The End of College

The future of higher education is online, and it’s already here.

Let’s face facts. The American higher education system isn’t fit for its purpose. It produces too many dropouts, lets degrees drag on and limits the scope of their subject matter.

There are studies to back this up. It’s been shown that not even two-fifths of enrolled students meet the four-year deadline for graduating from college. What’s more, two-thirds of them still haven’t graduated after six years.

The US census confirms this. According to the 2014 census, an incredible 35 million people over the age of 25 have dropped out of college.

And what about the skills the students were meant to learn? Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa conducted a survey of students from a diverse range of colleges in the United States. The study found that after two years of college, 45 percent of students had not advanced in fundamental disciplines. These included critical thinking, communication and analytical reasoning. Even after the full four years of college, 46 percent of the students had made no statistically significant progress.

But there’s a solution. It’s what the author calls the University of Everywhere. It’s a new way to get educated. Free online courses will be available to everyone wherever or whenever they want them, 24/7.

It’ll be much more egalitarian too. It’s not just a finishing school for the wealthy or for those burdened with big loans. There will simply be no debts because there are no overheads online.

This isn’t some crazy vision of the future. The University of Everywhere is already here.

The author himself attended an introductory series on biology by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The class had been set up by edX, an online educational organization established by MIT and Harvard University.

So if online courses are the future, what went wrong in the first place?