Even before COVID-19 made campuses physically risky, higher education faced a serious crisis, largely because of debt—total student-loan debt hit a staggering $1.5 trillion in 2019. Less expensive online learning is one solution, but the quality of web-based schools has been spotty at best. Enter Outlier. Built by the people behind the online-learning platform MasterClass, Outlier offers remote college courses for credit through the University of Pittsburgh. The courses—which include calculus, astronomy, psychology and statistics—are taught by top professors from schools like Yale and NYU, and are made with high production values not usually seen in online education. —Matthew Gault
More Must-Read Stories From TIME
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.
