When Sebastian Thrun, then of Stanford, taught his artificial intelligence course online, the best performers were not the students from Stanford. Generally the best performers were the students abroad, often from poor countries and very often from India. All of a sudden these individuals had a chance to outperform the US domestic elites…
Online education can thus be extremely egalitarian, but it is egalitarian in a funny way. It can catapult the smart, motivated, but nonelite individuals over the members of elite communities. It does not, however, push the uninterested student to the head of the pack.
That is from Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. The book is rather scattershot, but contains some interesting information (and arguments); the top Amazon reviews provide what is IMHO a fair assessment.
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