Universities need to wise up – or risk being consigned to history

I feel that there will always be a place for the university - the original need, to connect students with teachers, is a powerful one. The question is in what form this need is met, and it will determine which universities live or die. We have proven that to some extent computing infrastructure is able to shoulder some of the heavy load of education and instruction. Therefore, I predict that in-person universities will become places of human connection and specific, personalized learning.

The basic building blocks, such as libraries and lecture halls, will be significantly transformed into collaborative, social, and study spaces better suited to the needs of connected students. In-university research might be supplanted with cross-university collaboration in shared labs and spaces, with traditional office needs largely being met by computers. The university probably isn't going away any time soon, but I feel like the relationships inside of it are going to be significantly rewired.

I’m all for the demise of universities, at least the modern American incarnation of them. They’ve become ideological monocultures and echo chambers that are aggressively hostile to any sort of diversity of thought. They seek diversity in skin deep ways, and will accept you as long as you give up your deeper diversity and adopt their way. They are a threat to intellectual culture not a bastion of it, and the article’s implication that their reduced role in “intellectual inquiry” is a problem doesn’t make sense to me.

Leaving that aside, on more practical matters, they simply don’t provide value. I find their alleged role in developing critical thinkers to be minimal and for my earlier reasons above, they may even be working against that interest. So if they aren’t doing that then surely they provide value in a more obvious manner - but most students study degrees that have no value, which is clear because no one is willing to pay for their skill set in those fields when they enter the workforce. And with everyone being encouraged to go to college, it is increasingly a poor differentiating signal for talent.

Tack on massive expenses for their bloated administrations and I see no purpose except for college except to be a fun social environment that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. Surely we can achieve that through other means. As the article mentions , most of college material can be learned virtually or even in self directed ways at significantly lower cost. All we need in terms of centralization is certification (testing of knowledge). I would like to instead see us do more with community colleges and trade schools, and do more by way of choice in education broadly - whether K-12 or higher education. The current model needs to die a swifter death.