Let’s put that into perspective:

- Average tuition, room and board (for in-state students) at the nations four-year public colleges and universities for an entire academic year (2006-07):
$14,203
$14,203 x 4 years = $56,812
That is more than double the corresponding figure in 1990.
There are 18.4 million students enrolled in the nations colleges and universities this fall.
(This is up from 13.5 million 20 years ago.)
18.4 million students x $56,812 (average college cost for 4 years)=
$176,117,200,000.00
That’s $176 billion dollars being spent collectively for a 4 year ‘public’ college education.

*Source: U.S. Census – Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/
Google University

More on the Google University

More links on free education from the past….Free access to education gears up to end the monopoly of bricks and morter campuses.

Source: Technophilia
by Wendy Boswell

Grab some larnin’ from the University of Washington‘s free online courses; Greek mythology, American Revolution, Heroic Fantasy are just some of the offerings. If you get tired of that, you can study economics at the University of Nebraska.

Teach yourself sign language from Michigan State University. Browse through the vast treasures at the Library of Congress. View free videos on all sorts of subjects from Annenberg Media, a major supplier to most distance learning universities, or read the core documents of American democracy.

Feel like a little light reading? You can study theology at Covenant Seminary; course offerings are delivered via a combo of free downloadable .pdf files and podcasts, and include subjects ranging from Church History to the Modern Reformation.

Learn mathematics with this extensive list of free online math courses from Whatcom Community College. Visit Carnegie Mellon University and take Biology, Causal Reasoning, Statistics, and more, all for free.

Penn State University offers a free Swedish language course, in addition to a free Hungarian language course. Or, you can take an Italian language and culture course from Brooklyn College. California State also offers a free Conversational Mandarin Chinese course, and you can learn Turkish via the University of Arizona.

The University of Washington School of Medicine offers free CPR classes online, complete with video and instructional guides. You can also take health courses from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; anything from adolescent health to population science.

Prepare for the US citizenship test from the Missouri Southern State University. Learn linear algebra from the University of Puget Sound. Learn about bioterrorism (really) and other hazards from the University of North Carolina.

Get free online mathematics textbooks, videos, and lecture notes from New York University. Take advantage of Tufts University’s open courses on dentistry, medicine, nutrition, and more. Learn about cognitive science from Hampshire College.

Take eight different courses via the Sofia Project, a collaborative effort between select California community colleges. Brigham Young University offers independent study in subjects such as Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study. Get access to ten free seminary courses from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Learn about human resources in 52 (!) different free courses from ERI. Browse a huge variety of materials in the University of Michigan’s courses and seminars on Internet laws.

Ivy League

Take advantage of Stanford University’s free CS education library. Go to college by taking free classes at MIT. Go to Berkeley with your iPod.The University of Pennsylvania has an extensive online library; over 25,000 books are listed here.

Just debuted, you can take free courses from Yale (funded by HP) on such diverse subjects as the Old Testament or Physics. Watch or read free online lectures in archival format from Princeton. Get a free Introduction to Probability text from Dartmouth.

Google tricks

Using the right keywords, find course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts, and various sorts of online books using Google.