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 can't survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are simply cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology has just hit its stride after years of glitchy videoconferences, and it will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree -- much like the news business in 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "Phoenix U" joke.
It is hard to predict the precise pace of change, but it's possible that within 15 years most college credits will come from classes taken online. In 2007, nearly 4 million students took at least one online course, and the numbers are growing. Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student. The Ivys will be much less affected than the middle tier and local schools. But colleges that depend on tuition and have no special brand will be hit hard. The recession will accelerate this trend as students become warier of taking on loans and state schools experiment after funding cuts.
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.
A model based on scarcity
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 slightly different promises: degree programs that provide access to brilliant minds, training in the art of thinking and, ultimately, better jobs. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere.More from MSN Money and The Big Money
But the demand for college isn't just about the yearning to learn; it's also motivated by the hope of getting a degree. Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of Ph.D. students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, ask the instructors to work from home and assume that they will rely on shared syllabi instead of always developing their own. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition, and even before the recession, there was substantial evidence of unmet demand for cheaper college degrees. Of the students who drop out -- and bear in mind that half of all students never graduate -- many cite money as a major reason.
Online degrees are relatively inexpensive. (The in-state online "undergraduate completion" degree offered by the East Carolina University costs only $99 per credit hour; that's a base of $1,200 a year.) And the price will only dive in coming decades as more universities compete and entrepreneurial colleges remix online material and match it with online instruction by poorly paid graduate students and part-time instructors. Cost drives choice: A recent survey suggests that college cost is one of the top factors determining which schools students choose to attend.
Separating 'class' from 'college'
You can already see significant innovation in online education in some community colleges and for-profit institutions. The community colleges are working with limited resources to maximize their offerings through Internet aggregation. For-profit institutions appear to be capitalizing on the high demand for low-cost degrees and the fact that few public schools do much traditional marketing. (In researching this essay I signed up for a handful of online degree programs and have been hounded for the past three months by college marketers trying to persuade me that I really want that engineering degree at Devry University. Monroe College, meanwhile, is well-known to New York City commuters thanks to glossy ads plastered on many subway cars.)
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These entrepreneurs are a little like the early online news-sharers -- a blend of bloggers and listserv members, profit-seekers, tinkerers. Just like the new model of news separated "the article" from "the newspaper," the new model of college also will separate "the class" from "the college." Already, many degrees allow you to pay for each credit as you take it. Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead of in bulk -- just as news, once read in one sitting, is now read article by article.
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