Academic

Sunday?s Washington Post featured an article about how undergraduate education was ?on the verge of a radical reordering,? spurred by the Internet and innovation in online education.   Certainly not a new topic, but the article comes with some pretty dire warnings about the future of university education.  According to the article, the fact that online classes are cheaper to produce coupled with the growing demand for low cost degrees has endangered the current university structure and decreased the likelihood that the business model on which U.S. colleges have relied will survive over the next several decades.   This has a variety of repercussions not only for the manner in which students learn and earn a degree, but also for the manner in which academic institutions are structured.   To this end, the article analogized the impact of the Internet on university education to such impact on the newspaper industry, noting ?Just as the new model of news separated ?the article? from ?the newspaper,? the new model of college will separate ?the class? from ?the college.?  The article further noted that similar to the manner in which new Internet efficiencies reduce the need for a large number of foreign correspondents who report on the same events, such efficiencies will make it harder to justify ?built-in redundancies? at the university level such as hundreds of professors teaching the same class on a given day.  And this change will inevitably lead to fewer researchers and professors, and a significant restructuring of university faculties.  In fact, the article predicts that ?the typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.?  While there may be advantages to online education, this prediction paints a pretty disturbing picture of the future of university education.

So what is the likelihood that the picture will materialize? For me, the article raises at least three issues that impact on this and other questions for higher education.  First, can such a shift in the educational area actually occur given the skepticism among employers and others regarding the quality and value of online degrees?  On this point, the article acknowledges this skepticism, but notes that elements are in place to alter that skepticism, including the fact that major universities have begun to offer online courses, and the fact that the current generation of students is more comfortable with online education.  Then too, economic pressures on some colleges, particularly community colleges and state institutions, may force them to rely on the less expensive alternatives that online courses and degrees present.  From this perspective, it seems possible that practical and economic factors could combine to make online education more common for even major institutions and hence more acceptable.

Second, will these trends be universal, or are they likely only to impact a select group of colleges and universities?  On this point, the article notes, ?like the New York Times, the elite schools play a unique role in our society, and so they can probably persist with elements of their old revenue model longer than their lesser-known competitors.?   But the article goes on to say, ?within the next 40 years, the majority of brick-and-mortar universities will probably find partnerships with other kinds of services, or close their doors.?  Hence, the prediction is that market forces will pressure most universities to get into the online business in some fashion, suggesting that the trend will be, if not universal, certainly a far-reaching phenomenon.

Third, will this trend reach the graduate school level? That is, can we expect law schools to be a part of the ?radical reordering? of educational services?  On the one hand, perhaps the style of law school education, with its reliance on the Socratic method and other modes of interactive classroom discussions, is not well-suited to online instruction and hence not prone to the same type of redundancies found at the college level.  On the other hand, not everyone relies on such teaching styles, while some even major law schools have experimented with forms of online courses and distance learning programs.  Indeed, law schools are not immune to the economic and other pressures that make offering these kinds of programs a good idea, while some may view reliance on the Internet (at least for some courses) as a positive development.  Hence, the concept of enhanced online courses in the law school setting is not entirely far-fetched.  In this respect, if the Washington Post article is accurate in its predictions, perhaps the real question is whether we should consider the law school teaching model as one that plays a ?unique role in our society,? and thus can probably persist largely intact, or if market forces will endanger the majority of brick and mortar law schools similar to their undergraduate counterparts?