The growth of lifelong learning is having an impact on initial higher education. Growing numbers of young students . An increasing proportion of the world's population will live in very large cities. Travelling within them will become slower but telecommunications networks will improve steadily. People will adopt customer attitudes and expect their education and training to be personalized.
Most campuses become more impersonal as they expand student numbers.
Daniel backs these good observations with ample citations of case studies and statistics. He examines, too, the situation at the University of Utah, a large state school beset by all of the problems mentioned above plus a few others. Not least among these problems is an academic core that risks suffocation with the rise of the university's ancillary services and institutes. But Daniel offers generous praise for the University of Utah, which he says has managed the crisis admirably by participating in the innovative Western Governor's University, a coalition of several large state universities interested in reaping the benefits of the distance learning boom. As of 1996, there were 11 such institutions, the smallest of which is Spain's Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia with 110,000 matriculates and the largest of which is Andalou University in Turkey, which enrolls some half-million or more.