But today, employers may be more than willing to offer work to a student with an excellent record in MOOC courses without a college degree. That is especially true at technology companies.

Andrew Ng says many people want to know why people would pay to attend college when they can use MOOCs instead.

“So, one question we have often been asked is if you can take all those Princeton and Stanford courses online for free, why would anyone still pay two hundred thousand dollars for a Princeton degree?”

But Andrew Ng says attending classes in person at a good university is still important. He does not believe that course content alone is the real value of attending a university like Princeton. Instead, he says, relationships between students and professors and with other students are more important.

Mr. Ng says many professors are creating on-line videos for their lectures. They then ask their students to watch the videos at home the week before class. The computer scientist notes it is lot more fun for students to work in teams at solving problems than listening to a lecture.

Many universities hope to receive return on their investments in ways other than saving on operations. Coursera, for example, plans to develop a job placement service for top-performing students. After a time, the money from that service would flow back to the schools, Andrew Ng says.

Moody’s Investor Service predicts that MOOCs will help large, famous universities gain more students. It says schools that create content for MOOCs can earn money by providing the course material to smaller schools.