Why Free Education?

SIAI GSB offers its online coursework at no cost because, in a digitally delivered environment, the marginal cost of distributing educational content is effectively zero. Rather than treating access to lectures and materials as a scarce commodity, the institution reserves pricing for activities that consume genuine human and institutional resources—namely supervision, evaluation, and in-person residency. This approach reflects a deliberate separation between knowledge dissemination, which scales efficiently online, and institutional judgment, which does not. By removing financial barriers from the learning phase, the program allows academic rigor and self-selection to operate naturally, while ensuring that fees are applied only where direct human oversight and responsibility are required.

Online Education

SIAI GSB’s online education is conceived as analytical infrastructure rather than a monetized service. Once developed, digital coursework can be delivered repeatedly without depletion, enabling identical access regardless of cohort size, geography, or timing. In this environment, charging for access would introduce artificial scarcity without improving educational quality or rigor.

By offering online education freely, SIAI separates intellectual formation from credential consumption. This structure allows participants to engage seriously with demanding material without financial signaling, while ensuring that progression reflects understanding, discipline, and self-selection rather than payment. Online coursework therefore functions as a shared analytical foundation, not as a gatekeeping mechanism.

P=MC=0

In a fully digital environment, the marginal cost of serving an additional student approaches zero: no incremental faculty time, physical space, or institutional capacity is consumed by content distribution alone. Under these conditions, pricing access to coursework violates basic principles of economic efficiency and diverts attention from mastery toward transaction.

SIAI therefore applies the principle P = MC = 0 to online education by design. Pricing is deliberately excluded from the content layer and reserved for components where marginal cost is strictly positive—where human judgment, evaluation, and institutional responsibility become the binding constraints that cannot be automated or scaled.

Offline Backup

In contrast, offline education entails irreducible institutional costs that scale directly with participation. Physical presence requires dedicated venues, sustained faculty attention, supervision time, evaluation labor, and logistical coordination, all of which consume scarce human and organizational resources and impose real opportunity costs.

These activities cannot be replicated digitally or distributed at scale without loss of integrity. SIAI therefore prices offline components—such as residencies, supervision, and evaluation—not as content delivery, but as institutional commitments. Fees reflect accountability, direct human oversight, and the responsibility inherent in in-person judgment and certification.