[CliffFletcher]

If there's an institution ripe for technological disruption, it's post-secondary education. Since about ten years ago, back when my kids were born, I've been reading about the educational flip, where those 500 student halls will be replaced by students watching lectures at home on their laptops, and they would come to campus for tutorials and collaborative work with other students. The pedagogical model is there. The technology is there. It would be far cheaper. I figured a new system might well be in place by the time my kids when to university.

But it's looking that was a fantasy. The institutions themselves are fiercely opposing fundamental reforms to what is essentially a 19th century approach to education - professors standing in halls reading out of books. And the reason half the professors don't want to be there is because they're interested in research, not teaching. Why the two are still so tightly linked is one of those baffling anachronisms that makes the system so frustrating.

Does anyone really believe that if we invented post-secondary education from scratch today, using today's technology and designed to meet the needs of today's workplace, it would anything remotely like what we have now?

It's funny how consumer/voter price sensitivity about the cost of everything from hotels to snow removal to TVs to houses can influence the market and politics, often massively. But everyone behaves as though the relentlessly rising cost of post-secondary education is something we simply have to endure, that it's out of our hands and we just have to accept it.

Fuzz is exactly right that it's a racket.