The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun the most revolutionary experiment in the history of education, stretching all the way back to the pharaohs. It now gives away its curriculum to anyone smart enough to learn it. It has posted its curriculum on-line for free. These days, this means a staggering 1900 courses. This number will grow.

This is proof to the academic world that MIT regards its program as the best, and dares any other institution to prove otherwise, where everyone can see and compare. The free site validates the MIT T-shirt: “HARVARD: Because not everyone can get into MIT.”

MIT has publicly stiffed its main rival for the title of the best science university on earth. That rival is the California Institute of Technology. CalTech will forever play catch-up to MIT on-line. It will be “We, Too On-line University.”

UTC and many private colleges are old-world educational models relying on state power, centralization, costly physical plant and oceans of parental debt to survive the digital age.

Students around the world can see for themselves that MIT has what it takes to be the best. They can test drive the entire curriculum.

Top students all over the world still want to attend MIT. They want a diploma that has MIT’s name on it. The free site does not reduce demand for an MIT diploma. It increases it.

MIT has up-ended several millennia of higher education. Let me explain.

Walter Williams, Times Free Press, Aug. 31, wrote:

As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it’s worth both the money they will spend and their children’s time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled “America’s Most Over-rated Product: Higher Education.”

The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend 8½ years in college. That’s even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million students who took the ACT college entrance examinations in 2007 were prepared to do college-level study in math, English and science. Even though a majority of students are grossly under-prepared to do college-level work, each year colleges admit hundreds of thousands of such students.

Here’s Nemko’s report.