Via Instapundit and The American Interest:
In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
The End of the University as We Know It – Nathan Harden – The American Interest Magazine
Points:
- “Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes.”
- “…the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.”
- “…students themselves are in for a golden age, characterized by near-universal access to the highest quality teaching and scholarship at a minimal cost.”
- “…big-budget universities carrying large transactional costs stand to lose the most. Smaller, more nimble institutions with sound leadership will do best.”
- “…the primary platform for higher education may be a third-party website, not the university itself.”
- “Students can learn as much from their peers in informal settings as they do from their professors in formal ones.”
- “Creating the world’s premier, credentialed open online education platform would be a major achievement for any university, and it would probably cost much less than building a new luxury dorm.”