Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering.
Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing
information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained
private U.S. colleges cannot survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just
cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education
entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free
options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators
have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way
students earn a degree, making the education business today look like
the news biz circa 1999.
Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling
hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next
to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on
Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters' pay is
vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different
promise — a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As
with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A
student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly
available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18-
(or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online
classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board
populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.
Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't
need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they
can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor,
and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings
translate into cheaper tuition … Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.
Just as the new model of news separated "the article" from "the
newspaper," the new model of college will separate "the class" from
"the college." Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead
of in bulk–just as news is now read article by article.
Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has
built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer
researchers and professors. … At noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are
teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to
justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101
lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States. … The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone
in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering
multiple-choice tests from afar.
Read the full article.
