If you, like me, are one of those parents of a teen whose daytime fantasies feature oneself waving the flag of liberty atop the heaped, smoldering ruins of Harvard University, you will enjoy Randall Parker’s piece on the rise of online higher education.

College is also incredibly inconvenient in an age where convenience defines so many other parts of life. Want to go to a grocery store at 2 AM? One’s probably open. Want cash from a bank on a Sunday? Find an ATM machine—and many are located away from banks in shopping malls. Want to book an airline flight? Do searches online and choose from dozens of choices. By contrast, colleges make you take courses in bricks-and-mortar buildings at the hours and days of their choosing and at the rates that were chosen by centuries old traditions. Your course will last a semester of about 12 weeks. It will start on a particular day. It might only get offered once a year. Take it or leave it. Your instructor might be bored, unenthused, and perhaps not even speak English very well. You’ll have to buy a big thick textbook and lug it around. This is all incredibly inconvenient. I say down with tradition. Time to automate and make education cheap and convenient.

The college racket is way overdue for a major correction. And: If we really do take a wrecker’s ball to our institutions of higher education, think how much less liberalism there will be in the world!

By the way: Mooching around an airport magazine store the other day, I noticed a magazine devoted to e-degrees. Can’t find an internet reference, and perhaps it was a magaine about something else just doing a cover story on e-degrees…but if such a magazine doesn’t yet exist, it soon will. Before my daughter reaches college age, please, please.