Univirtual

Popping the college bubble with electronics:

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.

In a sense, this is merely the progression of public education. It was only three generations ago that the majority of Americans made due with at most a middle-school education. And those were the lucky ones. The foibles of modern state-run education notwithstanding, the average American is still far better educated than his great-grandfather.

As a capitalist I believe in competition, and the big universities in this country have been able to monopolize higher education for many years, effectively removing competition in favor of political collusion. The big downside to that monopoly is that many of the most zealous left-wing evangelists have been able to infiltrate the system and twist it to their own nefarious uses. Hence, we have children coming out of those institutions who are ardent believers in socialism... after their parents footed a quarter-million dollar bill to put them through it.

The "normalization" of collegiate education will naturally dumb down the content in order to be more accessible to a wider audience, but it will also have the effect of marketizing it, which tends to remove political and social bias in favor of economic reality -- and that's never a bad thing. Bring on the basket-weaving webinars.