In a recent blog post, I argued that structural changes—the lasting effects of COVID and the acceleration of ubiquitous broadband—would mean that some of the shift to online will be permanent. I also argued that the marginal value of a residential campus experience will be challenged as students and their families consider just what they are getting for in return for the extra money required for a residential college experience.
Today I want to add some more nuance to those claims. I don’t think that residential education is going to disappear except for elite universities. Nor do I think that we’re going to see the long-predicted Great Unbundling. Some residential colleges will fold or go online. There will be some unbundling. There will be some downward price pressure. But one of the most profound changes may be the re-imagining of what it means to have residential education experience in a digitally enabled world. There have already been some experiments in this direction, such as the Minerva Project. But I don’t think Minerva will be the dominant model. In fact, I’m not sure that there will be any one dominant model. Rather, I think we’re going to see a growth in various forms of blended and low-residency educational experiences, where colleges use various means to create that magic of connectedness which we tend to romanticize as coming-of-age experiences but which really are intimately related to the ways in which people learn, grow, and succeed.
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