Brain Arbitrage

From Half Sigma: "A kid in California has an English tutor in India. The tutor makes $2/hour."

This is quite a good deal when you consider that American parents often pay $7-$10 per hour for mere babysitters.

Colleges should take advantage of cheap but talented brains in poor countries. Professors could select and provide some background training for Indian tutors. Imagine that each student in a class gets 100 hours of personal assistance from on overseas tutor. The cost of this could be paid for by only a trivial percentage increase in tuition.

Someone should start an Indian paper grading service. Grading student essays is the least interesting part of being a teacher. I suspect that many, many teachers would gladly give up, say, $5 for each hour of paper grading they didn't have to do.