If Bill Gates Jr. hadn’t dropped out of Harvard, he might not be the richest person in the world, but he might have a better understanding of higher education.

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Froma Harrop, a syndicated columnist in the Seattle Times recently quoted Mr. Gates as saying that, “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.” Ms. Harrop goes on to quote the Microsoft founder telling us that a “year at a university costs an average of $50,000” while “The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.”

Rich people, like professional athletes and movie stars, are often mistaken for experts on things they know nothing about, which can lead to various kinds of confusion for folks who depend on talk shows and newspaper columns for their take on the world. Here at the blog, we try not to pronounce on internal medicine or home repair, so it kind of rubs us the wrong way when software billionaires act like they know everything about higher education.

You don’t have to wait five years to find the best lectures in the world on the Web, you can probably find most of them right now on You Tube. And while that’s great, it’s not all that earthshaking. There was a library in Timbuktu before the Egyptians were out of short pants and academics have been going the extra mile to make knowledge widely available for a long time. Advances in technology have made information much more easily and readily available (a few keystrokes in your pajamas at 2 a.m. is a lot easier than trudging to the library to thumb through thousands of books and journals), but they have not fundamentally changed the process of learning. The Web may deliver information, but it doesn’t deliver education. Teachers do that.

So when Bill Jr. tries to tell you that a Web education for $2,000 is a bargain, he’s really overcharging you. In a healthy democracy, knowledge should be available to everyone and it should be free.

College professors have been putting syllabi and course materials online for free ever since there’s been a web, long before the for-profit crowd started commodifying and selling them. And, unlike those on the corporate circuit with their agents and their fees, we’re likely to give a free lecture anywhere three or more people gather.

But what we won’t do is give people college credit or a degree just for reading around in the on-line library. The reason why corporate education subsidiaries can turn a big profit by charging you only a couple grand for stuff you should get for free is that they cut out the cost of those pesky qualified teachers.

The next time the Gates Foundation or the Lumina Foundation or Phoenix University or iTunes U tries to tell you that online degrees are just as good if not better than real college, ask yourself if Bill Gates’s kids are going to attend any of those “colleges.”

And it might be that shopping for college for those kids is what’s confused Mr. Gates into thinking that a year of college costs $50,000. Fifty grand buys you a year at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or almost any other fancy private college. To attend a public university in Washington is more like $6,000 or $7,000 a year.

Public state universities give regular folks access to some of the same opportunities that the children of billionaires get. Microsoft’s offices in Redmond and Bellevue and Seattle have hundreds of degrees from Washington’s public universities hanging on their walls—probably not so many from WEB U.