The cost and value of a college education have been under scrutiny amid what can be crippling levels of student debt.

That's also been true in some cases for online university degrees of dubious quality and outcomes.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on one effort to create an accessible, affordable, and global university, one that's getting

attention as an online alternative.

It's part of our series, Rethinking College.

For millions of would-be students just about anywhere in the world, higher education

feels out of reach.

It is very upsetting to see how much college costs.

Too expensive or scarce. I was in the refugee camp. Even forbidden. I was trying how I did to

keep myself safe. From very different worlds, all three of these young and younger people attend or attended the University of the People, an accredited institution, nominally based in California, but fully online, with more than 150,000 students in 200 countries and territories, about 20,000 of them in the U.S.

We are the best alternative because they have no other alternative.

Shireesh founded the nonprofit in 2009, a time when the online education industry was dominated

by for-profit schools.

Technical Institute can help graduates prepare for careers.

Several were sanctioned or forced out of business for deceptive advertising and substandard

academics, but also saddled students with crippling debt.

Shira Chef himself founded and later sold an international online education firm, one not mired in controversy, he notes.

He says he wanted to use his experience to give back.

Open source technology, open educational resources,

professors who put their content on the net for the rest of the world to use for free,

and the new phenomena were people who were willing,

and especially professors, to help students with their homework for free.

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