Envisioning a Post-Campus America

MIT is set to offer a fully-automated certificate-credentialed coursework system called MITx. Therefore, 95% of tenured professors will lose their jobs, universities will cease being research centers, "civil society will have to substitute for the intense friend networks that are built at college", and we'll all use dogs to spot the Terminators.

The logic shot through this post is what I would call "Winer-ian".

When I pointed out on Twitter the extent to which funding for professors in STEM comes from grants, she said "not talking about STEM". Ok then.

This assumes you buy into the notion that college transfers actual knowledge/skills rather than just functioning as a signaling mechanism. How do you think employers are going to value Diet MIT degrees? (It totally doesn't matter to this analysis if Diet MIT is in fact a superior education.)