The beauty of cyberlearning is that you can pursue it while working at a full-time job and living miles from a college. In an age when many jobs require continuing education, cyberlearning brings it to people who cannot afford to interrupt a career. As the consumption of higher education has spread in the U.S., its economic efficiency has declined. In good part this has been because faculty productivity has been in steep decline. According to InterEd's Tucker, professors currently spend less than half the time in the classroom than they did 25 years ago.
Many professors delegate teaching to graduate assistants.
At a time when American business has been brutally restructuring and raising efficiency, colleges loftily resist change. Nevertheless, change is coming. Though the prestige brand universities are still besieged with applicants, smaller colleges are feeling the pinch as families and students are less willing to go heavily into debt to finance a college education. Over the last ten years, some 200 college campuses have closed for good-twice the number that shut down in the decade before. That's what health care said, that's what the automobile companies said.