A University undergraduate education is a total waste of money. I didn't learn a d@mn thing in almost all my undergraduate classes. They were just a rehash of the stuff I learned in high school.
Of course my proposal would put hundreds of thousands of left wing college professors into the unemployment line.
What could be better?
Besides, since the left owns the universities, online education is one way to cheaply take back the educating of our young. EVERY Christian College/University should be pushing or creating online extensions of their campus.
Online education could be a great equalizer.
What could be better?
Having taught college myself for the past six years, I have to disagree with your projections. Yes, there is some course content that could be covered online, and when I was a student I took one online course (rather useless, as it turned out), and several of my other professors offered copious online resources for independent learning. Now that I’m on the other side of the desk, I also make good resources available to my students, but quite frankly nothing can replace conscientious hard work, let alone class discussion. And even when I do put stuff online, a very small percentage of my students rely on it, since they know I cover most of the important material in lecture.
Perhaps more to the point, putting a class online doesn’t drive costs down anywhere near the “tens of dollars a unit” that you suggest. Instructor salaries are roughly the same for online and in-person courses, and while class management software isn’t quite as expensive as physical classroom buildings, the college still has to invest a lot in infrastructure, bandwidth, etc. It’s simply not true that an online course consists of a few static HTML pages followed by “click here to take the final exam”!