Thirty years from now, big university campuses will be “relics.”
That was the management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction in 1997. Over a decade later, notes the online-education consultant John Sener, the demise-of-the-university arguments keep piling up.
The latest, “A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges,” was published on Sunday in The Washington Post. In it, Zephyr Teachout argued that kids heading off to college this year might be part of the last generation for which that means the traditional experience of dorm rooms and tenured professors.
“Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering,” wrote Ms. Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham University. “Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.”
Ms. Teachout describes the “real force for change” as the market, arguing that online classes cost less to produce and distance-education technology will continue to improve.
Her argument drew a quick rebuttal from Mr. Sener, director of special initiatives for the Sloan Consortium.
“Anybody who believes that universities are going to become relics in another 18 years needs to go next weekend and chill out at a tailgate party,” Mr. Sener told The Chronicle in a brief interview on Monday.
Mr. Sener’s take is that Ms. Teachout and similar commentators don’t grasp that education “is a complex system animated and sustained by a variety of important competing forces,” a system that “operates fundamentally differently from business.”
The consultant sent an e-mail message to a Sloan Consortium listserv tallying up the procession of similar brink-of-demise or radical-transformation predictions since Mr. Drucker’s 1989 book The New Realities. The pace seems to be accelerating this year, he pointed out, noting David Wiley’s remark that universities “will be irrelevant by 2020” and Kevin Carey’s earlier use of the newspaper analogy.
Laurie Fendrich weighed in with her take, “The Dystopia of Distance Learning,” on The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog on Sunday. What’s your opinion? Are these arguments reality or hype?