The One Dollar PhD

A PhD requires about 10,000 hours of work: reading, group instruction, research. An HDTV channel requires up to 14 Mb/s of compressed information. If the data flow to ten students averages HDTV rates for 40% of the time, the total data per student is 3600 x 10K * 14M * 0.40 / 10 = 2E13 bits.

An 8000 satellite, 40kg server sky array might cost $1M; $760,000 to manufacture and $240,000 to launch (WAG). It might transmit 100 Gb/s of information by superposition of many packets to multiple ground stations. If the service life of the array is 6 years, 200 million seconds, it can ship 1E11*2E8 = 2E19 bits. 2E13 bits per dollar.

So the information cost per student is a dollar. Of course, the information must be created, programs prepared for pacing each student, some human evaluation, etc. However, a tiered school system built around group collaboration, with older students teaching younger, and students completing the process programming the system for those that come after, might complete the information flow; after all, schools are a monetized/debt version of this, as all faculty in tuition schools are former students of some previous school.