Less than 10% of PhDs find a permanent tenure track position in academia. Entire webcomics series have emerged to cope. Meanwhile college tuition costs increase exponentially, dramatically outpacing inflation.
College tuition even outpaced the housing bubble in recent years.
What if some of those surplus doctorates served as Oxford style tutors for small groups of students?
Sure a PhD might have specialized in evolutionary biology or economics but online there are a zillion resources, including open online classes on Coursera, Udacity and other MOOCs. A talented, curious PhD could guide students and provide a curated experience through the wild frontier that is the internet.
Imagine: our intrepid entrepreneurial intellectual ditching the staid, rigid confines of academic life could take students anyway across the globe. The teacher could offer 1-1 tutorial and small group seminars with students getting baseline curriculum from MOOCs.
There are also increasingly a variety of mechanisms for independently verifying student's learning through examinations. Such a model would be emphatically experimental though perhaps worthwhile for certain students.
Consider the following rough economics. Ten students at $10k a year is $100k, much better than a barista at starbucks for an aspiring academic. That's also much lower cost than a years tuition at a university or many private high schools.[1]
Such a price tag might make sense for students with rich parents looking to give them a leg up or a homeschooling co-op. In the not too distant past, such personalized tutoring was more the norm for figures like Theodore Roosevelt and others from that, and preceding, eras.
Why not try a digitally native version today?
[1] The Minerva Academy launched a decade ago offered a somewhat similar aspiration. The new online-first university promised to use the world's greatest cities as its campus and provide elite education for a fraction of the price, initially around $10k a year. Those rates have since risen closer to what's typical for private universities, around $50k a year including room and board.
