Bureaucracy is the real threat to universities not online competition. University's need to maintain a solid reputation, but faking the reputation game has become so common that most University's are ridiculously inefficient.<p>Consider, Why would you care if your English professor published anything? With that said, a lot of waste seems really important to the people designing budgets so they have issues dealing with leaner institutions.
I wonder how much this will happen? It seems that qualifications from cheaper institutions are always valued lower than those from more prestigious and expensive ones. I doubt that this is entirely due to the more prestigious universities having harder course content.<p>In the UK there seems to be a strong correlation between how valuable a degree from an institution is perceived and how many "posh people" attend a particular institution.<p>I've often wondered how often "we want somebody with a degree" actually means "We want somebody from a particular social class".
The labour government's answer to this was the ensure that more young people got a university education from across that social spectrum but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the employment figures of young people.
Good. Having gone to a very well regarded university in the UK in my time, the attitude of a lot of the academics regarding teaching undergraduates was not just poor but offensively so, and the institutional complacency was staggering. At the same time, there was a relatively small but exceptionally hard-working and dedicated set who clearly worked hard on their presentation for lectures etc. and who clearly made a real effort to support the undergrads.<p>Today, undergraduates pay thousands of pounds per year for the "privilege" of that kind of education, and the UK hasn't developed the culture of some other countries that have always had expensive education systems in terms of employers recognising the debts students have taken on and paying compensation accordingly. Indeed, with something like half of young people now being pushed into a higher education system that used to train perhaps the top 5-10% academically of the year group, a lot of kids are graduating and finding their degree still won't stop them literally stacking shelves or making telesales calls for a living.<p>If someone can take advantage of modern technologies so that all people at that stage in their education could benefit from the kind of hard-working and gifted teachers I mentioned, at a fraction of the cost, and without putting up with the arrogant, patronising or simply lazy attitudes of probably the majority of academics who wind up teaching them, then the kind of university that can only offer the latter deserves to die, while the services that provide a better education and the good people behind them deserve to flourish.