In a Few Years, College Professors May Have to Work For A Living

It can be difficult to distinguish a tenured college professor from a person living in comfortable retirement. Sinecured professors can be quite mad and dysfunctional, yet be guaranteed a well paid career and pension, with benefits, for very little work. That cushy situation may change fairly quickly, however.

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

...When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

...Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. _WashingtonPost_via_ImpactLab

And the professors who have squandered their privileged position and "academic freedom" for the chance to indoctrinate a constant flow of inexperienced and vulnerable young brains -- they may have to learn to provide value for their wages, for a change.