One prevailing idea is that education drives economies, but this is a slow process. Instead, economic and market forces will drive education. Education can no longer be seen as the right of everyone distributed arbitrarily, but as an investment in success or failure. Peter Drucker has suggested recently that universities are dead. There will be winners and losers as a result.
Cost reduction is always difficult.
A reduction in tutorial inputs is likely to form a part of the process of cost reduction. This development will coincide with the time at which the on-line medium arrives as a mass medium. The concept that that all learning can be made fun and easy is flawed. Although it should be interesting, the task is to teach skills. Nurtured by an amusement culture from their first days of watching Sesame Street, students now are children of post-modernity, who seem implicitly to distrust anything that purports to be a source of knowledge and objectivity.