$50,000 for an online education*

While most universities do not over-enroll their students, and while most universities decide to accomodate over-enrolled students, the University has decided to ask the 50 extra students in the Class of 2016 to not return next semester and instead take all their courses on Coursera, the new online learning platform.

The extra students are being cleared from their rooms on the fourth floor of Wilcox Hall in order to build a new Coursera virtual classroom that can connect students better than a precept can. The beds in which they slept last semester will now house Macbook Airs connected to the Coursera platform.

Despite protests from students paying $50,000 a year to attend the Ivy League institution, University officials insist that online learning is fine and that the over-enrollment was an intentional strategy to enable a real-life test of the new platform. But Kathryn Hall ’80, chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, emerged Thursday afternoon from Nassau Hall puzzled as to how the University could communicate so poorly internally.

“We told President Tilghman that she could not experiment Coursera on current University students. I guess Dean Rapelye didn’t get the memo and do something so dras– ” she said, stopping mid-sentence, realizing she was speaking to a reporter. “Oh, that was good.”

Regardless, University administrators expressed delight that they could now transform Princeton into virtual space and blame it on the over-enrollment.

“It’s a new toy! Buy me another, Shirley!” University Provost and Coursera aficionado Christopher Eisgruber ’83 said. “I want a robot!”