Colleges! Are They Going the Way of the Dinosaurs?
The Washington Post today has an amazing story today. It starts as follows "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. ...The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive."
The article then goes on to say that market forces are such that online classes, which are far less expensive than brick and mortar buildings, are going to become the model for future higher education.
The implications, if this comes to pass, are enormous. While the writer predicts that prestige universities will continue, online classes will be the norm and most colleges will disappear. "The new model of college will separate "the class" from "the college" as more and more web sites make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities. Academic jobs will steadily vanish as "the typical 2030 faculty" becomes "a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar."
It's difficult to envision change this vast. But that does not mean it will not come to pass. If you would like to delve further into this idea, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/11/AR2009091104312.html
