College In The Digital Age

Mike Konczal has mixed feelings about online education:

I think you will see state governments embrace online education. But I don't see them passing on any of those savings on to the students, in the same way that the savings on replacing teachers with adjuncts was captured entirely by the university. A university now envisions itself as a profit-maximizing firm instead of a "public option" of college education. And given that education is our society's only chosen form of social mobility, if only middle-class people can afford college, then only middle-class people are eligible for the benefits of the 21st-century economy.

In fact, online education could fit right into the transition to the hybrid university where it's public in name (and subsidies) but private in terms of tuition.