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"This fall, Harvard will charge students $36,992 for tuition, compared to a bill 34 times less at most community colleges. Don't let the higher sticker price fool you. Community colleges offer teaching instruction comparable to their four-year counterparts but won't saddle graduates with long term debt in the process."

Harvard & MIT Presidents: Our nation has a remarkable record of rising from the ashes of crisis, and education and research in science and engineering have often led those revivals of prosperity and morale. Of the world's top 20 research universities, the United States claims 17. As leaders of two, we know our institutions must play a central role in helping America to rebuild.

"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum. But their challenge isn't fundamentally one of money: online tutorials don't have to be expensive to be effective, as the open-to-all Khan Academy has shown. The much greater challenge for traditional universities and colleges is changing their teaching traditions. Full-time faculty members must not only assent to the inclusion of online learning in the curriculum, they should lead it."