The problem with that idea is that it takes more than just people waving money to make something happen; it also has to be economical. There has to be a solution to the "money flow in > money flow out" problem. And due to the enormous fixed costs a college campus implies, if demand drops far enough, you may not be able to make the numbers work for much more than the very, very highest demand people. And that says niche market, which is going to be a big transition away from where we are now.
There's probably some convenient economic term to describe this.
Ultimately, you sort of missed the point of my message, which is that it isn't enough to merely establish that these are good or desirable qualities of a college. You have to establish that there's enough people who think it's the best choice to make it economical. Colleges have to beat every other option from the point of view of enough people that they can turn a profit because colleges are in a free market, and will very soon be facing stiff competition from a new competitor that will undercut their prices by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously providing services that will be in many ways superior, probably superior enough to make up for the ways in which they are inferior.
A few art colleges will survive and a few music colleges will survive, and I tend to agree the Ivy league will survive (but they will bleed), but at the end, nobody is going to look around at the landscape and say that "colleges have survived". It's going to be a bloodbath.
Try to cut out the emotional overtones and just imagine a market where someone comes out with a competitive product that is orders of magnitude cheaper, while being fairly substitutable for the original product. Technically, there are still people who make shoes for horses, and they come out to your house to do it. They aren't gone. But they aren't a significant industrial force, either. That's where colleges are heading; just enough left over that you might be able to come up to me in 2030 and say "Look, Harvard's still there! It's all OK.", but you wouldn't be fooling anyone.
There's probably some convenient economic term to describe this.
Ultimately, you sort of missed the point of my message, which is that it isn't enough to merely establish that these are good or desirable qualities of a college. You have to establish that there's enough people who think it's the best choice to make it economical. Colleges have to beat every other option from the point of view of enough people that they can turn a profit because colleges are in a free market, and will very soon be facing stiff competition from a new competitor that will undercut their prices by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously providing services that will be in many ways superior, probably superior enough to make up for the ways in which they are inferior.
A few art colleges will survive and a few music colleges will survive, and I tend to agree the Ivy league will survive (but they will bleed), but at the end, nobody is going to look around at the landscape and say that "colleges have survived". It's going to be a bloodbath.
Try to cut out the emotional overtones and just imagine a market where someone comes out with a competitive product that is orders of magnitude cheaper, while being fairly substitutable for the original product. Technically, there are still people who make shoes for horses, and they come out to your house to do it. They aren't gone. But they aren't a significant industrial force, either. That's where colleges are heading; just enough left over that you might be able to come up to me in 2030 and say "Look, Harvard's still there! It's all OK.", but you wouldn't be fooling anyone.