The end of the university II

by | Sunday, September 20, 2009

From my end of the university as we know it series, here is another article, this time from The Washington Monthly, titled College for $99 a Month: The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities. Here are some key quotes but the article is worth reading in full. [H/T Daily Dish]

[T]he day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.

Topics related to this post: Economics | Evolution | Learning | Online Learning | Teaching | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton

Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton

"un-creativity" design, invariant under rotation by 180-degrees In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Chris Bilton, Reader at the Centre for Policy Studies at University of...

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...

TPACK Newsletter #41, May 2019

TPACK Newsletter #41, May 2019

Here is the latest pdf version of the TPACK Newsletter (#41, May 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This issue includes 59 articles, 4 book chapters, and 20 dissertations that have not appeared...

Online physics-based games

Physics Games - online physics-based games. Some cool stuff here. For instance check out Demolition City Online Physics Games

Unpacking TPACK

Suzy Cox is a lecturer in educational technology and educational psychology at Utah Valley State College and also a doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (working with Dr. Charles Graham). She is currently working on her dissertation which seeks to develop a...

Election 2.0

An op-ed in today's NYTimes by William Poundstone about how the web can be used during an election to prevent election fraud. As the article describes a computer scientist and a mathematician "have proposed an ingenious method that would combine paper ballots and a...

Visualizing mathematics

I love visual proofs of mathematical theorems. One visual proof I use quite often in my design courses (CEP817 or CEP917) is a visual proof of the fact that the sum of consecutive odd numbers is a square number. In other words: 1 + 3 = 4 = 22 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 = 32 1 + 3...

TPACK is top story on eSchool News

I just discovered that TPACK made the Top Story of the Week for Educators on eSchool News! Written by Laura Devaney, Senior Editor of eSchoolNews the article is titled, TPACK explores effective ed-tech integration. It is a pretty comprehensive piece with quotes from...

Education by Design, 1 year progress report

Education by Design, 1 year progress report

"Time" 180-degree rotationalchain ambigram © Punya Mishra I have been at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College for two years now (actually two years and a month, but who is counting). In many ways this has been an incredible two years, a period of personal and...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *