“In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It’s not enough to learn something—you have to be able to prove to other people that you’ve learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputation to put its brand and credibility behind open-education resources and credentials to match. But most world-famous universities got that way through a process of exclusion. Their degrees are coveted and valuable precisely because they’re expensive and hard to acquire. If an Ivy League university starts giving degrees away for free, why would everyone clamor to be admitted to an Ivy League university?”