This book may be controversial for some. Boiled down to it's most simple concepts, it first discusses the availability and cost of education. It then proceeds to question the need for a traditional education at all.

Most would agree that the rising cost of education is beginning to push it out of reach for many at a time when a college education is seen as essential for earning a decent wage. The book examines how technology could be used to provide an education more efficiently and cheaply. Reusing existing materials, using free resources and textbooks and doing away with menial tasks to allow educators to focus on interacting with their students all seem sensible.

The author then takes a more radical path and calls into question the need for organized educational institutions. They argue that educational content is available for free on the Internet and students can interact with other learners through a number of social media outlets. Therefore, traditional colleges and universities may no longer be needed. I would challenge these notions on two points; first, the student is using materials that are not juried and content that has not been peer reviewed. Also, there needs to be some assessment or evaluation of learning. Some form of credentialing is still needed to demonstrate that the student has acquired some minimal knowledge level.

The book is full of interesting statistics and references to studies in education. Perhaps the most frustrating observation is that even with an increase in available educational technology, it has not resulted in an appreciable increase in efficiency or cost savings. One educator admitted that they had decreased the amount of time required to teach a number of courses. In theory, this should allow students to complete a required series of courses and obtain a degree faster. When asked if the savings should be passed to the student, they stated that a degree from University X would always need to cost a certain amount so as to not devalue the degree obtained. My shock at the discussion demonstrates my naivety that education isn't the primary focus of some universities. ( )

Part 1 is a bore (a review of current higher education). Part 2 gets to the point and gives some useful advice and resources for self-directed learning and independent study. ( )

Very informative and includes a lot of facts, but does not bored the reader. ( )

This guy is a mixed bag with no clear thesis. The appendix in the back is a good cheat sheet for open / free academic resources, but in a strange gesture (telling of the book's contradictions) it lists FAFSA as a resource after railing about how student loan bloat is both driving up the cost of the college and dragging people into debt. A good primer on college costs, loan debt, and efforts to change the system (mostly via the internets) but it could have been better organized. ( )

In first section of the book, Kamenetz examines the social-structural and economic issues in higher education which drive costs up and graduation down. This section works reasonably well and should give people pause. Kamenetz did a fair job of convincing me that current methods cannot merely be scaled up to educate substantially more students; new players and approaches will be necessary (possibly including new philosophies about the uses of education and credentials).

The second section, in which Kamenetz tours the various technological means for delivering information, isn't as successful. It reads like a mere catalog of various options, not critically examining any of them. Everything is presented as "potentially revolutionary"; options aren't even compared to each other, let alone existing pedagogical strategies. It devolves into a gee-whiz tour, more in the style of the Travel and Leisure section of a newspaper than a work of investigation or analysis. ( )