[recursivecaveat]

Sometimes I wonder what an MOOC-like education that went all-in on signalling/credentialism would look like. You convince some real down-on-their-luck university to lend you their name to provide eduction for lower income adults, you rent a big empty room with folding chairs in downtown where people actually live a few nights a week, a contracted PhD with a tweed jacket and a blackboard lectures in person, curriculum straight from an old edition textbook with pen-and-paper tests.

What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.