The Brick-and-Mortar University is Obsolete

[causticus]

Yes, that's right. With (near) ubiquitous high-speed internet, every college lecture imaginable is at every internet user's fingertips; not only college lectures, but the very best of college lectures from the very best professors. For the most part, the professors and instructors we find at the vast majority of brick-and-mortar university campuses are little more than second, third and fourth hand repeaters of knowledge someone way before them and much smarter than them discovered. Why get your info through them when you can go straight to the source at just the click of a button? Much less, why pay all kinds of insane money to this middleman class of aforementioned repeaters?

The incumbent higher-ed model is a dead man walking. Sooner or later (hopefully the former) the student debt ponzi bubble is going to burst bigtime and there's going to be a lot of useless academics and administrators out on their asses. Yet there will still be the need for education and competency certification (i.e. credentialing). Displaced instructors may find a new calling as test proctors and evaluators. For all fields of study that aren't hands-on technical disciplines, students will be able to entirely learn at their own pace through books and youtube videos at. At this point their only need for a middleman will be for someone to test their knowledge regarding the discipline in question. Instructors will become more like trainers and coaches than distinguished intellectual pulpit-occupiers. If Natural Law is to properly reassert itself then knowledge-acquisition/transmission as an organized activity will once again take on a Guild-like structure. Students will be Apprentices, junior instructors and thesis-writers will be Journeymen/Associates, and professors of course will be Masters (as we can see, the existing concept of a "Masters Degree" is somewhat of a misnomer).

And for everyone else who really doesn't need to take up an intellectual discipline (i.e. the overwhelming mass majority), there shall be a return to trade schools and guild-like organizations. The 800 lb. gorilla in the room regarding the higher-ed system today is that the vast majority of enrolled students shouldn't even be there in the first place. Traditionally, intellectual attainment was an elite activity; well, because most people simply don't have the natural aptitudes to make it in those areas. Precisely because higher-ed degenerated into a money-sucking scam, the whole thing became massively dumbed down in order to accommodate the new horde of mediocre people that comprised its new customer base student body when this gigantic over-expansion really started to get out of control. So when Natural Law does once again reassert itself (gods willing), we're going to see the intellectual end of education shrink back into its proper, natural niche.

Most of academia today is useless fluff and pile of hyper-inflated makework for a professional pharisee class. It will get what's coming to it.