The end of the university as we know it??

A provocative but balanced article, "College for $99 a Month," in the Washington Monthly by think tank analyst Kevin Carey (policy director of Education Sector). There's been a fair amount of controversy over this model & this particular company, but it is, probably, an inevitable "disruptive innovation" to the higher education model. Good article...well worth the read.
An excerpt:
"Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound....Regional public universities and non-elite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return."

The company's founder has been frustrated by the push back from students and faculty at institutions with which he has tried to partner (in order to get accreditation cover for courses students complete online). "But neither the regulatory nor the psychological obstacles match the evolving new reality... The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do. All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate than any other—and a whole lot cheaper in the bargain—for the consensus of consumer taste to rapidly change. The odds of this happening quickly are greatly enhanced by the endless spiral of steep annual tuition hikes, which are forcing more students to go deep into debt to pay for college while driving low-income students out altogether. If Burck Smith doesn’t bring extremely cheap college courses to the masses, somebody else will."