Administrators at educational institutions have tended to think of technology as a benign force for organizational enhancement -- not something that could effectively end their way of life. That attitude reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web.... The Internet has changed the fundamentals of the economics of information. Although information is still costly to produce, the Web has revolutionized the way we reproduce it, lowering the cost of additional copies to nearly zero. The forces of competition will drive the price of information down to roughly the cost of its reproduction.

The most important question facing many colleges and universities is ... how to survive when others offer free online education -- particularly if an institution's current annual tuition is $15,380 (the 1999 average for private four-year institutions).

Colleges and universities face two crucial tasks. First, they must reverse the trend of the commodification of instruction, characterized by large lecture classes and the growing use of adjuncts. Second, they need to increase the value of what they can offer their students, perhaps by developing hybrid models that combine the best features of the brick-and-mortar campus and e-learning. Otherwise, they will be in for a rough ride.

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