Learning Is Free Online. So Why Is Education Costlier Than Ever?

For Indian parents, education is no longer just a monthly school-fee bill.

There is tuition. Books. Uniforms. Transport. Coaching. Extra classes. Then comes college. And, increasingly, another round of spending to make a degree “job-ready”.

All this when a child today can learn mathematics, coding, languages, science, programming and even advanced university-level subjects from a phone or laptop. Much of that content is free.

Yet education itself keeps getting more expensive. The irony is hard to miss.

So, What Exactly Are Parents Paying For?

Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder of space startup Skyroot Aerospace, recently said in a podcast that “education is practically free now a days with everything available on the internet.”

Then there is Elon Musk. The SpaceX founder has argued that college is “basically for fun” and to prove that students can complete their responsibilities, rather than primarily being a place for learning. He has also questioned the value of much academic research, saying that most PhD papers are useless.

Taken literally, those comments can sound extreme. But they raise a question worth asking. If information is becoming almost free, why does formal education continue to cost so much? And more importantly, is the traditional education system giving children the skills they will actually need?

There was a time when access to knowledge depended heavily on where a child lived, which school they attended and what their parents could afford.

The internet has changed that equation. A child with a smartphone can access lectures, tutorials, coding lessons, language courses, science experiments and educational material from around the world.

There are free resources from YouTube and government platforms. NPTEL and SWAYAM offer access to courses from leading institutions. DIKSHA and PM eVIDYA provide educational content. Atal Tinkering Labs have introduced maker spaces, robotics kits and 3D printers in thousands of schools.

The problem, therefore, is no longer simply access to information. The harder problem is knowing what to do with it.

That distinction matters. A 12-year-old can watch a 20-minute video explaining artificial intelligence. That does not mean the child knows how to build anything with AI.

A student can watch hundreds of coding tutorials. That does not automatically make them a programmer. And a child can read a thousand pages about entrepreneurship without ever learning how to solve a real problem.

This is where the argument around traditional education becomes complicated.

“The System Is Failing Us” 

Ashwath Bharath, Senior Director, Movement Building at Teach For India, says the education system is failing, but not necessarily for the reason people assume.

“Yes, the system is failing us, but not in the way this debate assumes. It isn’t failing because content is expensive, it’s failing because it teaches to the test and rarely to the child,” he said.

That is perhaps the most important distinction in this entire debate. If the internet has made content cheap, then schools cannot justify their value merely by providing information.

The value has to come from what happens around that information. A teacher can identify where a child is struggling. A classroom can force a student to collaborate with someone very different from them. A school can teach discipline, communication and social skills.

As Bharath puts it, a child can watch videos about kindness and still bully a classmate at recess. That is something a YouTube video cannot solve. “School’s real job, alongside literacy and numeracy, is teaching a child how to sit with someone unlike them and still get along,” Bharath said.

This is also where the Musk argument needs some context. College may not be the cheapest way to acquire information anymore. But formal education does much more than deliver information.

• It provides structure.
• It provides socialisation.
• It provides credentials.

And in India, those credentials still carry considerable weight.

The Real Problem: Degrees Versus Skills

Chetan Mangalwedhe, Founder & CEO of TalentiFi-X, says the comments by Chandana and Musk reflect a growing discomfort with traditional education.

But he does not believe the answer is to abandon schools and colleges. “It is not failing completely. Schools and colleges still provide structure, socialisation, and credentials that matter in India,” Mangalwedhe said.

The problem, he argues, is that too much of the system remains exam-driven. Students are trained to remember. They are trained to reproduce answers. They are trained to chase marks. 

But employers increasingly want something else.

• Problem-solving.
• Adaptability.
• Communication.
• Digital skills.
• The ability to learn something new.
• The ability to work with others.
• And the ability to actually build something.

A student can spend years collecting certificates and still find that the first employer wants experience. This is why the debate should perhaps not be framed as degree versus no degree. It should be framed as degree plus skills versus degree alone.

So, Can Parents Build These Skills Without Spending Lakhs?

The good news is that they can. And this is where the education revolution becomes interesting for middle-class families.

Mangalwedhe points to resources such as NPTEL, SWAYAM, quality YouTube channels, open-source projects and government skill programmes. Bharath points to Atal Tinkering Labs, YouTube, DIKSHA and PM eVIDYA.

Bharath says Atal Tinkering Labs have put free maker spaces, robotics kits and 3D printers into more than 10,000 schools. More than 60 per cent of these, he said, are government or rural schools, reaching more than one crore students.

The larger lesson is that many tools that once required expensive private courses are now accessible at little or no cost. But there is a catch.

Free content is not the same as free education. A child still needs direction.

Someone has to tell them which course to take. Which skill to practise. What project to build. What mistakes they are making. How to improve.

That person could be a teacher. It could be a parent. It could be an older sibling. Or it could be a mentor.

Bharath says the gap is increasingly not availability, but someone helping a child use these resources effectively. That could become one of the biggest education questions of the next decade.

• Not: Who has access to information?
• But: Who has access to guidance?

The cheapest education may still need an expensive ingredient: time. This also explains why simply telling parents to “educate children online” is not enough.

Consider two children. One has a laptop, a quiet room, educated parents who can guide them and enough free time to experiment.

The other has a smartphone shared with family members, limited internet access, household responsibilities and parents who may not know what online course would be useful.

Both technically have access to the internet. But their educational opportunities are very different. This is why the next education divide may not simply be between children who have internet access and those who do not.

It could be between children who have guidance and mentorship and those who only have access to content.

What Happens To Schools Then?

This is where schools may have to rethink what they are selling. If information is available everywhere, classrooms cannot remain focused primarily on delivering information.

The classroom could increasingly become a place for discussion, experimentation, teamwork and projects. Teachers could spend less time simply explaining facts that students can find online and more time helping students apply those facts.

Imagine a child learning about climate change through a textbook. Then imagine that same child using sensors to measure air quality around the school, analysing the data, presenting it to classmates and discussing what could be done.

The second experience is harder to forget. It also builds skills that an examination paper may not measure. That could be the future of formal education: less information delivery, more application.

And What About Homeschooling?

This debate naturally leads to another question. If parents can access curriculum content online, could more Indian families simply take children out of school?

Homeschooling is likely to grow in urban India, particularly among families frustrated with rote learning, school pressure and the race for marks.

But it is unlikely to replace mainstream schooling on a large scale anytime soon. There is a simple reason.

Homeschooling is not really “free school”. Someone has to run the school. Someone has to design the curriculum, teach the child, monitor progress, arrange social interaction and prepare the child for examinations.

That requires time. And time is not equally available to all parents.

Bharath says homeschooling will remain a genuine option for a slice of the upper middle class rather than becoming a replacement for schooling at scale.

India also has the National Institute of Open Schooling, or NIOS, which provides a recognised route for students pursuing education outside the conventional school structure.

But the larger trend may not be homeschooling. It could be hybrid learning.

The Next Education Model 

Mangalwedhe expects homeschooling to rise among some urban families, but says the practical shift is more likely to be hybrid learning.

The child remains enrolled in school. But school is no longer the only place where learning happens.

A student might learn coding online. Build a robotics project. Join an open-source community. Learn a language through digital resources. Take a course from a university. Find a mentor. And still go to school every morning.

This model may make more sense for India.

Competitive examinations still matter. Degrees still matter. Socialisation still matters. Employers still use educational qualifications as signals.

At the same time, the skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly. The answer, therefore, may not be to choose between school and the internet. It may be to use both.

So, What Are Parents Paying For?

Perhaps the answer is not knowledge. Knowledge has become dramatically cheaper.

Parents are paying for structure, teachers, mentorship, socialisation, credentials, safety, peer groups and a system that keeps a child moving forward.

The problem begins when an expensive education provides little beyond what a child can already find online for free. That is where traditional education will face its biggest test.

The question schools and colleges will increasingly have to answer is not: “What information can we give your child?”

The internet has already answered that question. The real question is: “What can we help your child become?”

And that could determine whether the next generation sees school as an unavoidable cost, or as something genuinely worth paying for.