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I only skimmed this article, but I don't see how this argument works. US "academia" (in the sense of the top handful of universities in any given field) isn't supported by student tuition in any meaningful way. It's supported mostly by government grants to the science departments and by alumni giving (typically buffered by a large endowment foundation) to make up the slack. Only schools with no graduate programs (i.e. pretty much "not academia" by typical definition) need to get by on tuition.

US academic institutions are dominant because they have more money (largely because of historical government policy), not because of any monopoly position enjoyed over the students. I can certainly see European or Asian institutions taking over this lead, but certainly not because students want to attend "MOOCs". If you want a top-tier university go and buy one.

That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recent years (as those grants have fallen) tuition/fees. If we decide that we don't really need to educate people that way anymore, then the University of California system should be much smaller (if it still exists at all), and those researchers are going to have to find somewhere else to research, or leave research and do something else.

If that happened, California could take the money they aren't spending on the UC system anymore, and decide just to fund research directly, setting up a state research institution that isn't a university. Maybe they will; I have no idea.

Makes sense. Though again, that's not exactly breaking the back of an existing monopoly. Frankly if you wanted to do direct research funding the obvious mechanism would be just to increase the direct grants paid right now, which are going to existing university faculty.

I think you and the grandparent both seem to be arguing that "removing the undergraduates and sending them to MOOCs" will somehow change the character of the way "academia" works, and that's what I just don't see. Undergraduates are a side project at these schools -- as mentioned, they don't provide meaningful funding (tuition breaks even at best). And at most, they provide a cheap labor pool for the research programs. Take them away and you'd never notice the difference.

I expect the top tier schools will see their positions strengthened while everyone else sees the bottom fall out from underneath them. There are private schools that, rather than having a big endowment, have large amounts of debt which require revenue growth to service.

"If you want a top-tier university go and buy one"

You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci...

$10 billion endowment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204482....

Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.

Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.

But there are other data points. Stanford's rise to prominence in the 1960's (people forget that for quite some time it was a tiny college with no notoriety at all) was driven by almost exactly this kind of thing: they came into a huge endowment and embarked on an affirmative program to recruit top-tier talent in a big list of fields. And it worked.

Obviously details matter. A university in Riyadh is going to be disadvantaged vs. one in Palo Alto, but the idea that professors can be encouraged to move by big paychecks shouldn't be controversial.

NYU has been been buying its way up the reputation ladder for the past 15 years.

They just bought Caltech's president.

I hope this doesn't come across as defensive, or as some form of national pride ... but I'm not sure I agree. If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more education to more people, then the lower cost of obtaining said education should produce more, not fewer, researchers.

Of course, if this comes to pass, then the same would be true for every country with ubiquitous access to the internet. In such a case, the proverbial rising tide would lift all boats equally :)

  > If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more
  > education to more people

It won't. It surely can make more education to be available to more people, but at the end there will be less people willing to use that oppurtunity.

Bold statement that has been proven wrong already. Khanacademy is a point against decreasing "willingness", as is Coursera. Most of their participants would not otherwise attend a formal course, either because of cost, living circumstances or some other factor. In fact, the "poaching" of students from traditional venues is limited.

Even if they do succeed in that goal, I'm not sure the result of more researchers follows. Most of what they're targeting is replacing bachelor-level education, for one thing, not PhD-level. But more importantly, research is currently more constrained by funding and positions than availability of researchers. When either a university or Microsoft Research opens a position, they get hundreds of applicants. Even for postdoc jobs there are many more researchers than jobs. If several physics departments have to close, thousands of new students who've successfully taken physics MOOCs isn't going to make up for the closure of those research labs, from the perspective of progress in physics.

It's possible something else could replace those physics labs. Maybe Microsoft Research and similar non-academic labs will get larger, and expand out of computer science, more like the old Bell Labs? The U.S. could decide, alternately, that funding research is a priority, but doing it via hybrid educational/research institutions (the classic "research university") isn't going to work anymore, and choose to fund research-only institutions, e.g. bring the national labs back to the forefront. That's plausible, but I'm not sure there's political support for it.

I think currently it really comes down to the type of person enrolled in a MOOC. MOOC's certainly lower the barrier to accessing top level educational material, however that helps the people enrolled in them minimally if they are not motivated to fully take advantage. The comment made about MOOC's not having the same effect on people because they have no tuition is partially valid because of this.

My point is that with our current culture surrounding education, I don't believe that MOOCS will be powerful enough to topple academia. People just simply don't care enough about their education in America. I think that MOOCs would probably be much more effective in other countries, where education is not taken for granted.

However as time passes, and the culture around education shifts in the US, perhaps people would be more inclined to use MOOCS to their fullest potential.

"As least in Scandinavia, we don't feel MOOCs are a huge threat to us, because there is no tuition, so there is no real financial reason for students to prefer MOOCs."

At least the best Stanford MOOCs, Machine Learning and Databases, were taught much better, and the material and exercises were much more carefully planned, than most of what I'd expect at least in any university in Finland.

Now, I hear Coursera has also some bad quality MOOCs, but as long as the very best courses by the very best lecturers can be offered to the whole world as MOOCs, their better quality should be a strong reason the prefer them over some mediocre course in a local uni.

American non-academic here. Frankly, it would be absurd for this plan to fail.