Are our Universities becoming obsolete due to their cost structures and tuition costs? What good is getting a degree if it economically enslaves you for a decade or more? What good are degrees for which there are not jobs or career path? Learning something for the sake of learning it is great, but that is a luxury, not a viable career opportunity. If the cost structures for the Universities came down so too could the tuition costs - why have big buildings and all those facilities if you can teach the same courses online?
There was an interesting article on April 6, 2014 in the Ventura County (California) Star Newspaper titled; "Business Degree Going Online - CSU Channel Islands to Offer Program in Fall," by Jean Cowden Moore which noted that the California State University set up the class to help single parents when attending class would be a hardship or military personnel that cannot get to class due to their service.
Additional students would include career business people that cannot take the time to get to the University but need to get their business degree even if they hadn't yet completed it, perhaps a few units short. The price would be $400 per unit. Talk about a high profit margin, the entire class is mostly online. Get this - there is a waiting list for these online classes which will be offered to perhaps 100 that qualify on a special basis due to needs and circumstances. This is the beginning folks.
The price per unit will come down, and more classes offered, eventually, why would anyone want to actually go to the college or any college for that matter? Just think if we had such classes available to everyone, that $400 per unit class could be more in line with the Udemy Online University website where classes start at $20 to $40.00 and you get the same information and no worries about paying off college debt upwards of $50,000 or more.
It is for this shear reason that the future of Universities is in jeopardy and soon the bubble will burst as the student loan default rate hits 50% and 1.5 Trillion Dollars outstanding. That's the path we are on. Right now, Congress is talking about a Student Loan bailout of $108 Billion and that wouldn't even fix the current problem completely - what we have now is a runaway financial bubble in the student loan space, and it is getting quite serious. Please think on this.
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