site, Academic Earth, where you can watch and listen to entire college courses from places like Harvard and Stanford. (You can listen to many of the same things in podcast form at iTunes U.) Cost? $0.

3. A blog post at Podcasting News points to research that shows that people who watched a podcast version of a classroom lecture actually performed better on a test than those who were listening to the lecture live.

Conclusion: Podcast education = less expensive, more effective? 

It's true that you can't go to office hours, plan study sessions with classmates, or ask a question in class, but for intro classes, it might be worth taking a podcast class and then seeing if you've gained the smarts to test out of it.