Bloomberg BusinessWeek features 11 colleges that offer students free education. Some are highly specialized. Two caught my eye as opposite ends of the spectrum.

Deep Springs College is an all-male liberal arts college located in a remote desert area of Big Pine, Calif with a focus on academics, labor, and self-governance. Reading their alumni news page is a fascinating look at Cultural Creatives values. If your vision of Deep Springs College grads is newly-minted hippies doing yoga in the desert, read on.

The big story is the BusinessWeek story is progress at Israeli Shai Rashef’s University of the People, the world’s first global tuition-free online university.

Backed by the UN and top academics from Columbia University and New York University, the online university is fully operational, with 300 students, an expanding curriculum and an evolving relationship with Yale University.

Monica Yunus and her father Dr. Muhammad Yunu I’m totally devoted to Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank’s micro-lending program. Sitting in New York front row seat a month ago, listening to Dr. Yunus tell the inspiring history of microfinance from Bangdalesh to Omaha, I had no idea that his daughter Monica Yunus is an opera singer with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Monica Yunus was born in 1979 in Chittagong, Bangladesh to Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus and his then wife, Vera Forostenko. Yunus has one younger half-sister, Dina Yunus. Yunus’ parents met in 1967 while attending Vanderbilt University. They were married in 1970. Yunus’ parents’ marriage ended within months of her birth, and Forostenko returned with Monica to the United States claiming that Bangladesh was not a good place to raise a baby. Forostenko is the daughter of Russian immigrants to Trenton, New Jersey, United States and she returned with Monica to live with them. via Wikipedia

Listening to Monica Yunus for two minutes leaves me emotionally breathless.