The ideal is for students, though of moderate or modest means, to retreat to an institution where they can wrestle with the ideas of the ages, where they escape the real world for a while. Sure this has become hard to find among huge universities and burgeoning junior colleges, but distance education may finish off the public liberal arts colleges if students opt for the efficiency of degrees by monitor. It is not only the matter of the control over curricula that distance education threatens, but it is also a threat to the idea that a community of scholars is promoting and protecting something of inestimable value in the face of sophisticated circuitry, a virtuality whose consequences are indeed real. Conclusion Students' respond only grudgingly to distance education, not so ready to forgo the real university experience as the proponents thought. Rather few students sign up and they drop out at a high rate.
Students know that there is more to universities than what's on the screen.
But certain offline rituals remain sacred. We can sustain some distance education around the edges, we always have, so long as the faculty remain in control of the curriculum and aware of their common bond. But big businesses are trying to grab university education as a distant pot of gold. The professorate has to be there meeting the challenge to keep education a real and fulfilling experience for all. Texas Association of College Teachers Quarterly Bulletin , p. 19. .