The perils of "free" education

Imagine reading one day on a restaurant website the following:

"Come eat with us FOR FREE! That's right - we believe in open food, and that nutrition is a basic human right for everyone! We provide free meals, created for people at any hunger level! Eat as much as you want!"

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Even a place that would offer "all your nutritional needs covered for just $49 / month" sounds incredibly suspicious. Would you really eat there? What could they possibly be putting on those plates to cover their expenses?

It's pretty simple - you know that food has a price, and that the people making and serving it have expenses to cover - so anything extremely cheap is most likely very bad quality, or a scam, and immediately raises red flags.

Yet, when it comes to education, we quickly seem to let our guard down. Free courses to learn anything I want? Bring it on! A full education for $49 / month? Sounds good, count me in! No suspicion is raised - this is normal. After all, most of us didn't pay for school either.

The fundamental problem there is that we easily confuse education with information. Yes, information can be free, and when it comes to knowledge about the world, I'd argue it should be free. But education is not just information - not by a long shot. Education is helping learners make a selection about what is worth learning (at least initially); it's helping learners differentiate good quality from bad quality; it's helping learners when they get stuck; it's reviewing learners' work, and give them guidance on how to improve; it's assessing their knowledge at regular levels, and eventually putting your name to vouch for the level of know-how they have. And it's a million other things as well, as anyone who has ever taught another person anything can readily confirm.

Many of these things cannot be automated yet, and the question is not only if they ever will be, but also if that's what learners really want. But whatever the future may bring: today, when you are getting an education, someone is paying for it. And thus, if it's free, or almost free to you, then someone else is paying for it. Do you know who that is, and why they are doing it? Do you know "the deal"?

Our students at EPFL, who currently pay about 1'200 $ per year - a tiny fraction of the true cost - (hopefully) know that it's the Swiss tax payers who are paying for them. They also hopefully know that the tax payers are paying because they think they're getting more in return in the long run - the until know safe assumption being that a well-educated population will be a wealthy population. Same for all the parents in the country (the vast majority) who send their kids to the excellent public schools, at no direct cost to them - again paid for by the tax payers, for the same reason.

This is not free. In fact, many governments spend multiple percentage points of their GDP on education. The EU, for example, spent 715 Billion Euros on education in 2017. That's right: that's € 715'000'000'000 in a single year. So much for free education.

So that makes you wonder - what are all the people thinking who are signing up for (almost) free online education? That somehow, all of these mechanisms don't apply anymore? Part of the problem, as mentioned above, is that we confuse online education with online information. Online information can be free, yes - although even there, its creation and maintenance costs something.

But the problem with (almost) free online education goes further. In the same way that you are not a Facebook user, but the Facebook product (with advertisers being the customers), free online education means that you're not the only one who is learning something - someone else, with vested financial interests, is also learning something about you. What kind of learner you are, for example. How quickly you grasp new concepts. How well you work with others. How you solve problems. How you search for solutions. How motivated you are. If you go to any job interview, these are exactly the kinds of things companies want to know about potential hires. And there is a huge market developing that sells this information about you to companies that are hiring - directly, or indirectly through recruitment services. It's worth a lot of money - enough to pay for the education.

It may be a deal worth making. But we should be aware that there is a deal in the first place, and most of us simply are not. And we should realize that the education that we hope would advance our career, may actually be putting a break on it.

There is a long term solution, and a short term solution. The long term solution is appropriate legislation - that learners getting the free education deal must be kept totally in the clear about this deal. Perhaps an even better solution would be to prevent such deals in the first place, at least for adult, continued education; I'm not entirely sure yet. The short term solution is to prevent the problem in the first place, and find someone who is truly interested in your education so that they will pay for it. Oftentimes, that will be you; other times, that may be your employer, or perhaps even your government, should you be so lucky to live or work in an environment that supports life long learning and continued education.

At the EPFL Extension School, we think about these issues a lot. We offer courses and programs for digital up-skilling online, and the topics of lifelong learning, online education, and data ownership are parts of our daily discussions. The entire learning experience going through the EPFL Extension School is what we offer as a service, and because of that, we don't even have to think about monetizing any data about our learners to anyone. In fact, we viciously protect our learner's data, far beyond our legal obligations. Being in total control of our learner's data was also a major factor when we decided to build our own learning platform, rather than using someone else's.

I think that's the fairer deal.