But the instructor only needs to be part time and class sizes can be raised to something like 50 without compromising the quality much vs 25. A detailed technical education can be achieved with 13 hours a week in contact hours so you can divide the salary by ~3 compared to 40 hour work week.

> That does not cover building, supplies, administrative or technical support, advertising etc.

A building is mandatory I'll grant you that; but maybe skip the advertising, downplay the admin and go light on the supplies. They invented calculus without anything much more impressive than pen and paper; there is a limit to how many toys are needed. Everyone can bring their own laptop.

People won't be bragging about it to their millionaire friends but it would be cheap and they'd learn enough to do hard jobs. It wouldn't be feasible to do Real Science where lab-work is required, but it'd work a treat for maths, engineering, arts and social sciences which are more about reading papers, talking to people and in extreme cases doing maths.

The 'teaching' is overrated, the value of university is in the controlled assessment environment. That can be replicated for a few thousand each with a few tens of students.

That would make the teacher completely unavailable for grading assignments, answering student questions outside of class, or much of anything beyond simply speaking to students. Someone needs to read all those history essay questions on the test, and then change something when most students get something wrong.

A 50+ person class would similarly limit students from asking questions. At which point you might as well just show videos. Some introductory classes are taught in huge auditorium’s but they still require additional TA’s and don’t work for upper level classes.

Don’t get me wrong, you could simply have an online system with canned videos, multiple choice question tests, and zero ability to ask questions. But, that’s not a collage education.