My cover story, “The End of the University As We Know It,” is out in the latest issue of The American Interest. In the article, I consider the disruptive impact of technology and the enormous changes coming to the business of higher ed.
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 real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.
Read the full article here.
In 1981, I wrote an article entitled “The Dismantling of Higher Education” (Improving College and University Teaching, Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 1981, pages 55-69) suggesting unbundling the five functions of higher education.
In 2008, I published another article ith a similar analysis, “The Restructuring of Legal Education,” 17 The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 331 (2008). Although the article discusses legal education, the principles apply to higher education generally. A subtheme of the article is the use of technology and distance education. Below is the abstract of my 2008 article.
ABSTRACT
Currently, law schools tie together five quite distinct services in one
package, offered to a limited number of students. These five functions are: (1) impartation of knowledge, (2) counseling/placement, (3) credentialing (awarding grades and degrees), (4) coercion, and (5) club membership. Students do not have the opportunity to pay for just the services they want, or to buy each of the five services from different providers.
This article proposes an “unbundled” system in which the five
services presently performed by law schools would be rendered by many different kinds of organizations, each specializing in only one function or an aspect of one function. Unbundling of legal education along functional lines would substantially increase student options and dramatically increase competition and innovation by service providers. This offers the hope of making available more individualized and better instruction and giving students remarkable freedom of choice as to courses, schedules, work-pace, instructional media, place of residence, and site of learning. Most importantly, this improved education would be available on an “open admissions” basis at much lower cost to many more
individuals throughout the nation, or even the world.
In order to explain how to restructure the existing law school system, this article will discuss the five educational services presently performed by law schools, the disadvantages of tying these services together, a hypothetical unbundled world of legal education, the advantages of the unbundled system, answers to some possible objections to the system, and some recent developments in the use of technology and distance learning in law schools.
The main theme of this article is the advantage of unbundling. A
more modest sub-theme is the benefit of use of technology and distance learning.