Gyroscopic Investing

Interesting article.  We are going "virtual".

http://the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352

"The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete;"

My first reaction is perhaps  this will mean freedom from liberal brainwashing.  I wonder what long term consequences that will result in.

Benko wrote: My first reaction is perhaps  this will mean freedom from liberal brainwashing.  I wonder what long term consequences that will result in.

Not so fast.  If anything, this will consolidate education into the hands of a small handful of famous professors at prestigious colleges.  Those few will have tremendous reach, and will become targets for intense lobbying and advertising by special interests.  God complex on corporate steroids.  On the positive side, students will have more choice on who to learn from and can "walk out" whenever they please.

I'm also interested on what this means for actually certifying that students are good or bad. One Harvard professor certainly isn't grading 10 million term papers, not all subjects can be judged by multiple-choice tests online, and even the ones that can will be rendered useless by Google.  Which means learning will basically be on the honor system.  As a result, I still think the market will show preference to undergrads with a certified degree.  However, graduate work (specifically continuing education for working professionals such as executive MBAs) will quickly go completely virtual.

This trend to the Internet is part of the "distance learning" trend.  This trend started many decodes ago with the "mail order" degrees offered by some universities (and those degrees were just as controversial then as Internet degrees are today).

Back in the 1970s, for example, I took 90% of the courses I needed for a degree by sitting in a remote classroom connected by microwave radio.  The setup had one-way video and two-way audio.  My employer at the time encouraged this education and worked with the college to provide the service.  I didn't have to leave the company premises to attend classes.  A courier picked up and delivered written homework assignments.

I've audited a number of classes since then using the Internet.  Yale University, for example, has its Open Yale program (I "attended" a class on Financial Markets given by Dr. Robert Shiller and learned a lot).  I didn't get any credit for auditing these courses, but that does not matter.  Once a person is in the labor force, personal financial statements become more important than the report card for measuring success (in other words, money rather than grades becomes the way for keeping score).

This is not to say that I want to keep up with the Joneses.  Rather, it means that as long as I live below my means and invest the rest, I will eventually achieve financial freedom when my investment income exceeds my living expenses by my required margin of safety.  Whether I'm richer or poorer than my neighbors is not a concern of mine.