In short: 

University is about creating value by bringing professors and students together. Everyone who is not a student or a professor is an intermediary.

Accreditation and degrees are both signalling mechanisms from the 16th century. In an era when you can look up the individual biography of each professor who makes any contribution to your child's education, it is only inertia that gives them the illusion of relevance.

I foresee a wave of technology-enabled professorial-rank entrepreneurs, who get together in cooperatives with just enough credentialed professors to teach a complete 4-year curriculum. A very rough guesstimate of the ":minimum value proposition" would include 16 professors and 256 students.

Here's how it works

• The professors among themselves do all the necessary administrative work - there's really not much of it if you use the right tools. 
• A fair tuition pays a fair compensation to the cooperative members. 
• e.g. $10,000 per student per year pays each professor $160,000
• With that, the professor can afford a house with a basement to hold his 16-person classes.
• The 16 co-op members could also meet in any of the houses. Or outdoors at a public venue.
• Business expenses like library memberships and software licenses would get group discounts and tax write-offs
• Basic research costs can also be written off. Grants to fund more equipment would incur no overhead. Students can participate in research as undergraduates for free.
• The graduates come out with 
• letters of recommendation from their favorite professors, and 
• a statement signed by all 16 professors the they competently completed a course of study designed by these 16 professors. 
• The reputation of the 16 would be easy to verify using a quick Google Scholar search. 
• They are free to use any resources or learning management systems available for free of for money to deliver their lessons, but they are the ones responsible for the one irreplaceable ingredient: the statement that this capable scholar has personally guaranteed that this graduate has certain competencies.
• Workload: Each professor would be responsible for
1.  two required courses and 
2. three electives per year.
   (The required courses have exactly 16 students each since they are taken by all freshmen or all sophomores. The electives would have 8 to 16, depending on how many "majors" they satisfy.)

So, already with this model , we lower tuition, raise professor income, and ensure highly individualized attention and unique "narrative-style" evaluations for employers and grad schools. But for the educational experience to be valuable, it will also have to be bot well rounded and offer meaningful specialization routes. This leads to:

Rules for the make-up of the 16 professors

Of course different groups of 16/256 would emerge with different specializations, and mergers can occur, but since no such cooperatives exist yet, let us just describe the first founding group.

• To create meaningful distribution requirements (i.e. mixes of required courses), perhaps we would want the 16 to include
• Physical scientists, 
• social scientists, 
• engineers, and 
• scholars in the fields of humanities, 
• arts and  
• business.
• Some foundational required courses would be taught by non-specialists. e.g. a physicist might teach calculus, a sociologist might teach writing, a marketing professor might teach public speaking, and an economist might teach history.
• Four professors in closely related field can designate a major for students who take most of the electives of the group of four and selected "related" electives from others.
• Every one of the 16 professors should be versatile and flexible enough to adapt to the skill sets of his colleagues and the preferences of the different student cohorts.
• Every one of the 16 should be able to make meaningful contributions to the running of the cooperative, such as 
• Recruiting
• Database management
• Logistics
• Curriculum design
• Peer review

Critical mass

The biggest challenge to making this happen is the sheer size of the student body required to make the first incremental value. Professors who are interested might be able to seek each other out and form part-time arrangements while holding on to university appointments, or full-time short-term commitments during paid sabbaticals, or during post-tenure-refusals searches. But students are needed in greater numbers and required to make a greater leap of faith to enter this model. The cooperative would suffer from a need to maintain reasonable admissions standards and from lack of access to various student financial aid sources.

I will address this in a future blog post.

and as they say in Egypt: Campus No, Doctor Yes!