Universities could disappear just like the music industry or the newspaper business…

It’s the first article where I see a link between the decline of the music industry, and the coming decline of Universities.

And once you got the point, it’s clear as magic.

The idea comes from Don Tapscott and is basic: Encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels have a lot in common. They all are in the business of producing content.

Not convinced?

Here are a few numbers and facts:

• A dismal 58 percent of entering freshmen actually graduate from the same college within six years.
• More and more students are questioning the “bang for the buck” as college tuition has risen in cost more than any other good or service since 1990, leaving students with $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States alone.
• Students around the world are increasingly choosing alternative models of higher education.
• In 2007, nearly 20 percent of college students in the United States — some 3.9 million — took an online course, according to the Sloan Consortium, and their numbers are increasing. The University of Phoenix now enrolls more than 200,000 annually.
• Annual enrollment in the University of Phoenix online MBA program is 16,000 compared with 900 at Harvard.
• Given the huge explosion in MBA courses offered online, many of which are from Asia, it’s a fair guess to say that most MBA degrees today are taken online. Yet the proportion of institutions declaring that online education is critical to their long-term strategy has actually declined.
• There are more subtle indicators as well. Students and faculty alike are refusing to pay for academic periodicals and are file-swapping like it’s 1999.
• For many of the smartest students, it’s fashionable to try to get an A without going to any lectures — meaning that the cream of the crop is beginning to boycott the basic model of pedagogy.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials that universities award, along with the position of these institutions as centers of learning and research and as campuses where young people get a chance to “grow up.”

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE