These programs could also liberate education from its ageism. College is the most ageist sector in the U.S., a huge industry set up to serve 18-24 year olds. Even graduate schools are designed to appeal to twenty-somethings. Yet our innovation economy means people will need new skills at every phase of life.

Unfortunately, with student debt burgeoning to $1.5 trillion in 2019, the public coffers can barely afford the former paradigm, much less underwrite a more expensive model where learning is continuous.

The prize is enormous — a dramatic increase in the number of seats at good schools. Fifty percent online courses is tantamount to a doubling of the physical campus and returning admission rates back to what they were in the eighties, a time when the unremarkable sons of single immigrant mothers from lower middle class households were given remarkab... See more