Penn Study: Glorious Utopian Future of Free Elite Online Education is a Bit of a Crock

The New York Times reports on a Penn study showing that MOOCs—”massive” online courses provided cheaply or freely by elite universities—aren’t really democratizing education the way it had been hoped. Instead, they’re democratizing dropouts: Only 4 percent of users actually completed the courses.

The Times adds: “Much of the hope — and hype — surrounding MOOCs has focused on the promise of courses for students in poor countries with little access to higher education. But a separate survey from the University of Pennsylvania released last month found that about 80 percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a degree of some kind.” So, you know, so much for that.