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An Avalanche is Coming

- May 14, 2013

Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone. Lehman Brothers seemed a good option for top graduates in 2007. Just a year later, it too was gone.

Right now, nothing looks more solid, more like that snow-covered mountainside, than the traditional university. … [I]t would be easy to conclude that right now we have seen the realisation, the full flowering, of the 20th century concept of the university. Indeed, the rise of universities in the developing world, often based on this western paradigm, is the ultimate endorsement – imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery. The mountainside looks solid indeed, but there are changes ‘under the surface’. They are ‘rather invisible’, but they are unmistakable. An avalanche is coming. It’s hard, of course, to say exactly when. It may be sooner than we think. Certainly there is no better time than now to seek to understand what lies ahead for higher education – and to prepare.

From the recently released Institute for Public Policy Research publication An Avalanche is Coming. See as well the recent New Yorker article “Is College Moving Online?“.

[h/t to @kinggary.]