Could a university ever adopt the Google business model and offer tuition for free? This may seem an ever more unlikely prospect as governments the world over struggle to finance the growing demand for higher education — often levying tuition fees to plug the gap.
But the president of Austral University, a private institution in Argentina, believes that universities could be on the cusp of a “breakthrough” in how they finance student education. In an interview with Times Higher Education, Fernando Fragueiro outlined the all-powerful internet firm’s business model: it offers its services to consumers for free, thus generating enormous amounts of user traffic for its services.
It then makes money by selling advertising space to companies, which can target specific groups of Google users based on their searches or the content of their emails. Universities could do something similar, he proposes. Companies could pay to advertise their physical products (laptops, for example) and services to students during their course of study, helping to eliminate the need for fees, he explains.
This proposal may sound like a radical commercialisation of the lecture theatre, but it stems from Prof. Fragueiro’s view that education must not be off limits to those who are unable to afford it. “Education is a human right, not a… privilege for a small number of people,” he says.
However, he did not outline immediate plans to roll out his ideas at Austral, which does not disclose its MBA fees on its website.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)