“Subbed” to the university.

A case against a subscription- based university. P.S. We’re nearly there.

Imagine university on a subscription. You pay for a class for as loonggg as you wish to take it. And the promise the university makes to you is that you stay skill-relevant in your field.

I’ll be honest, there is a great deal of ambition in that imagination. I dig it. (Most of it atleast)

But here’s the thing. If this is the future of the university, I think we just might have just managed to make the university invisible.

1. The attitude towards subscriptions in general
   Look I’d love to go to university for free and forever. But making university “almost free” forever through subscription models- that I worry about little. Because most people have low to nil commitment towards subscription- based services.
   What I see is this - Higher education learning will inevitably become a procrastinated chore when its simply there for us to attend to forever.

2. The better subscription
   As a layperson would you rather a distance learning course from the elite universities of the world or the university in your hometown, when-

   • both are the offer the course you want from the comfort of your bed, and

   • both offer the same thing- endless access to updated content.

   Subscription- based universities will probably just scale up a battle that already exist (the battle that is- “which is the most elite university?”) If all universities fall hard for the industry-based learning and MOOC trend, you’re swimming right into the mouths of the bigger fish, the sharks of the industry.

People have worried about the university for ages and I’m still hopeful and optimistic that they will stick around. But only so long as we remind ourselves that- universities are a gift to the region. When you remove region out of the equation, you make universities more invisible than they already are.