The role of the information gatekeeper isn’t what it used to be. There’s a diminished role of authority regulating the flow of information and deciding what content passes forward —and anyone can be a mass-communicating producer and consumer of content.

Every industry and institution that functions as an information provider is facing more competition than ever before.

In some ways, the same forces driving newspapers and more isolated cases of traditional media bankrupt threaten the university model.

An April commentary article in the Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out that universities have a weakness with large, low-level undergraduate classes. An increasing number of online classes from for-profit groups threatens that revenue source.

The author cited the regulatory wall of college accreditation to bar competition, but private sector competition to the university environment is on a growth trend — more students than ever take classes with for-profit institutions like Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix.

A 2008 study by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation found that 22 percent of American college students took at least one online class in the fall 2007 semester.

Compare this to the readership of Time Magazine online versus in print: clearly, the magazine’s business side would prefer print readers, since they are more profitable for advertisers. This is similar to the financial stake universities may begin to have in in-person classes, should variable rates for online classes become the norm (ASU recently changed its policy on distance learning rates).

As article author Kevin Carey of the think tank Education sector writes, “… it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever.”
As tuition regularly outpaces inflation, students have more incentives to find cheaper alternatives to university classes.

In my experience, and what I think is the norm, online classes are for convenience and in-person classes are for substance.

But this could easily change, especially because technology is making it easier to replicate the bricks-and-mortar learning environment.

Moore’s law says that a unit of processing power cuts its price in half every 18 months — it’s not a stretch to think that in 10 years, any classroom environment, even lab-type environments, could be cheaply replicated in a virtual online setting.

While competition has a tendency to make products better, it would be an enormous loss for American universities to lose financial soundness from an emergence of cheap online education.

Print media failed to adapt in time for the Internet. Recording labels failed to jump onboard the file-sharing phenomenon, such as when they chose to sue rather than embrace Napster and sent millions of people to illegal downloading services.

It seems unlikely that universities will be hit as hard as comparable stakeholders by the explosion of free and cheap online content, but it’s not unthinkable.

ASU, like most other universities, is right to embrace online education and continue to emphasize the University’s hybrid and web-only classes. As with any field, online is the future for education.

But universities should be wary of the Internet’s tendency to kill business models — newspapers, recording labels and soon maybe the rest of traditional media demonstrate that lesson.

Reach Matt at
matt.culbertson@asu.edu