What will be the long term impact of the Covid-triggered online-ification of education on the HE sector? My hypothesis is that a useful parallel can be found in what happened to artisanal shoemaking after the rise of factories. Over a long enough time line ...

... once enough lecture content has been captured in video form to enable an enterprising enough business to identify the best “standard versions” for each topic, acquire the relevant IP rights to it, and start selling the respective educational product on a large enough scale to

be able to drive the prices down, the majority of traditional HE institutions that still operate on the basis of a model essentially comparable to traditional bespoke shoemaking will be driven to the verge of bankruptcy.

Even when face-to-face course delivery once again becomes a possibility, the market pressure coming from the online model will do the same thing to the HE sector that shoe factories with their mass production lines did to traditional / artisanal shoemaking. A handful ...

will be able to survive, through luck or thanks to their stellar reputations. They will be able to keep their old ways and continue with the bespoke format, although subject to a significant narrowing of the product range. The rest will have to adopt the disruptive practices of

the new sector leader. In time, new hierarchies and taxonomies will emerge. At the bottom will be found institutions playing the role equivalent to that performed today by Timspons and other local cobbler-style one-stop shops.

At the next level there will be the Timberlands and the Eccos - purveyors of relatively affordable but totally non-individualised products - and their imitators. And at the top there will be the John Lobbs and the Edward Greens: still some remnants of a bespoke (face to face)

education format but hugely expensive and with an inflexibly backward-looking philosophy aka “taking pride in keeping the tradition alive” (read: the structure of our product line, the materials we use, etc. can never change).