Colleges will remain in business as long as businesses will use college degrees as a meaningful qualification to hire talent.

Data has shown that companies have continued to use degrees beyond their relation to actual tasks for the job they're hiring for. We've seen decades of evidence that degree inflation is on the rise, signalled by vacancies requiring a bachelor degree while the tasks are high school level. You can see this either by doing a qualitative analysis, e.g. running surveys among employees and categorising their job complexity and linking it to an educational level. Here you find e.g. many administrative jobs which an 18 year old with 2 weeks of on the job training can do, require one to finish a 3 year bachelor in just about anything, first. But the more common methodology is a quantitative one that's a little less accurate, but easier to perform. Survey existing employees at a large firm about their educational credentials, then survey vacancies for people in similar positions at such firms. You'll find various occupations where 60% of vacancies require a certain credential that only 20% of the employees have, indicating that many companies require credentials that are apparently not necessary. And this is on the rise.

Then you can wonder why, and the answer is because they can. If you can choose between a large pool of people who meet minimum qualifications, you have the luxury to select overqualified people.

And that tendency by human resource managers isn't going to change anytime soon, especially not when there's no significant salary premium companies have to pay to get a person with a college graduate to do highschool level work, over hiring a high school graduate. And I don't see that changing anytime soon with increasing competitive pressure from technological advancement and globalisation.

In the end, a college degree is moving more towards a signalling device that shows socioeconomic background and interpersonal aspects such as grit, stability, delayed gratification, and is less and less about signalling subject matter knowledge, academic competencies etc. HR focuses more and more on the former and not on the latter, when requiring a college degree.

As online education is more accessible and easier (i.e., less financially straining, less psychologically straining, less socially challenging, but rather at-your-own-pace learning behind your computer from anywhere), it's typically viewed as not signalling the former aspects I just mentioned (grit, delayed gratification) but mostly signalling the latter (knowledge etc).

That's why I don't necessarily think that online education is going to supplant colleges from the outside as fast as we think. Of course it'll take over eventually, but I think it'll be slow and will happen more from the inside, by existing colleges, not just through disruption of new startups which will bankrupt existing colleges.

Precisely because of a growing number of companies which have stopped using college-degree requirements to hire for knowledge, and have started to require college degrees to select for 'the type of person who has the background and personal traits to be able to survive and complete college', which online education doesn't signal as well.