This is one of those cases where fostering the elite is a good thing. Nothing wrong with funding community colleges or making tuition at four-year institutions more reasonable, but we are systematically undermining our country both economically and culturally by undercutting our large research universities. All hail the MOOC, and for goodness sake, make higher education function more effectively, but don’t use it as an excuse to take the “research” out of research university…