The future of college education

Online delivery.

We can now shop online, get a taxi on our phone, etc.

CD stores are now difficult to find, because internet delivery is just so cheap and convenient. 

If there is a way to use internet-based, satellite, or wireless communication technology, it will happen, and walking physically into a store or hailing a cab on the curb in the rain--it's not necessary anymore.

Clearly, this is already happening with online education.

Unbundling or disaggregation. 

Airlines used to fly the planes, clean them, fix them, and make and serve the food. 

Now they just fly the planes. The cleaning, repair, and food are all done by other companies.

(Examples could be multiplied.)

Why should the same vendor sell you courses, pay your teacher, offer you tutoring, counsel you to graduation, prepare you food, rent you a room?

Universities are already using content from other universities. How long before students buy data services from one school, get tutoring online, do some things face-to-face, etc.--cafeteria style?

Outsourcing.

X-rays are analyzed overseas. Call centers moved there long ago. Programmers can be hired for pennies on the dollar. Etc.

Does your professor need to be within ten square miles of you? Of course not.

Professional Saturation.

The need for lawyers has hit an end. Law school graduates now do temp work.

Ph.D.'s can't find teaching jobs: there are too many Ph.D.'s for every job.

We've made too many professionals. Demand didn't keep up.

Implications?

Only the first of these is really hitting hard. But the others are sure to follow. 

What happens to those industries that are shaken up by online, unbundling, and outsourcing?

Tower Records? Gone. Barnes and Noble? Hanging on by a thread.

Airline companies? Bankrupt and merging, except for the carriers with the lowest prices and the least overhead. 

Professions lose their mystique when a degree doesn't get you a job.

Presumably, this will happen to education, too.

Colleges will close. Not the most elite. Likely not the cheapest. We will end up with the top 50 or 100 colleges, and then community colleges and for-profit colleges in strip malls (because of convenience). 

It's not pretty.

Will the new educational order be worse or better?

Do you enjoy downloading music and videos? I bet you do. 

Have you enjoyed a plane trip lately? I doubt it. Is the food on planes better? Yes. Is their crash rate lower? Yes. On-time performance? I doubt it. (I admit I haven't checked.) 

Do you enjoy calling a call center for support? I didn't think so.

It seems inevitable. Maybe I'm wrong. But powerful forces break up industries very rapidly.

To mix metaphors, higher ed is on life support.

Additionally, .and in a tech bubble you can get away with a lot of wishful thinking.  For example, you can convince yourself that taking free online classes can replace the experience of a brick-and-mortar university.  There are a lot of entry-level programming jobs out there that pay pretty well, and if you can talk your way through an interview based on the time you've spent at Coursera, well, who needs that degree, right?

But bubbles eventually pop and programmers get laid off.  Now there aren't nearly so many entry level jobs, and that's when the four-year degree starts paying off.  You've had four years to network with a much larger (and much more diverse) group of people, including professors.  Those people remember you and remember how you stood out.  And if you're on the market, they might know somebody who knows somebody and pass your name along.

You don't get anything like that in online courses.

When you're interviewing, now letters of recommendation start to matter.  Sure, you did pretty well with your last job, but maybe you were only there a year and maybe your supervisor wasn't giving you very difficult work.  If you're up against someone with a four-year degree they may be in the same boat with their industry LOR, but they still have a couple of professors writing letters for them, and the professors can can compare them to hundreds or thousands of other students they've known.  Maybe you've taken every course on compilers that EdX offers.  You might be up against the person who camped out in their prof's office hours trying to bolt a C++ compiler onto their C compiler assignment.  Sure, it never worked, but it's a great story and their professor will tell it well. 

So what's the future of college education?  Fewer tenure lines, more vocational classes, and a model that will continue to work well into the foreseeable future.