I'm rather taken with the trend towards offering college courses for free online. There's no enrollment, no grades, no pressure, and no diploma. They're simply there for the personal education of interested parties. Indeed, one nice effect of this is to further clarify how little of the contemporary college experience is about learning, rather than about obtaining the economic and social benefits of a degree. Learning, of course, is hoped to be a byproduct of earning that degree, though I'm a bit skeptical as to the strength of the correlation. Nevertheless, it's the degree which students are paying for, and so there isn't now and never really has been a reason to close off the number of folks who can derive personal benefit from auditing the classes.
