This is the first post in a 3-part series about the disruption that universities face from the internet.
- In part 1, I want to explore the reasons that the Internet has made the modern university functionally dead.
- In part 2, I will talk about how the universities are responding (or failing to respond) to this disruption threat from the Internet.
- In part 3, I will describe what I think the eventual successor to the current university system will be – the online networked communities that are forming around every niche, topic and interest.
Let’s begin.
The Internet has Changed the Game
Thesis: any institution founded before the internet may not survive the internet.
Balaji Srinivasan
Universities today still operate as if expertise is scarce. Because expertise was once scarce, universities traditionally served as physical hubs for knowledge creation and dissemination (campuses, lecture halls, labs, and research centres) where people come together in order to study existing knowledge and produce new knowledge.
The internet eliminates the scarcity of expertise because it allows anyone to communicate directly to the entire world without having to be ‘credentialed’ by a university. In the pre-Internet world, expertise is scarce, gatekept and centralised at a physical campus. With the Internet, expertise is abundant, freely available and distributed throughout the world.
This shift is captured well in a report by Dr. Ryan Young, which I will reference throughout this post blog post.
Universities have, for hundreds of years, occupied a privileged position in the information economy. They collected information and knowledge, housed many of the experts who had mastered existing knowledge, and therefore educated the broader population. This privileged position is now under threat as knowledge access, and production, has been significantly democratised.
Future Disruptions for Australian Universities, Dr Ryan Young, NSC Futures
The Functions of a University are being replaced by the Internet
This means, for a start, that many university functions are now open to much greater competition than in the past. Education and knowledge transfer occurs through widely available (and often popular) videos and blogs. Research can be, and increasingly is, crowd-sourced. The unique convening ability of universities as physical places where great minds congregate is being undermined by remote working technologies.
Let’s go through the functions of a university and see how the Internet displaces their functions.
1. Expertise and knowledge is no longer limited to a university
Knowledge is now no longer just accessed in specific buildings, through books and journals or by consulting a limited number of experts. Instead, it has been thoroughly democratised so that anyone, anywhere can rapidly access most of the knowledge and information on any subject in minutes or seconds.
Universities are weak signals of competence and expertise in today’s world. People are choosing to share their expertise directly to the world through blogs, podcasts, Youtube videos, Substack newsletters and through X posts.
The Internet allows experts to produce first-party proof of work. Online audiences directly make a judgement themselves on the value of someone’s work (e.g. audiences watch creators because they are interesting not because they went to the Yale School of Youtube… if such a thing even existed).
2. The value of a University Credential is falling (fast)
The value of the credential is rapidly approaching zero as the number of people who have a university degree has exploded (the share of population with a bachelors degree in Australia increased from 9% in 1989 to 32% in 2023). Having said that, Australia is still one of the relatively sane countries in terms of runaway credentialism. Look at America or Europe where many young people need multiple masters degrees to get entry level professional positions.
Accreditation is now moving to direct proof of work – Writing blogs, building Youtube channels, recording podcasts, online portfolios.
3. Teaching already happens through the Internet
Walk into any university tutorial today and you will see that teaching already happens through online and digital channels. The majority of the experience of attending a university is now navigating a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle or Canvas.
More importantly much of the material that constitutes a university subject comes from online channels (Youtube, Twitter, blogs, etc). Very little content, if any, is produced directly by the lecturers/professors and even when it is, its often poor quality and incredibly boring. At best, the university lecturers/teaching assistants are becoming curators of online content.
This also extends to answering student queries. If you as a student want help with something, the first place they look to is not to their professor or lecturer, it’s Youtube. Students self study off and would rather watch an Indian guy on Youtube than their engineering professor in front of them.
So where does this leave Universities?
I have painted a very bleak picture of what the university system is currently. Universities are no longer where experts live. The value of a credential is rapidly falling. The students who attend university don’t pay attention to their lecturers and prefer learning off online resources.
Universities are scrambling to adapt. In the next post, I’ll dive into how they are responding, and whether it’s enough to keep them relevant. In the next post I am going to discuss what things universities are trying to do to respond to this disruption threat.