A 'Place' for Higher Education - William Weitzer, Inside Higher Ed

In “The University of Wherever” (The New York Times, October 2, 2011), Bill Keller mused on the predictions that “place” will become obsolete in higher education: “Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and ‘distributed’ learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame.” Despite the proliferation of online learning, Keller observes that it has had minimal impact on elite higher education observing that: “Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got.”