Unfortunately, going to a top-tier university is not just about the classes but about the contacts you make and the “club” that you join. Have you noticed how many high government officials are from a small number of universities. They hire and promote their own.
True, but I think, eventually, there’ll be an app for that - some kind of high tech social media platform providing online students with online clubs, frats, etc, with virtual reality meet-ups from people all over the world, along with the option for off-line live meetups of folks in your own region.
Potentially that technology will provide even greater networking opportunities, as students get exposed to a much wider population of online students and can make connections all over the world ... and it’ll likely be done on a centralized platform used by all the online schools, expanding that networking opportunity even further.
The driving forces behind this change will be two-fold:
1) A tech savvy young generation already immersed in social media and having an interest, and often even a preference, for being in that kind of environment.
2) Traditional brick and mortar college, weighed down by years of leftist economic policies resulting in staggering wage and pension costs, can never compete with the online schools. It’s like what happened to Toy’s R Us when they let Amazon get a foot in the door to do their shipping, because Amazon could do that so much cheaper. Eventually, the Toy’s R Us shoppers migrated over to the Amazon site entirely, since they could get all the same things they wanted there at a much better price. So that’s what will happen to the universities.
So I think colleges are heading down the same path, as they’re under pressure to offer more and more online offerings, and have to either drive those costs down or lose students to other online only schools that offer the same courses and degrees at much cheaper prices. Hence, the traditional schools will get their Toys R Us moment where the resulting revenue decline can no longer sustain their unavoidable institutional costs, and they’ll bite the dust.