The ivory tower is headed for a fall

Colleges must find ways to compete with their digital counterparts

Wikipedia defines education as the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to the next. Much like modern day monks transcribing the scrolls of our generation onto fresh sheets of papyrus, colleges have staked out their territory as the conveyors of wisdom and culture from generation to generation.

However, the laborious transcription work done by monks, was pushed aside in favor of a higher calling. As printing presses came onto the scene in the 1500s, the intensive human-based efforts were soon far too inefficient to compete. Similarly, colleges are about to find that their digital counterparts in the education realm are about to render their human-based teaching operations far too inefficient to compete.

Rest assured, the need to convey information from one generation to the next will still exist, but the professors, like the monks of the past, will be given a higher calling. For colleges to survive and thrive, the coming years will find them searching for higher ground. Their struggle will be to transition themselves beyond regional objectives, political boundaries and short-term thinking.

Instead, college will focus their considerable talent base on the challenges that lie ahead, capturing the salient points of understanding with each step of the journey. Much like an astronaut setting foot on a new planet, future colleges will be seen as the ever-vigilant explorers of the unexplainable, guiding us into worlds unrecognizable, creating doorways into a future that is unknowable.

Similar to the way the news media serves to assure a clear separation of powers in all areas of governance, one of the key roles for future colleges will be to save us from our primitive selves. They will become the champion of forward progress, the defender of what’s possible.

Just as the forces of tradition favor the status quo, the forces of next generation learning and understanding will favor the non-status quo. In short, colleges will become our checks and balance for the status quo.

Fundamental Drivers

So why are all of these changes starting to happen, and what are the fundamental drivers underlying these shifts? At the heart of these changes is a maturing base of Internet technologies connecting people and rewriting the rules for communication. This has resulted in a shifting base of cultural standards, speed of operations, and overall expectations.

As with many industries, universities have established themselves as the intermediaries, the gatekeepers between information and our minds. With information now abundant and free, the gatekeeper business model is quickly becoming unworkable.

Here are a few of the cultural forces behind the changes that lie ahead:

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