Anya Kamenetz explains why cash-strapped colleges need to stop worrying and learn to love the online classroom:
For most of the thousand years or so since it was invented, a university education was thought to be suited for only a tiny group — a ruling class or a subculture of scholars. Today, nine out of 10 American high school seniors say they want to go to college. Since World War II, this country has turned higher education into not only a mass-market product but the best hope of achieving a middle-class income. Sending your kids to college is now part of the American dream, just like homeownership. And like homeownership, it’s something for which we have been willing to go deeply into hock.
Faith in the universal power of higher learning is at the heart of modernity. From enhancing our basic humanity to preserving culture, from developing our economy and technology to redressing ills like global warming and AIDS, there are very few needs for which more education has not been prescribed. As H.G. Wells famously put it, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”