So Bill Gates says Universities will be obsolete within 5 years. Interesting prediction and not wholly based on opinion either. Big Bill did give some valid reasons for this bold prediction, but mostly cited the internet as the reason.
Some say it takes almost 6 months longer to go through a masters degree but with the savings mounting to upwards of 50% in some cases, its easy to see why this prediction could be, at least partly, based on truth. Although it takes on average 6 months longer to complete a masters, the cost savings can be anything upward of 50%, so it’s easy to see why Bill’s prediction could be partly based on fact.
The trouble is, Bill thinks current universities will die out thanks to the internet and with grad rates from some of the current online universities sitting at a miserly 10%, it won’t take a genius to work out that proper bricks and mortar universities will be around much longer than Bill predicts.
Don’t be fooled though, the savings on text books and time spent travelling to and from school should not be underestimated, but unless you have an all in one printer You’ll have to make sure you have a decent. You are also going to need to have a decent desktop PC, with plenty of PC Memory in it to cope with the multiple open websites and documents, not to mention a reasonable internet connection for VPN’ing in to lectures and watching recorded videos.
When you actually, physically, attend Uni, you do so for long periods of the day with total focus on the job at hand, but at the beach, the focus tends to be on other things. When you attend University, you do so for 80% of your day in some cases, but on the beach, well, let’s just say there are other distractions.
No they won’t, but don’t be fooled in to thinking thats the final nail in the coffin for this subject, with more and more online uni’s springing up, expect to be able to complete your masters online in far more subjects than you can now, in 5 years time? No way, but if the question were termed differently and instead we asked Will we be using the internet for university more often than today in 5 years time, absolutely we will.
