Monetizing MOOCs: How Massive Open Online Courses Can Educate the Globe And Make Money in the Process

By Barbara Correa

The prospect of online courses opening up a new world of learning to people with few educational opportunities has long been a goal for educators interested in technology and open source advocates interested in equity. Online courses have been around for awhile, but up to now they have been limited in size and run by prestigious universities with tuition to match, or by less distinguished schools or organizations. Now, for the first time, UC Berkeley and Harvard-caliber institutions are delivering high-quality online lectures and quizzes taught by professors from those schools. They are doing it massively, and they are doing it for free using a format with a clunky acronym: massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Incubated at top-level universities such as Stanford and M.I.T., the new MOOC model is spreading ripples of excitement and fear through the academy. Whatever people might think about MOOCs, both pro and con, one claim made about them is indisputable: they are turning traditional higher education on its head. Every institution of higher learning, from large and public to small and private, from community college to for-profit, vocational or some other hybrid of all of the above, is closely monitoring the MOOC movement. Professors, administrators and students are all keeping an eye on MOOCs’ potential to disrupt what has been the dominant path of secondary education.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors alike see the MOOCs as a potential new business opportunity and one that is aggressively challenging the established model of the university and its bottom line. As Philip DiSalvio, dean of University College at the University of Massachusetts, points out in a New England Journal of Higher Education blog post, "If

2colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost- cutting and painful reorganizations."1

Exactly how MOOCs can do that, and whether they can make a profit in the process, is the main topic of this paper. It begins with a brief background and definition of MOOCs and how they compare to other kinds of Silicon Valley startups. The paper then analyzes three different business models or profit centers that MOOCs could operate under in the future. Finally, it examines the meaning of MOOCs for the transformation of higher education and for a post- industrial economy. 

What the Heck is a MOOC?

The format of the massive open online course is usually credited to two Canadian thinkers who created the online course “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.’’ George Siemens, an educator and theorist focused on learning in digital environments, coined the term connectivism, a theory of learning specifically relevant to the digital medium and social networking technologies. Stephen Downes, a National Research Council of Canada researcher, developed some of Canada's first online courses at Assiniboine Community College in Manitoba.

Connectivism is the theory that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.3 Downes and Siemens’ course is a “connectivist’’ class about connectivism (other topics covered include Net Pedagogy, Personal Learning Environments & Networks, and many others). Participants use Twitter, RSS feeds, blogs and virtual world interfaces such as Second Life to explore learning models of the future. The Connectivism MOOC debuted in 2008 for University of Manitoba students. Today, it is offered for college credit to tuition-paying students at Manitoba, but the ourse is also open to anyone with an Internet connection. Implicit in the spirit behind the MOOC movement is that education be Open to all, and being Online facilitates that openness, just as it allows courses to be delivered to Massive numbers of people simultaneously. The remaining letter, C for Course, speaks for itself.

Since Siemens and Downes facilitated their first MOOC, the medium has come a long way, mostly through trial and error and the involvement of visionary computer science professors. In the summer of 2011, Stanford decided to open up courses on artificial intelligence, machine learning and databases to any student with an interest.  In order to make available the classes in an online format, computer science professor Daphne Koller and a group of students built a platform from scratch. That fall, each of the three courses counted over 100,000 enrollees.

Koller’s eureka moment had come four years previously when a group of faculty was asked to find a way to inject more meaningful interaction between faculty and students. Koller imagined replacing the standard one-hour lecture with multiple eight-to-ten minute units that would individually engage each student by pausing to ask questions which students would need to type in (Salman Khan revolutionized the short video format for learning with Khan Academy). She describes the shift as a movement away from filling minds with content toward active learning and interacting in the classroom.

This brainstorm led to the founding, with another Stanford professor, Andrew Ng, of Coursera, a for-profit company now offering more than 200 courses in math, science, engineering and more to hundreds of thousands of students. About the same time, another group of Stanford-affiliated professors and roboticists opened their first course online, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Within weeks, 160,000 from 109 countries had signed up. The result is Udacity, also a for-profit firm but more focused on science and technology with about 20 classes currently on offer. The third university-inspired MOOC that is getting the most attention in the press is edX, a not-for-profit enterprise started by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The amount of attention these three university-launched MOOCs have received over the past year or so cannot be overstated. Each time they announce a new university partner in their ventures, the “big three’’ MOOCs seem to raise a new wave of publicity. However, it is important to note that while Coursera, Udacity and edX have received the most visible attention, there are many MOOCs that exist outside these high-profile platforms. In fact, the original pioneers of MOOCs have worked to differentiate their connectivist-inspired MOOC designs from the commercial and well-funded MOOCs that offer a more traditional course structure, using videos and online quizzes for instruction, often within a set timeline.6 It is this more traditional model that is being embraced by universities in the U.S. at a rapid clip. This paper is focusing primarily on the business potential of this more commercial MOOC model, particularly as used by Coursera and Udacity.

Coursera has agreements with over 30 university partners including Columbia, California Institute of Technology and UC Irvine, in which professors from those schools teach courses on the site. Udacity courses are taught by university professors and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, such as the founder of Reddit, a Web feed that tracks online trends. edX classes are taught by faculty from Harvard, M.I.T. and other partner schools including UC Berkeley.

How Do MOOCs Compare to Other Silicon Valley Startups?

Like other famous Silicon Valley start-ups such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, the for- profit MOOCs have focused on growing membership as a first step and leaving potential monetization strategies for later. However, with membership growing faster than expected at MOOC sites, business models have moved to the fore more quickly than they may have for tech startups of the past.

Compared to the monetization of Facebook, Twitter, et al., it doesn’t require quite the creative reach to see how Coursera and Udacity could become profitable. Since the MOOCs provide a tangible service that many people need and want, they have several clear-cut avenues to profitability that do not rely on advertising.

Last summer, under a Freedom of Information Act request, the Chronicle of Higher Education obtained the first contract Coursera signed with an institution of higher learning, the University of Michigan.7 In the contract, Coursera lists eight possible modes of monetization, including banner advertisements and corporate sponsorship (the article points out that the university partners have the right to reject monetization plans on a course by course basis).

Other ideas for turning a profit outlined in the contract were selling course content to community colleges, selling course content to universities who in turn charge tuition to their own students taking the courses on campus, and offering secure assessments, such as proctored testing. At least two of these strategies is already happening (licensing out course content and selling assessments). The methods of monetization that the companies have been touting most aggressively, however, revolve around job placement services, credentialing and data. 

Job placement

Recommending and connecting Courserians (members who are enrolled in classes) to potential employers for a fee is a business model already in place at the for-profit MOOCs. Coursera announced in December an employer matching service, Coursera Career Services, which will begin with software engineering students. Through the program, participating employers receive a list of qualified students who have opted to participate. Coursera acts as the matchmaker between an interested employer and a student and makes introductions via email.8 If the communication results in a hire, the hiring company pays Coursera a flat fee, and the college offering the class also receives a percentage.

Udacity’s job placement service is more hands-on. 

Like Coursera students, Udacity alumni opt in to allow their curriculum vitae to be viewed by companies seeking new hires. Other information is also shared with potential employers, such as the level of distinction a particular students reached in each course. “Collecting karma’’ by helping others on Udacity’s Web forums also can boost job candidates’ eligibility for software developer positions being filled by the 20 or so high-tech firms currently working with Udacity.9 Finders’ fees for Silicon Valley headhunters typically total 20 percent of a software engineer’s starting salary, which would translate into $15,000 per match.

As a business model, job placement services have the advantage of involving individual job seekers and the MOOC companies directly, while the universities are only tangentially involved. Placing universities at the center of money making strategies brings up some thorny issues, as seen in the quest for college credit for MOOC classes. 

Credentials

At the moment, the biggest obstacle to MOOCs achieving relevance in higher education long term is their lack of credentialing. As wonderful as it is that 100,000 students across the globe, from Ann Arbor to Jakarta to Vienna, can take a high quality introduction to finance course for nothing, it is unclear how or whether that translates into something tangible, such as a job or college credit. That uncertainty is reflected in Coursera’s completion rate, which is about 12 percent.11

While many universities offering courses through a MOOC will provide a certificate of completion, the barriers to MOOCs offering college credit are formidable. Universities see the value of college credit as providing personal contact between instructors and students. That level of interaction isn’t possible when there are thousands of students in a course. The personal interaction, after all, is the foundation of the traditional fee-for-credit system that has been the university business model for generations. And so far, there doesn’t seem to be any simple way to replace it. But universities are trying.

The issue of credit-earning MOOCs is a topical one and is being examined on several fronts. In November, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $3 million in grants to study

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MOOCs. Most of the projects being funded seek to answer how universities can maintain the quality of their courses while making them more affordable.12 Another chunk of the Gates funding will go to the American Council on Education to assess whether some MOOCs could qualify as credit-bearing courses. As part of the study, faculty teams will evaluate online courses. Students seeking to earn credit for one of them would take a proctored exam on the material offered in it and those who performed well would be given the option to purchase a transcript of the course to submit to a university.13

Some colleges are not willing to wait for the model to be tested. In October, Antioch University, a private system with five campuses in the U.S., announced a deal to offer its undergraduate students college credit for two Coursera classes developed by the University of Pennsylvania. The classes, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, will be offered to students attending the Los Angeles campus, and will cost less than half what a typical course costs at the school.14 As part of the agreement, Antioch will pay Coursera a fee, essentially licensing the course content, one of the original monetization strategies envisioned by Coursera. Whether other universities will follow suit remains to be seen. However, paying for the use of an online platform like Coursera or Udacity would seem to cost a university in reputation. It’s one thing to participate in the next big thing by designing an innovative new curriculum or teaching in a futuristic format. But to pay a third party for content or exposure really marks a brave new world. Outsourcing Testing

There are other ways for MOOCs to make money on credentialing and student assessment that do not involve the universities directly. One method to provide MOOC takers

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with a layer of credibility is to have them tested by a third party. This model is also directed at the cheating issue, which has emerged as a serious problem for MOOCs. It turns out that people working by themselves without any human monitoring tend to cheat at much higher rates than students in physical classrooms.15

Under this model, the student is the one who pays — about $85 a pop — for a proctored exam that will earn them tangible proof of performance. In many cases, however, it will be up to the student to take their certificate and present it to a university for credit or to a potential employer. All of the large MOOC providers have waded into this style of credentialing. Udacity announced it was partnering with Pearson Education Inc., which runs testing centers in 175 countries.16 At least one school, Colorado State University’s Global Campus, said it would give academic credit for a course on building a search engine if students taking the proctored exam. At $85 per student, third party testing may be a viable monetization strategy for MOOCs with classes of hundreds of thousands. And it offers a level of oversight of student performance. 

Data

The third major area of potential for monetizing MOOCs is data. This is probably the most controversial and least thought-out options for making money from MOOCs. It is also possibly the most intriguing. As Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller has said, the massive scale of participation in the popular courses puts the MOOC firms in a unique position. “You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students,’’ Koller said at a TED talk in June. “So you can turn the study of human learning from a hypothesis-driven mode to a data-driven mode. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions such as what are good learning strategies versus ones that are not.’’EdX, the nonprofit MOOC initiative from Harvard and M.I.T., has listed student learning data collection as one of its primary goals for the purpose of sharing freely with education researchers.

Koller says her company would most likely use such metrics to personalize feedback in course material and improve instruction and learning. But the potential for selling data captured from tens of thousands of students is unimaginable and would probably be very tempting. In a recent briefing on MOOCs, Educause, the nonprofit association devoted to information technology in higher education, outlined some possible business streams for MOOCs that would probably fall into the highly controversial category:

   • Data mining: Sell student information to potential employers or advertisers.

   • Cross- or up-sell: Course materials (e.g., videos) are freely available, but ancillary services

like assignment grading, access to the social networks, and discussions are fee-based.

   • Advertising model: Courses have named sponsors. 

What does this mean for the transformation of higher education?

Universities are under a great deal of pressure to to cut costs and make education more affordable while maintaining their reputations for high quality. Funding shortages due to the massification of higher education have shifted the responsibility for generating larger percentages of revenue onto university departments. This trend has been exacerbated by a widespread political inclination toward greater privatization of services previously provided by the state, including in higher education.18

At the same time, in the age of austerity, public voices questioning the return on investment of a college education are growing louder. Outstanding student loan debt stands at $956 billion.

 The unemployment rate among recent college graduates is 9.5% and 39% of that group is mal-employed, or underemployed.20 And yet, universities are raising tuition and fees above the rate of inflation just to keep afloat. Members of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities raised fees an average of 3.9% for 2012-13, almost double the 2% increase in the U.S. Consumer Price Index.21 Tuition and fees at public institutions have risen even more — up close to 5%. Companion surveys from The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Pew Research Center in 2011 found that 80% of the general population think that a college education is not worth the price.

Given the enormous pressures of an economy requiring advanced learning, fiscal austerity at the state level and the drive toward privatization and competition in higher education, it is no surprise that innovations like MOOCs are appearing on the short list of potential solutions. 

MOOCs, Vocational Education and the Economy

One natural outgrowth of the MOOC movement is the return to a more vocational model of education. The dismantling of the vocational component in U.S. public education and its impact has been well documented in the skills gap between employer needs and student skills.

There is a growing body of literature questioning the structuring of education for the knowledge-based economy that is the product of globalization in the wealthier countries. This move toward knowledge-economy training at the expense of job-ready vocational training is increasingly being seen as a false dichotomy.22

The MOOCs reflect the synthesis of knowledge-economy skills with employer-based competency training (at a price that is unbeatable). With their emphasis on technology and science-related course material, edX and Udacity offerings certainly have the potential to help fill the gap in this sort of training.

Until the credentialing issue is resolved, MOOCs are left open to criticism that they only reinforce existing gaps in knowledge and access to legitimate employment. Education via MOOC could create a bifurcated system in which less-prestigious universities offer MOOC courses for credit at a lower fee, said Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at UC Irvine, which recently added six courses to Coursera’s offerings, including public health, pre- calculus and personal finance planning.

That outcome is exactly what happened with the deal between Antioch University and Coursera. “The conversation in people’s houses is, where are we going to send Johnny to school next year, and the idea that you would send them to Coursera or Udacity doesn’t exist right now,’’ said Cooperman. At the moment, MOOC courses for credit is for a certain kind of student. “We find it problematic that instead of democratizing the field we give greater advantages to the already advantaged.’’

The idea of vocational education as somehow inferior is an old one. But new models that may eventually translate into both profit and prestige are cropping up that challenge those assumptions. The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the Firefox Internet browser, has developed source code for Open Badges, which are digital credentials. Badge issuers so far include universities, organizations and government institutions such as Carnegie Mellon, Girl Scouts of America and NASA. Badge issuers use the Mozilla source code to create the parameters of their badges. Users complete the requirements to earn the badges and then compile them into badge backpacks that can be posted on social networking sites or packaged and linked to resumes.

The badges themselves are also embedded with meta data, so that a human resources director clicking on a badge earned from a university would be able to see not only detailed information about the person who earned the badge but also the test scores upon which the badge was issued. This type of high-tech credentialing is already making its way into some MOOC courses and represents both an avenue from education to employment and a monetization strategy: a Purdue University subsidiary that offers online courses in nanotechnology is issuing digital badges for $30 to course completers. 

Conclusion

MOOCs are clearly a groundbreaking innovation in the rapidly shifting landscape of education, employment, and technology’s ability to bridge that gap. Their evolution from online education to massive and open to all represents a huge leap forward, but one that is filled with uncertainty.

The three areas of potential monetization for the commercial MOOCs, job placement, credentialing and data, are all in some form of being adopted or are already generating some revenue for MOOCs.

Despite their clear motivations as profit-seeking firms, the commercial MOOCs are all rooted in the academy. The people behind them are well aware that the reputations and longevity of their businesses depend on being part of the solution to reforming education to make it more affordable and more relevant in the future economy.

Healthy Food Programs No Match for Sugar-Touting TV Ads

This is an excerpt of a paper I wrote on child obesity for a public health course last quarter. It basically spells out and references what we all know: that there isn't the political will to regulate food industry advertising to kids. As long as this state of affairs persists, we rely on parents turning off the TV, buying healthful foods and preparing them.  -- Barbara Correa, Head of a Woman

Economic efforts to reduce caloric intake

The acknowledgement that obesity is happening on a broad scale has ushered in an era of local efforts to change behavior, despite massive spending to prevent such initiatives by the food and beverage industries. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on super-sized sodas attempts to control portion size. Tax measures in two California cities with high levels of child obesity — Richmond, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and El Monte, in Los Angeles County — followed suit by placing soda tax measures on local ballots this November (both were sharply defeated amid big spending by beverage makers). 

Such measures are fueled by longitudinal studies that show a strong correlation between added-sugar intake and increased body mass index.

 An analysis of food prices and health outcomes in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study found that increases in soda prices were associated with lower calorie intake, lower body weight and reduced insulin resistance.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2004 found that about half the added sugar Americans consumer per day comes from soda and fruit drinks.

 Soda and fruit juice drinking has increased in the past four decades as milk consumption has declined. Among children aged 2-19, milk consumption fell from 15 ounces per day in 1977-78 to under 10 ounces per day in 2003-06 (Smith et al., 5). 

In the same period, fruit juice consumption rose from about 3 ounces a day to 5 ounces and non-diet soda drinking increased from 5 ounces a day to ten ounces a day in 1999-2002. Soda consumption then dropped to 10 ounces a day by 2003-06.

The 2010 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis using demand elasticities to estimate consumer changes found that a 20 percent price increase on sweetened drinks such as soda and sweetened fruit juice could reduce weight by 4.5 pounds a year for children. However, the effectiveness of such a policy would depend on how much of the price increase would be reflected in consumer prices. If manufacturers were to absorb a price increase instead of passing it on to the consumer, the effect would be limited, the study argues. In other words, consumers need to be able to see the higher price and feel the pain of having to pay for it in order for the policy to impact purchasing decisions. 

School- and community-based lifestyle interventions. 

Many school- and community-based policies and government programs have been introduced in the last 15 years to curb the increase in obesity as a way to prevent T2D in children. Among people with prediabetes, a 33-to-68 percent reduction in diabetes onset had been observed with a weight loss of between five and ten percent

. Initiatives to motivate healthier eating range from calorie labeling on restaurant menus, nutrition labeling on packaged foods, education and social marketing efforts, such as the 5 a Day for Better Health program launched by the National Cancer Institute in the early 1990s. 

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 is national legislation that aims to improve nutritional content of food managed by federal programs such as the National School Lunch Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The law requires that common sense actions be implemented at school with the goal being to improve eating and drinking habits. Actions include providing free potable water where meals are served, serving food that meets USDA nutrition standards, limiting what kinds of food and drinks can be sold in vending machines at school and offering grants to schools or organizations involved in local farm-to-school programs.

However, there is evidence that lunch programs at schools may part of the problem. A Department of Agriculture-funded study of over 13,000 elementary school children found that children participating in the national school lunch program had a significantly higher correlation with obesity by the third grade.

 The correlation could be explained by relationships between other variables, such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity (the study controlled for those co-variates and others). But the study also found frequent noncompliance with federal nutritional guidelines for school lunches in terms of lunches failing to meet fat content limits. Also, schools are offering high sugar content a la carte items such as sodas, ice-cream sandwiches and cookies alongside lunch program items.  

The findings of such studies reflect the difficulties schools and other institutions face in creating successful obesity outcomes in an environment where entrenched special interests have made the rules. Clinical guidelines, educational programs and loosely-enforced nutritional standards in schools are all examples of an approach that relies on individuals acting strategically to make smart choices. What is required for real change instead is a food environment that contains default choices that would reduce caloric intake of sugary and fatty foods and drinks without consumers even being aware they are making a choice. 

A recent article from an American Heart Association journal, Circulation, argues that the food industry has strategically created a food environment in which default choices consumers make are hazardous for their health and lead directly to obesity. “Although clinical guidelines, educational programs, and social marketing campaigns are important, they do not address the environmental causes of the obesity epidemic and rely on individuals to prevail over a most challenging environment” (Novak & Brownell, 2348). “Educating children about the risks of consuming sugary drinks and entreating them to consume healthier beverages like low-fat milk is certainly important. However, children leave the classroom or the doctor’s office only to confront a world where sugary drinks are cheaper and more ubiquitous than milk and where beverage marketing confronts them in movies, on the Internet, and even in schools.’’

Classroom lessons that emphasize reduced consumption of high-fact, high-sugar foods and increased fruit and vegetable intake have proven to be no match for relentless marketing and advertising of unhealthful foods to kids. At the same time, federal school lunch programs have failed to comply with both the letter and intent of federal dietary rules, in some cases becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

Governments in Europe and elsewhere have taken some actions against food marketing. In the U.S., the only restrictions to date are self-regulatory standards that food companies established in 2007 through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (Novak & Brownell, 2349). But the companies have effectively circumvented self-policing efforts by strategically vague definitions and through social media marketing via Twitter and Facebook, which is not transparent. 

More recently, U.S. Congressional committees have attempted to engage various departments, including the Federal Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission and USDA to develop tougher regulation aimed at compelling food companies to comply. However, up to 25% of food marketing is estimated to come from companies who are not members of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative trade group. 

So far, despite some progress, self-regulation of the food and beverage industries on marketing to children and other policy areas has failed to improve school meal nutrition. Short of a serious threat of government regulation, that is unlikely to change, and a more active government role has so far proved politically unsaleable, the article concludes.  

The Truth About Work

Labor Day was last weekend, so this is slightly outdated. But, in that case, so is the New York Times. A piece in today's opinion section, "What Work Is Really For'' offers a quick examination of various philosophic takes on the purposes of work. The author, Gary Gutting, quotes Aristotle giving an oddly bourgeois justification for work: to provide leisure time.

What I want to take issue with, however, is Mr. Gutting's assertion that, according to Genesis, "work is punishment for Adam's sin." That characterization represents a distorted reading of the scripture.

Anyone who has ever trained and worked in something they truly find interesting can attest that work is not punishment. Work and labor can be among life's most rewarding activities. Even people laboring at something they have ambivalent feelings about can experience a genuine satisfaction in a job well done.

That is because work predates "the Fall'' of Adam and Eve, when the couple turned away from God by disobeying Him. When they decided to try to be their own gods, they  inadvertently set humankind on the long course of finding its way back to a healthy relationship with the Almighty, a journey that continues to this day.

Go back to Genesis, Chapter 2, verse 15: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.'' The garden is described as an abundant oasis of fruit trees and all sorts of animals. I've always imagined it as hot too, from a verse in Chapter 3: "Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day...."  In fact, it sounds a bit like a jungle where the man, Adam, was in charge. This conception of man as steward over the earth has been a common theme in faith-based environmental ethical thinking for centuries and stands in stark contrast to what happens after the Fall.

When Adam and Eve choose to eat from the one fruit tree the Lord has put off limits, they commit the first act of separating themselves from God by asserting that they know better than their Creator what is beneficial for them. It is a tragic and fatal decision, reflected in the way labor and work change for them after their disobedience. Indeed, it is only after the Fall that God curses the ground, so that Adam must toil to bring food forth from it, and Eve will endure pain in childbearing. The work they took pleasure in before the Fall becomes bittersweet and much more difficult.

The difference in the nature of work before and after the Fall draws an important distinction that is relevant and timeless for all workers. Work is often laborious, difficult, and performed in order to meet life's basic needs. But work (paid or unpaid) can also be done in the way it was before the Fall. When we are harnessing our talents and gifts to improve or bring forth something that was lacking before, we fulfill the original purpose of work.

Ayn Rand Was a Teenager Once, Too

I really want to write something about unregulated greed and the healthcare industry. But after reading Paul Krugman's hilarious column this morning, I can't resist a little Ayn Rand deconstruction. Like many of my contemporaries, I read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead in high school (and saw the 1949 film with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper as Howard Roark -- lovely lighting). Even then, at age 15 or whatever, I recognized in these two novels the simplistic archetypes equating financial success with moral superiority and financial failure with moral depravity.

A little context: the thing I haven't seen much written about Rand (by the way, please tell me that Ron Paul did not name his son after Ayn) is her childhood. She was a teenager living in Petersburg when the Bolsheviks came and seized her father's successful pharmacy. So, of course she worshipped an unobstructed and regulation-free market. Her experiences living through Communism shaped her point of view dramatically for the rest of her life. And I think we can all agree now, in 2012, that Communism was a colossal failure. No argument there.

The extreme circumstances Rand lived through in her youth -- coupled with a ripe imagination -- allowed her to construct a world of black and white. ANY check on the successful, strong or smart, whether in the form of a tax or a regulation, was always wrong in her mind. (The sky high tax rates during the 1940s and 50s, when Rand was living and working in Hollywood, didn't seem to temper her love of the USA, however).

So, really, Rand was only reacting to what she had seen and experienced. But what about the Alan Greenspans and Ron Pauls and Paul Ryans of the world? They grew up here, in a place where free markets clearly had their use, as did checks and balances on those markets. So what is their excuse for seeing the world in these fantastical archetypes of economic good and evil?? Here, Greenspan admits that the philosophy he's embraced for the past forty years, heavily influenced by, yes, Atlas Shrugged, was ... dead wrong.

What we need is an Obama-Ryan coalition. Robama? O’Ryan?

Imagine a world far removed from the nastiness and gritty reality of this campaign season – somewhere between Camelot and Galt’s Gulch (Ayn Rand’s fictional entrepreneur oasis from Atlas Shrugged), where disparate views could be expressed without the campaign-addled media butting in.

If such a neutral zone existed, perhaps it would bring to...gether the ultimate fantasy duo capable of solving our most pressing problems: Obama-Ryan (or Ryan-Obama). Because the truth is, these two youngish family men – who seemed to find a great deal in common before they realized they were in opposing corners of the ring -- would make a Presidential dream team.

If we could just eliminate Romney and Biden from the equation, what progress we could make. Obama has Obamacare, which wants to reduce Medicare costs by lowering reimbursements to doctors and hospitals; Ryan has his Medicare voucher plan, which could shift us from the current inefficient fee-for-service delivery model. Ryan has a sterling reputation as a deficit hawk but his budget plan actually raises the deficit – by trillions; Obama has a terrible reputation as a deficit hawk; his budget plan cuts spending in crucial areas like defense while raising revenues.

Couldn’t we throw the Medicare voluntary voucher plan in along with the individual mandate and see if we get greater cost-savings incentives? And what about blending that deficit hawk reputation with a realistic expiration of the Bush tax cuts and defense spending reductions? Did I say fantasy duo? Yes, I was forgetting that we’re nowhere near Camelot or any other fictional oasis where true compromise is possible. Just forget what I said.

Why The "Haves'' Don't Get It

I really don't think Elliott Hirshman, incoming president of San Diego State University, planned to begin his new $400,000 gig at the exact same time the Cal State Board of Trustees voted in a new 12% tuition increase (that's on top of a 10% tuition hike last year). Neither did the CSU trustees. I have no doubt that the unfortunate timing of the fat paycheck and tuition hikes for students was a completely honest mistake.

That's because Hirshman and the trustees live in an alternate universe from undergraduates scrambling to figure out how they're going to come up with $6,000 a year to pay for school. What does an Elliott Hirshman know about living on minimum wage with three roommates? Does he relate to the difficulty of falling asleep at night counting the thousands of dollars in debt today's graduates face coming out of college?

When I graduated from San Diego State in 1988, annual tuition cost about $900. At the time, former SDSU president Stephen Weber was pulling down $105,000, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission's 1988-1989 report on executive compensation.

Including the controversial pay raise, the new president at State is making almost four times what Weber made way back then. Student tuition, of course, has accelerated at an even faster pace -- about six times what I was paying in the late 80s. This fall, CSU students will pay $5472 in basic tuition for the year, still a bargain, to be sure. A pittance, in fact, to someone making $400,000, or even half that.

The reason the media glare is burning so relentlessly on San Diego State at the moment is that TuitionGate, or the latest example of unsupportable executive compensation in the face of draconian budget cuts, or whatever you choose to call it, provides the perfect analogy to the problem of economic disparity on a national scale.

The basic issue is that the people making policy live in a world where the bills get paid and the IRA keeps on growing and the future looks basically the same that it has for the past 15 years. How can this group decide what is an appropriate amount to exact from a 22-year-old graphic designer making $2300 a month, or a middle-aged single Mom making $15 an hour doing accounting at night so she can spend her days working toward a nursing degree?

Maybe the Board should consider recruiting a group of students to study the issue and come up with its own cost analysis and recommendation for executive pay. Oh, and be sure you pay them. $25 an hour would be a decent place to start. Does it sound like a lot? On an annual basis, that's just over $50,000.

Spelling Mistakes Cost Millions in Lost Sales Online

A British entrepreneur who runs travel, mobile and fashion Web sites in the U.K. says it is possible to identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on sales. According to his research, spelling errors are cutting in half online sales in the U.K., the BBC reports. Read the full story here.