Imagine growing up at some random place in the world. Maybe not the best place ever. Say, at a place where schools have so little money that you attend your elementary school from 6 am to 12 pm. Simply because there are not enough classrooms, and another group of students attends from 12 pm to 6 pm.

You do take advantage of the education that is given to you. And you are grateful for that. But understandably, it’s limited. After graduation, your family and friends expect you to work full time as a street vendor. But then you learn about an alternative. A global school that is willing to mentor you and give you the education you lack.

They give you a cheap computer. They get you a high-speed internet connection. They help you set everything up. Then you join the school's online classes with live interactive instruction.

After a couple of months, you are employable in the internet economy. You get a part-time job conducted over the internet. It pays way better than that full-time street vendor job. For the first time, you can pay for your own living expenses.

But you don’t stop there. The school has lots of other classes to offer. It provides mentorship and guidance. And helps you make the best use of educational resources that are available on the internet either free of charge or for a small fee.

In this way, you acquire pre-college, college, and masters' level education. You learn about advanced technologies and state-of-the-art methods. When you talk to graduates from Stanford, you realize you know at least as much as they do. They wonder how you learned so much without having to pay any expensive tuition. Sure, you promised to pay your school back later on, but you are happy to do that. It's not a large amount. Besides, you don't have to pay if your income isn't high enough, so there is no risk involved.

Many of your classmates took industry or government jobs. But you decided to be an academic researcher. Now you analyze data collected from wearables and from the cheap, non-disturbing implanted sensors that your group invented last year. Your goal is to build a predictive model of heart attacks. You spend an enormous amount of time on this. But your model doesn't work well.

Then you realize you had a stupid bug in your code. You just didn't properly read the documentation of the specialized open-source software library you were using. You fix the bug, and let your model train overnight using your data. When you wake up, you find that your model can predict myocardial infarction with a high precision and a recall rate of 94% an hour before any first symptoms appear. You understand that this should be enough to bring the survival rate from 90% all the way up to 99%. The following night you don't sleep. You work for 24 hours straight to double-check your results, finish your paper and get the word out. You know how much it matters.

Now imagine again growing up at the very same place. Everything is the same. Except that there is no such school. What do you see? Think about it.