Harvard Held the Future of Education in Its Hands. Then We Sold It.

Most proposals to make Harvard more inclusive are either expensive (campus expansion) or illegal (race-based affirmative action).

Broader access to higher education is certainly a goal worth striving for. But many reforms, if enacted, would ultimately have little-to-no impact on most people. Every year, hundreds of thousands of high school graduates apply to colleges and receive zero acceptances. Even the more ambitious proposals — enrolling an extra thousand students per year, for example — would barely make a dent in the problem.

What we need is a way to extend Harvard’s reach that is not only inexpensive and legal, but that also benefits more than just the lucky few thousand our campus can house.

Sounds like a pipe dream. It’s not.

In fact, the solution already existed: EdX, a nonprofit online education platform founded in 2012 by Harvard and MIT has offered classes to millions of learners worldwide since its inception, totally free of charge. Flash forward to 2023 and the schools have sold edX to a for-profit company now at risk of bankruptcy, endangering the future of accessible online higher education.

Let me explain.

To Harvard students, CS50 — the University’s crash course to computer science — holds repute as one of the campus’ largest courses and perhaps its most over-the-top lecture class, complete with a capella performances, an all-nighter hackathon, and a visit from Boston Dynamics’ robotic dog.

Outside of Harvard’s campus, though, CS50 is known as the world’s most popular online course. It’s frequently recommended on “best online coding courses” lists, and for good reason. Every lecture is available in ultra-HD, and the course offers graded problem sets, recorded sections, and options to interact with your classmates, ask questions, or even say hello to professor David J. Malan ’99 himself!

It’s impressive stuff. It’s also free.

Since its first online offering through edX in 2012, more than 5.4 million individuals around the world have learned to code with CS50.

Malan’s course was one of the platform’s first. Over the next decade, edX partnered with dozens of the world’s best universities to host more than 3,500 courses for 40 million learners. It was a stunning display of how impactful digital learning can really be.

But in 2021, Harvard and MIT sold edX to a for-profit corporation for $800 million. In the sale, the corporation promised to keep their courses free — for five years, that is.

That corporation, 2U Inc., was the target of a recent lawsuit alleging it had used falsified data to attract students to programs co-hosted with the University of Southern California.

A former professor who was slated to administer a program with 2U, Ashley Bell, claimed that the company aimed to use their course as a “cash cow,”saying 2U “made it obvious that they didn’t care about the quality of the program” when she resigned in protest.

Time is ticking. In two years, 2U’s agreement to keep courses on edX free will expire. One can imagine what a for-profit education corporation will do when it is allowed to charge for Harvard lectures.

But, even more concerningly, it seems 2U might be going under. Its stock price has declined 99 percent in the past five years, it last reported nearly a billion dollars in debt, and it’s made significant layoffs since acquiring edX. 2U has itself reported concerns about its ability to stay afloat.

Bankruptcy would leave millions of learners in the dust, including the tens of thousands of students in the official degree-granting programs universities contract 2U to host on its digital infrastructure. It would be — by all measures — a catastrophe.

Harvard seems to recognize that this hole should not go unfilled — or at least it purports to. With the $800 million from edX’s sale, Harvard and MIT launched a new nonprofit called Axim Collaborative that aims to build on edX’s “commitment to educational equity,” but I’m skeptical. Why try to fix something that wasn’t ever broken?

Their plan to fund the nonprofit offers a telling indication: Harvard and MIT plan to limit their expenses on the project to only cash generated from the interest on edX’s sale. They’ve offered few details on their plans for Axim, leaving some concerned about its ability to offer a real replacement for edX.

It’s a far cry from the ambitious goals they had for edX and a disappointing betrayal of then-Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith’s lofty promise for edX to “change the way education is done across the world.”

It’s also a discouraging sign for the online education movement more generally: Two of the world’s most prestigious universities selling their online education brainchild is assuredly demotivating for other institutions who may have sought to universalize their own courses.

The story of edX has demonstrated the difficulties of democratizing access to knowledge, but there is no need to end the story here. The online education revolution still holds great promise — so long as it is not overrun by ruinous profit-seeking.

As the promise of edX fades, Harvard must ensure that its original mission — making the world’s best education available to everyone — doesn’t fade with it.

Chanden A. Climaco ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Mower Hall.