The country's higher education system seems ripe for tech industry disruption. Student debt is out of control. Graduation rates are unacceptably low. And employers still can't find enough new recruits with the training they're looking for.

Enter online learning. Specifically, Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have been heralded as a savior for students disadvantaged by an inefficient, often rigid, and increasingly pricey higher ed system. The cost advantage of recording one lecture and broadcasting it to thousands of students regardless of location is undeniable.

And the potential social benefits are huge. Andrew Ng, founder of leading MOOC-maker Coursera, said in a recent interview with Fortune he hopes the flexibility and practicality of free courses on-demand will make "a great education a fundamental human right."

There's plenty of interest so far: Coursera has more than 80 universities and other institutions offering courses on its platform, broadcasting to millions of students. The top three MOOC-makers -- Coursera, Udacity, and EdX -- all appear on the cusp of convincing major institutions to offer some of their courses for credit. Cue many, many articles expressing deep angst that the traditional on-campus learning environment as we know it could cease to exist.

But all that fretting may be premature: The MOOC business model seems to have a few issues of its own. Take, for example, a recent competition put on by Boston consultancy Fuld & Company, in which business school students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Dartmouth College, and Northwestern University staged a "war game" between the education world's power-players du jour. The winner of the $5,000 grand prize was the team that presented the best plan for the future of higher education, and the best strategy to make money from it. Coursera, despite being easily the sexiest company at the competition, did not take home the grand prize.

The problem: the business model. "Wondering how they could monetize this technology, that was a big concern," says Fuld & Co. founder and president Leonard Fuld. The team proposed providing a variety of online courses, and then making money by charging universities. They likened themselves to Netflix, spreading a small amount of high-quality, specialized content to a large subscriber base.

Coursera is planning to charge universities licensing fees (with some of the revenue going back to the original school that created the content). Right now, though, the bulk of the company's revenue comes through selling verified completion certificates. The program, called Signature Track, allows users to pay a fee in order to verify their identities. The company announced in September that it brought in more than $1 million since starting to offer the service nine months earlier.