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What Can We Do About lt? 273 salvation. The most visible touter is the Secretary of Education, who gives eloquent speeches about more rigorous testing that are, of course, printed in The Washington Post. Why would President Obama want to do the same thing as Presi- dent Bush did, especially when he campaigned against No Child Left Behind, as I pointed out earlier? The answer is simple. There is lots of money invested in testing by powerful players. Kids are no one’s main concern. So the money for the new plan will not be coming from the government. What about from business? Venture capital, for example? Is a new kind of high school offered online likely to be a successful business venture? One mentor in the story-centered curriculum can handle between 20 and 50 students, depending on the mentot’s expe- rience. Assuming that the students pay tuition that covers the men- tor’s salary, which means they need to pay at least $3,000 a year, more or less, in tuition, it shouldn’t cost anything to run. Charge larger tu- itions and there will be profits. Initial investment is about $2 million to build a curriculum, but enough students paying reasonable tuitions will pay that investment back quickly enough. So, is this a big business opportunity? Actually I doubt it. I think that it is a big opportunity for universi- ties that traditionally charge large tuitions. We have had a great deal of success with master’s degrees, for example. But universities typically don’t invest $2 million in anything, even if it does have great upside potential. When Carnegie Mellon University made that investment in its West Coast campus (where I was designing the curriculum), it did so without quite knowing it was doing so because the person in charge didn’t tell the University officials what he was up to. Universities typi- cally don’t think about investing money in order to make money in the daily enterprise. Businesses do think that way, of course, but busi- nesses have trouble starting universities that are accredited. I worked for Trump University, which supposedly was going to do exactly that, but they never could raise enough money or figure out how to be accred- ited. So there is a potentially very big business in master’s degrees, but it needs some well-financed and prescient people to make it happen. High schools are another story. I actually do not believe that busi- ness will invest in online high schools whose mission is to overthrow the existing system. Venture capitalists are not revolutionaries. They tend to follow the herd in whatever they do and there is no herd in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023959