If you whittle away all the unnecessary expenses that we generally associate with college, it turns out to be quite inexpensive. An organization based in Oklahoma has done exactly that and in today’s Martin Center article, Professor Vance Fried explains what they’ve done.

Students only pay $44 per credit hour for courses. As Fried writes, “For those waxing nostalgic about the good old days when college was affordable, this is better than the good old days. Inflation-adjusted to 1970 dollars, our pricing translated to $6.68 a credit hour, and that’s without a dime of state or federal subsidy.”


Will Fried’s approach catch on? Too soon to say, but it could get more Americans to stop thinking that postsecondary education has to mean the extremely expensive experience they’ve come to think of as “college.”

Fried concludes, “In a nutshell, our Courses-on-Demand are top-quality, yet radically affordable. It’s part of our commitment to making education ‘good enough for the richest, yet cheap enough for the poorest.’”