Today I will be participating in a discussion at NYU on the future of higher education. The panel that I will be on has been given the following questions: “Do universities provide good value for money today? What are the gaps in the higher ed ecosystem, and who will fill them?” As it turns out these are the wrong questions to ask and I am planning to explain that in my introductory remarks.

Universities got going almost a thousand years ago with the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 and Oxford got started not quite a hundred years later. The European  system was well established by the end of the 18th century with over one hundred active universities. Not much has changed in the fundamental model of a university since then: it combines teaching and research and is organized by along faculty lines.

Back then in order to hear someone speak you had to be in the same room at the same time (and preferably close to the speaker). When you wanted to read a book you had to be in the library with the one copy that was kept there. In addition, travel was quite arduous and slow. With that kind of “production technology” it made sense to bundle research with instruction, bundle lots of disciplines and bundle a whole education in time (meaning a four year degree).

So what you were getting as a student was a package price. Nobody was offering anything a la carte as it couldn’t be delivered that way. We are now just at the beginning of the great unbundling of higher education. It will be unbundled into much smaller units – with a “course” being just one of the possible unbundled units. Other units that come to mind are intensive seminars, research facilities (cf. Science Exchange), published results down to data sets, and so on.

Newspapers similarly were a bundle of different types of information that existed largely because it was expensive to print and distribute. We have seen the effects of unbundling there and they are still ongoing. I similarly expect the unbundling of the university to take a long time but I am convinced that over time it will be dramatic reaching all the way to the existing definitions of faculties as the existing grouping such as biology, chemistry, physics, etc are no longer meaningful.

These unbundled units will increasingly compete in a global marketplace. That will expose many of them as unnecessarily duplicative and often of inferior quality both on the teaching and research side. The consequences will be an implosion in the size of the “university sector” on par with that in newspaper publishing. So instead the questions that we should be asking are the following: “who will be providing value tomorrow?”, “how will that value be financed / paid for?” and finally “what opportunities exist for re-aggregating the unbundled pieces?”

I am looking forward to the discussion. If you are interested and want to follow along, there will be a livestream.