Higher Education: An Obituary?

[Kathianne]

Not quite, but changes are forthcoming. There's a thread or two around here where Robert thought I was dissing Khan Academy, never did. Our disagreement was centered on my part anyways, on the ages and grades affected. I still maintain that early and middle elementary students need more than online learning.

However, post-secondary? Khan may be on forefront, but others are gaining, fast. What Robert would not understand or couldn't understand, I've been reading and commenting on this phenomena for over a decade.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles...-obituary-7516

January 2013
Higher ed: an obituary
On the future of higher education in the Internet age.

The fate of American higher education has been a central concern of The New Criterion from its very first issue in September 1982.

. . .


None of what we have anatomized these thirty-odd years has gone away. If anything, the politicization of the university is worse now than it was when The New Criterion first appeared on the scene. If “the closing of the American mind” or the careers of “tenured radicals” grab fewer headlines today, it is because the realities they name have lost the luster of novelty. They are now the common, institutionalized status quo that defines university life for most of twenty million plus souls who are now matriculated in what we still describe (and with a straight face) as “higher education.”


It is not surprising that many observers despair of achieving fundamental, recuperative change in the institutions of higher education. Decades of withering criticism haven’t done much to move the needle, not least because parents still look to the credential of a BA, especially a BA from a prestigious venue, as a card of entry to the good life of the American dream.
That assumption, we believe, is about to change—is already changing. There are several sources of pressure. One has to do with the changing nature of the American dream itself: Can our society, debt-ridden as it is, continue to offer widespread material rewards to millions of college graduates?


Two related but separate issues revolve around the inner metabolism of higher education, in particular its astronomical and still escalating costs and—an even bigger reality—the wave of technological innovation that is poised to break over the entire institution of higher education like a tsunami.

. . .