[p2p-research] Universities Irrelevant by 2020?

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/22/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

If you had asked me in 1990 whether GM could be on the verge of
> bankruptcy and irrelevance, I'd have said you were delusional.  I'm sure the
> horse shoe-ers on Main St. in Palo Alto in 1905 thought they had work for
> life.

A lot of it depends not so much on the trends in conventional
education and in technical alternatives for networked education, taken
in isolation, but in the larger economic environment.

I'm thinking of a series of cascading crises in which gasoline in the
U.S. goes over $12/gal., the supply chains of large corporate
manufacturers either collapse or start frantically shortening and
relocalizing, the large hierarchical institutions that provided the
main market for university grads dry up, hollowed-out states lack the
fiscal resources to fund universities at anywhere near the present
level and the securities in private college endowments become
worthless.  And given the current economic environment and Peak Oil
waiting in the wings to return, this is all quite plausible.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html