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I think what my colleague at NYU's Stern School means to say is that the future of college LABOR is cheaper. This will not necessarily translate into tuition savings for students. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/opinion/online-college-coronavirus.html#click=https://t.co/mOU5QEBr25
College faculty have never been more productive, and we're already reaching larger and larger class sizes than ever before, online and offline. Our wages have effectively been frozen for decades and both the absolute and relative numbers of tenured faculty have declined.
These developments coincided with rapid increases in tuition, far beyond those justified by inflation (and certainly not the death-spiral of the cost of academic labor). Why would online education change either trend?
On the other hand, the industry's dirty secret is that people don't pay top dollar to universities for education, they pay for the experience. The experience that online education can't provide. It's like weddings: we could all skip the ceremony and go to City Hall. Why don't we?
Take recommendations. With grade inflation, a substantive recommendation is worth its weight in gold these days to prospective employers. What happens in "the future of college" when there are 20K students per professor and the experience is entirely mediated by technology?
More critically, with the erosion of tenure, the value of scholarship is now in doubt. Research is critical to every level of review for all tenured faculty, but for most adjuncts and non- tenured faculty, research is an unaffordable luxury.
What happens when tenure becomes extinct, as it inevitably will? Research is already secondary to the modern university's mission, and with tenure's extinction there will be absolutely no impetus to engage in it or even keep up with the innovations happening elsewhere.
That means that faculty have no incentive to grow as scholars or engaged in research after they cease to be students, and therefore their own learning will be restricted to that level. That is to say, their teaching will become dated from the moment they graduate.
That also puts a limitation on what their students can learn from them. Over time, they, their students, and their students' students will become increasingly frozen at a particular moment in history, not fully engaged with the innovations happening elsewhere.
In short, the "future of college" looks a lot like its past, which is to say hidebound, rigidly hierarchical, and entirely scholastic. But hey, at least scholasticism is much cheaper than innovation!
