Colleges and Universities will not exist in the future

Nothing will exist in the future

We'll become more like Europe. University will be reserved for the academic elite and required for professions such as law, medicine, education, research science, and the like. Everything else will become trade schools. 2-3 years of mostly online study, no liberal arts electives, just straight coursework to create an employable human being. Honestly, we need more people with hard skills and far less "dime-a-dozen" undergraduate business and liberal arts degree holders working as lower wage call center agents and retail managers while juggling six figure loan debt.

Maybe...but I think the powers that be have a vested interest in keeping the college system in its current state and they'll work to keep it that way. Look at the college admissions scandal - it basically told the unwashed masses 'The college admissions system isn't broken, it's just that the rich have been gaming the system. Once that gets sorted out college will be more democratic" it was essentially a diversion from the real issues and most people ate it up.

Youtube/Khan Academy/The internet won't ever replace truly college. I think that the dream of people who think they are "smart but lazy" is to be able to watch a YouTube video and answer a few questions online and say that they "learned something". It may work well for technical degrees - especially programming, and it would probably work very well for "premed" degrees where the main goal of college is to get some required knowledge and have enough time to make your application look good. It wouldn't work for research science, art, most engineering disciplines, and the humanities where individual projects under the guidance of an expert are a key part of the curriculum.

Additionally, our entire social organization will get turned on its head if the college system goes under. I'm not saying that's a bad thing but the consequences will be interesting. Right now people make their closest friends/meet long term romantic partners/establish important business+professional connections in college. How would this change if college goes under - will people meet all their romantic partners on dating apps? Will they hang with their high school friends for a longer period of time? Will less people leave their hometowns/states or will more? Will they make friends on message boards or through social media? Will young people actually start frequenting bars/clubs/social events in their hometowns (this could be really good for the economy? Will we see post high school club sports grow?

We've already seen the way that entertainment is distributed change quite drastically - right now I get most of my entertainment from YouTube and I pay 2 groups (Cumtown and Million Dollar Extreme) $5/month in exchange for content. Any music I buy I'll buy on bandcamp using pay their what you want system or I'll buy a weird looking cassette from my local record store. I think we'll see this or 'tipping' like systems affect how art in general is distributed - if I like a piece of art, a artist, or a writer I'll just pay them directly. This provides a way for aspiring artists/entertainers to subvert traditional systems of media.

My bold hypothesis is that we'll see considerably less people from the upper middle class in particular attending college in the very near future. Not sure exactly why but I think this but I'm pretty sure it will happen.

Lastly, I think it's time for the peer review system to change with the times. Right now three experts, likely mid to late career scientists, decide the fate of a paper. I think the ideal change would be a pseudonymous message board-like format where critiques of scientific papers could be brought forth by anyone and the paper would need to stand up to critiques, follow up experiments could be posted and it would be up to you to decide if the claims are legitimate. Obviously there would be some sort of curation of significant, well done papers but Idk how this would happen. I've pitched this idea to a few scientist friends of mine and their opinions were pretty much "that's a good idea but it's basically anarchy and I like how easy it is to pick up a journal knowing that I can trust the majority of what I read". It would be a lot of work for scientists but it would greatly democratize the publishing process.

I think you are grossly underestimating the power of the internet and its ability to disseminate information. Scoff at YouTube all you want. It started with videos about kitties. It’s evolving into something very different. Like I said, someone will figure out accreditation. The internet will provide what you need to pass tests, hard tests. You won’t need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire that information and knowledge.

With respect to social interaction. That has been evolving and changing since the beginning of time. And will continue to do so. Nothing of that nature is static.

They will always be around due to endowments and research.

How they are used will change dramatically. Major universities provide degrees online now. In the future this will be the norm for all majors minus any required hands on learning.

Alan

Portland Hobby Jogger wrote:

We'll become more like Europe. University will be reserved for the academic elite and required for professions such as law, medicine, education, research science, and the like. Everything else will become trade schools. 2-3 years of mostly online study, no liberal arts electives, just straight coursework to create an employable human being. Honestly, we need more people with hard skills and far less "dime-a-dozen" undergraduate business and liberal arts degree holders working as lower wage call center agents and retail managers while juggling six figure loan debt.

The problem is you are living 60 years ago. Trade skills will be eliminated. We can easily automate trade skill jobs. What you need is programmers to do the automation. Which you can do through online learning. So both will gone in the future.

Consider this. I’m a gen x dude and went to a big state flagship school. My great grandfather went there as well. Zillions of people have attended this school over the years. Not a big deal.

I suggest that the difference between my experience and my great grandfather’s college experience will be very small between my experience and my great grand kid’s experience.

I would say that the changes have been linear since the early parts of the 1900s (or earlier). More people in college, more women, more minorities, more colleges, more fields of study, higher costs, bigger facilities, more expenses, etc. it’s kind of the same theme gradually trending in the same direction.

I would say that in 50 years the changes are going to be fundamental. The whole thing is going to be reworked from a fundamental perspective. Freshman, sophomore, junior senior, geography, physical structures, set time tables (psych 101 in Grossman hall Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00), live in a dorm and pay $50k per year, etc. it’s not going to be the same. The stuff that needs to be on a campus will remain. You need equipment, instruments, labs and all of that for certain fields of study and research. But for a big chunk of everything else I believe it’s going to be very different. Streamlined and efficient and cost effective compared to the current model. I also believe a lot of these worthless s#it fields of study are not going to withstand the weight of the marketplace. Leaving college with a gender studies degree and a hundred plus grand in debt cannot be sustained. I also thing the change could very well come very fast when it comes. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it could be kind of like a tipping point kind of thing spurred by some technology or idea or accreditation system or business that does not exist right now. Nobody knows the future, but this is my guess.

There's an argument to be made that trade skills will be some of the last jobs to be automated as they'll often require weird awkward motions as well as some thinking and we simply don't have robots that are that versatile yet. Think about what a plumber or an electrician does - they need to diagnose a problem, climb and crawl around and try different things to fix it, most of our AI and robots are highly specialized and simply couldn't keep up. We can already automate many routine intellectual tasks - paralegals, entry level programmers, and accountants will be the first to go IMO.

Maybe once all is said and done the only jobs left will be sex work and science....what a life to live

sorry for formatting :(

Maybe, but not for a long, long time. The "College Experience" is a huge part of American culture.

Going to college is such a bizarre concept in some ways

Many people will want a place to transition from being mommy and daddy's son or daughter to being an independent human. They will also like to gather in places where goals are pursued by likeminded individuals and where the resources (including flesh and blood professors) are in attendance at one locale. It is quite possible that fewer people will go to college because not all professions will require it. But it's not like Harvard and Stanford and Cal Tech are gonna cease to exist.

Hardloper wrote:

Going to college is such a bizarre concept in some ways

Care to elaborate Hardloper?

TAA wrote:

Maybe, but not for a long, long time. The "College Experience" is a huge part of American culture.

Only one in 20 had four years of college in 1940. So that’s 19 out of 20 did not do the “college experience”. 19 out of 20.

That’s 19 out of 20

Things changed and things will change.

Not really man wrote:

TAA wrote:

Maybe, but not for a long, long time. The "College Experience" is a huge part of American culture.

Only one in 20 had four years of college in 1940. So that’s 19 out of 20 did not do the “college experience”. 19 out of 20.

That’s 19 out of 20

Things changed and things will change.

Yah, but having the "college experience" wasn't considered a necessary part of life back then like it is now. Going to parties, binge drinking, having sex with promiscuous women. A lot of people consider college to be the best time of their life. It's extremely romanticized and young people have a fear of missing out.

TAA wrote:

Not really man wrote:

Only one in 20 had four years of college in 1940. So that’s 19 out of 20 did not do the “college experience”. 19 out of 20.

That’s 19 out of 20

Things changed and things will change.

Yah, but having the "college experience" wasn't considered a necessary part of life back then like it is now. Going to parties, binge drinking, having sex with promiscuous women. A lot of people consider college to be the best time of their life. It's extremely romanticized and young people have a fear of missing out.

That kind of zeroes in on the issue. When I was in school at a big state school one could do this. College wasn’t that expensive. Costs have grown so much that the equation has changed. There are better ways to slack off that don’t put you in massive debt. Plus, you don’t have to expose yourself to extreme leftist propaganda.

As We Speak wrote:

Many people will want a place to transition from being mommy and daddy's son or daughter to being an independent human.

It’s called life. It’s called the real world. People have been doing it for thousands of years, ya know. Very few people in the human race in the history of the world have gone to college.

Leland Stanford Junior wrote:

If you consider two factors....

The unreal potential and power of the internet, YouTube, etc.

The broken, corrupt, ineffective and dysfunctional formal higher education system in the USA. (Churning out worthless degrees coupled with massive loads of debt—that is their product.)

One has to conclude that a massive change is coming at some point not too far in the future. Information and knowledge can be disseminated super efficiently and at costs that are next to nothing when scaled. Someone is going to figure it out. Accreditation will be figured out (testing, etc.). Then the bottom falls out for the existing higher ed institutions. Who knows how it all plays out, but it won’t look the same. Not even close.

That defies the way things have progressed. You are not factoring in the role of institutions, especially elite ones, and the political clout they have. Knowledge and information have always been generally available ever since the invention of movable type. That process has gotten cheaper and more efficiently as time has gone on. As it has, universities have gotten more expensive and more central to the business of establishing yourself in life.

It's not only information and knowledge that universities "sell." It's credentialing. That's gotten more restrictive and pricey as time has gone on. It used to be that you could sit for the law exam anywhere in the US without attending law school. The common way was to work as a clerk for a law firm but there were people who just studied law on their own and sat for the exam. You could make money while learning law rather than spending six figures to do it. There are now only fourteen US states that allow you to sit for the law exam without a degree from an accredited law school and I believe all of those require you to have spent years working at a law firm. Try sitting for your state's medical exam without a degree from a med school or to be a licensed psychologist without a doctorate in psychology. Won't happen even if somehow you manage to learn enough about either field to pass a board exam.

As any profession wants to become "professionalized" it requires some sort of credential. Getting the credential nearly always involves getting a degree, often more than one. There will be changes in the university system as it prices itself out of more and more people's range, mostly in terms of on line learning, but those changes are not going to displace universities. What you're suggesting would benefit people who can't afford or can barely afford to go to universities and it would make some professions more accessible to the general public. But that would dilute the incomes of people working in those professions so there will be little support for such a thing.

What I love about these LRC debates about college is you can pretty clearly tell the difference between the writing of those who attended college and those that didn’t. That’s your answer.

I just don’t understand why anyone cares whether people attend college or not. Why does this persist as a political issue?