[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
 

Universities no longer spend as much time bragging about the size of their libraries. The reason is obvious: the size of the library is now of interest to just a tiny handful of researchers. Most anything that we want access to is available somewhere online or in paid digital libraries.

Stanford University has put up many of their courses online for free, and some have more than 30,000 active students at a time.

MIT just launched MITx, which will create ubiquitous access to information. The finest technical university in the world is going to share every course with any student who is willing to expend the effort to learn.

Measured by courses, MIT is going ahead and creating the largest university in the world. If you could audit any class in the world, would you want to?

A university delivers four things:

Access to information (not perspective or understanding, but access)

Accreditation/A scarce degree

Membership in a tribe

A situation for growth (which is where you’d file perspective and understanding)

Once courses are digitized, they ought to be shared, particularly by non-profit institutions working in the public good. Given that all the major universities ought to/should/will create a university of the people—giving access to information and great teachers to all (and if they don’t, someone should and will, soon)—which of the other three really matter?

Accreditation: A degree from an Ivy League school is a little like real estate in a good neighborhood. It makes a lousy house better and a great house priceless. We make all sorts of assumptions about fifty-year-old men (even fictional ones—Frasier Crane went to Harvard) because someone selected them when they were eighteen years old.

With so much information available about everyone, it gets ever harder to lump people into categories. Graduating from (or even getting into) a prestigious institution will become ever more valuable. We need labels desperately, because we don’t have enough time to judge all the people we need to judge. It’s worth asking if the current process of admitting and processing students (and giving a “gentlemen’s C” to anyone who asks) is the best way to do this labeling.

But there’s really no reason at all to lump the expense and time and process of traditional schooling with the labeling that the university does. In other words, if we think of these schools as validators and guarantors, they could end up doing their job with far less waste than they do now. They could be selectors of individuals based on the work they do elsewhere, as opposed to being the one and only place the work has to occur.

Membership in a tribe: This is perhaps the best reason to actually move to a college campus in order to get a degree. While access to information is becoming ever easier (you’ll soon be able to take every single MIT course from home), the cultural connection that college produces can be produced only in a dorm room, at a football stadium, or walking across the quad, hand in hand. Catherine Oliver, an Oberlin graduate, remembers living in one of the co-ops, planning a menu, cooking, baking, washing dishes, mopping floors, and sitting through long consensus-building meetings.

All of it builds tribes.

For centuries, a significant portion of the ruling class has had a history with certain colleges, been a member of the famous-college tribe, sharing cultural touchstones and even a way of speaking. The label on a résumé is more than a description of what you did thirty years ago—it’s proof, the leaders say, that you’re one of us.

Until that changes, this tribe is going to continue to exert power and influence. The real question is how we decide who gets to be in it.

A situation for growth: And here’s the best reason, the reason that’s almost impossible to mimic in an online situation, the one that’s truly worth paying for and the one that almost never shows up in the typical large-school laissez-faire experience. The right college is the last, best chance for masses of teenagers to find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to grow. And fast.

The editor at the Harvard Lampoon experiences this. I felt it when I co-ran a large student-run business. The advanced physics major discovers this on her first day at the high-energy lab, working on a problem no one has ever solved before. 

That’s the reason to spend the time and spend the money and hang out on campus: so you can find yourself in a dark alley with nowhere to go but forward.