Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation
for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and
listening to tenured professors. 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. … 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. …
This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of
academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of
tenure are all threatened.
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