In the United States, students often attend community colleges (2 year colleges) while still living at home. This cuts down on expenses and often provides an educational opportunity where none would otherwise exist. For many people this is the only way that they’d ever have access to any form of college education. In less developed nations, access to college – at any level – is often limited due to cost, lack of educational institutions, and geographic access to these institutions.
Whenever possible, there will be no cost for students to participate in online Space College activities. Such is the nature of open source – crowd sourced activities. At some point Space College will start to sponsor workshops, field trips, and other hands-on activities at a physical location. Some costs is likely to be associated with these activities.
While the costs of mounting Space College are still unknown, the costs of attending are also TBD. That said, with corporate and governmental subsidies, scholarships, sponsorships, and other support, it will still be likely that a portion of the cost will need to be raised by the student. Means whereby local communities can sponsor students should be encouraged and the tools where by others have done this should be shared by Space College participants should be openly encouraged – indeed required – to broaden their interactions and share their experiences with their community and others. Â Some elements of the Peace Corps might be worth looking at.
In addition, Space College could serve as a focus for corporate giving, educational training programs that focus on science and engineering in general, teacher training. Space College can also serve as a focus of individuals who seek to donate more than money – such as their time, facilities, and contacts. For example, If a sum of $20K is needed that sum be raised by 20 donations of $1,000, 200 donations of $100, 2,000 donations of $10 and 20,000 donations of $1.00. Enterprising students and local charitable organizations are capable of such things. With the advent of crowd funding platforms such as RocketHub, Kickstarter, etc., multiple projects (non-profit and for-profit) have been able to raise sizable sums from widely dispersed donors.
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