Perhaps an analogous situation is what happened in the brewing industry in
the '60s. When I was a kid growing up in Wisconsin, every town had its own
brewery and in some towns there were two or three. In those days, beer was
marketed without the benefit of preservatives, so it didn't travel very
well and it didn't last very long on the shelf. When the technology
arrived for making beer that could be easily transported from one town to
another, the advantage went to the large-scale brewers who could bottle
their product much less expensively. In a relatively short period, the
market was completely dominated by a half-dozen major suppliers and
hundreds of local breweries went out of business. I think what virtual
universities are providing is the technology that makes education, like
mass-market beer, a commodity that can be readily distributed. This is bad
news for all the small private colleges that depend upon a kind of regional
brand-loyalty. Why pay astronomical tutition to attend a small, liberal
arts schools when you can get a Ivy League degree off the internet?
What happened in the beer industry, of course, was that eventually a market
emerged that could support the flourishing of micro-breweries and, as a
result, the diversity that was lost was eventually recovered. I think this
is what you were basically arguing, Jay, that the new technology that
initially favors consolidation, will eventually also favor the development
of new markets. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be true, but
I think that the so-called "specialty providers" that you anticipate
emerging, will be different from the current local market providers. I'm
afraid that today's small, non-specialized schools are likely to go the way
of the small-town brewery.
While we are on the topic of Noble's white paper, there was something else
that caught my eye. He makes reference to a new business emerging that he
refers to as "Education Maintenance Organizations." He doesn't really
dwell on this, but I gather that he is anticipating that people will
eventually subscribe to services that will warrant that their knowledge and
job skills will always be kept up-to-date in the same way that current-day
HMOs warrant that your health needs will always be met. I find this to be
a startling development. Was anybody else taken aback by this development?
---Tim
_________________________________________________________________
Timothy Koschmann
Temporary Address (9/1/97-5/31/98)
Dept. of Computer Science
Campus Box 430, ECOT 734
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309 |
+1-303-492-2233 (voice)
+1-303-492-2844 (fax)
__________________________________________________________________