. . . sure would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
This is essentially what Bill Gates said to every traditional residential college in America at the Techonomy Conference last weekend in Lake Tahoe, Calif. As reported in The Chronicle:
“Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university … college, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based.”
“After all, what are we trying to do? We’re trying to take education that today the tuition is, say, $50,000 a year so over four years—a $200,000 education—that is increasingly hard to get because there’s less money for it because it’s not there, and we’re trying to provide it to every kid who wants it,” Mr. Gates said. “And only technology can bring that down, not just to $20,000 but to $2,000. So yes, place-based activiy in that college thing will be five times less important than it is today.”
(Gates also praised charter schools, bemoaning the lack of “room for innovation in the standard system,” and saying there “should be about 20 times as much” experimentation in learning delivery systems and new technologies in the classroom.)
Bill Gates’s full remarks on “place-based colleges”: