However, I don’t buy the caricature that serves to represent current college ed. Not every college class is a lecture. Further, I expect “reform” to continue come about organically in many instances.

The biggest trouble we’ll have with needed change is anything that assaults the current dominant model where you pay 20-30k+ per year for 4 years to live at a school and develop a broad base of liberal arts knowledge in addition to an often esoteric major/specialty.

I’d love to see someone with the seeds to come up with a highly demanding kick-ass 2-year version of college. One that made much of what many consider essential to the college experience to become optional for those more interested in starting their careers in the real world. The cultural experience (political evangelism/training wheel subcultures/drinking and frats/formation of social allegiances), while delightful, can be construed as optional. And much of what comprises the liberal arts base ought to be regarded as optional, or at least distillable into 3 or 4 courses.

From my own college experience (now several years in the rearview mirror), his assertions about the current state of the college classroom are just plain wrong unless he’s focused exclusively on the freshman gen-ed, 200-person lecture classes. And those make up a small fraction of they typical college courseload. I went to a large state school and found that expression and collaboration were behavioral norms, not the exception.

Finally, higher education itself is much more diversified already. There is built-in school choice, and typically a breadth of coursework that dwarfs what is available to a high school student.

Recess ends for everybody.

I say this as someone who uses maybe 10% of what I learned in college. That 10% is still worth every minute of the 3 years I spent at RIT. These days, everything I need to know I obtain from the Internet or from books (virtually all of which are available for download in PDF form), but I also recognize the fact that I need the foundation that RIT provided in order to effectively make use of the knowledge I’m able to obtain from the Internet. Perhaps we don’t need 4 or 5 year programs anymore (I completed my degree early), but if higher education were ever eliminated from the equation, all you’ll do is produce a lazy, uninformed work-force. Hopefully we’ll never be dumb enough to go down that road.