The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.  By Kevin Carey.  Riverhead Books, 2015.

By Eric Johnson

Given the ominous title, Kevin Carey’s look into the future of higher education is surprisingly upbeat.  The End of College predicts plenty of disruptive change coming to academia, but also offers a rousing defense of affordable, accessible higher education as an economic and civic necessity.

Far from ending, Carey contends, our idea of college is poised for a massive, Internet-enabled expansion.  And not a moment too soon.

“The kinds of jobs that pay a decent salary require far more from workers than they used to,” Carey writes. [1] “People with the expertise and skill to perform complex tasks using machines powered by ever-improving information technology can thrive and prosper. People without that kind of education are being left in the cold.”

Bringing more people in from the cold will require more access to higher education.  For that kind of expansion to occur, Carey believes, many existing colleges will have to be radically reconfigured using new learning technologies.

“Information technology will allow for the creation of many new and different higher-education institutions that offer a much better education for a much lower price,” Carey contends.

Traditional colleges — what Carey terms “hybrid universities,” with their blend of liberal arts curricula, vocational training, and scholarly research — have become too inefficient and unwieldy to compete. “Instead of choosing,” Carey writes, “American universities decided to do all three things at once, with consequences that last to this day.”

The most dire of those consequences, he argues, is a lack of focus on teaching. The rewards for research and scholarship are so compelling that many colleges treat teaching as an afterthought.

There’s some merit to this critique, and the emergence of new instructional technology — online courses, customized student assessments, and flipped classrooms — has helped shift attention toward high-quality teaching.  Carey thinks online competitors will soon force traditional universities to rethink the whole enterprise of instruction.

Perhaps.  Or perhaps there is considerably more to learning than transmitting a set quantity of knowledge.  Questions of maturity and life experience, as well as the value of classmates and figuring out how to live away from home, all figure into a college experience.  Carey’s vision gives short shrift to such broader lessons.

He’s also dangerously sanguine about the loss of higher education’s contributions beyond teaching. Colleges have been “a shelter and benefactor” for long-term research and scholarship.  “Institutions that create knowledge on behalf of all humanity can’t rely exclusively on the funding that private markets provide,” Carey writes.

At a time when private-sector research and development has stagnated, [2] the “disruption” of universities would leave an enormous void in the traditional American strengths of discovery and invention.  If traditional universities give up that role, it’s unclear where such economically vital research will be done.

It’s also unclear that the traditional model of higher education is quite as broken as Carey contends, at least in places that still put significant resources into accessible public universities.

Recalling his father’s experience with the University of Pittsburgh, Carey wistfully remembers, “college was cheap enough to afford with prudence, part-time and summer work, and reasonable loans.”

That kind of access may seem like a bygone dream at many universities, but it doesn’t have to be. Tuition and fees at UNC Chapel Hill just 10 years ago amounted to $4,560 — well within range of prudence, part-time work, and reasonable borrowing for most students. [3]  That’s what strong public investment will get you.

If college costs seem out of control today, the weakening of public investment is a major reason.  Between 2008 and 2013, annual state funding for North Carolina’s public universities declined by more than $2,500 per student, shifting more of the burden to families. [4]  Even with that erosion of support, tuition and fees at UNC Chapel Hill today come to $8,106. At UNC Charlotte, it’s $6,179. And at UNC Pembroke, it’s $5,206. [5]

That’s not pocket change, but nor is it the astronomical expense that makes Carey’s vision of an all-online future inevitable.  The goal of public higher education has been to put the full college experience — with classrooms, labs, and actual human contact — within reach of any student with the talent and work ethic to earn it.

“[Colleges] need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending projects of learning,” Carey writes. “They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people.”

He’s right about that, and surely there’s a role for technology in opening new pathways.  North Carolina’s public universities now offer more than 300 complete degrees and thousands of individual courses online. [6]

But I’m not ready to give up on public campuses — real places, welcoming real people from all walks of life, offering the time and the resources to read and think and talk and try.

North Carolinians have spent two centuries building such campuses.  In eras when our state was poorer, our lives shorter, and our challenges greater, we somehow found the will to invest in immersive learning for a large portion of our people.  It has proven a wise choice.

We can do better, and online learning should help make us better.  But technology shouldn’t become a cost-cutting substitute, a good-enough backup for the kids who can’t afford flesh-and-blood teachers and non-virtual classmates.

“For nearly all of recorded history, the great gift of higher education has been locked away from the vast majority of people,” Carey writes. “It still is today.”

For that to change, we’ll need more than Internet connections and online job training.  We’ll need strong support for public higher education, solid financial aid for talented students from poor families, and a K-12 education system that prepares more people for college-level work.

It’s not easy.  But that’s no reason to give it up.

Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works for the University of North Carolina, but the views expressed here are his own.