A year ago I'd have agreed with you. I just changed colleges and spent a short gig at Princeton, and now I wouldn't doubt that what we think of as colleges today will remain in some shape.

The college experience is about independence and about sharing independence. It's not about the classes so much as it's about what comes out of those classes - what thoughts, what productions, etc. I just had my first video production class. I'm certain that the various technical lessons are ones that I could get for cheaper, and the various artistic lessons I'll skim over. What I wouldn't get is the feeling of community and collaboration and togetherness, the almost-fantasy of being alive and alone and at the same time together with everybody else. I'd also probably be hard-pressed to get the high-level gear that I get to use.

Granted, I'm in a unique position now because I'm at an art school rather than a generic lib-arts college. My student body is all geared towards certain things more than others. The result is that I'm in a community that feels uniquely welcoming of me, and it's a physical community, meaning that I'm living in the midst of these people, and it's a personal community, meaning I'm making, hopefully, lifetime connections and profoundly changing my life and my worldview. I get to live in the middle of extremely over-the-top people, extremely ambitious people who are ambitious in a way you can't find online. (There are two big tenants of ambition that I identify: One sort you find online right here; the other sort might be impossible to move gracefully online; in any event, it hasn't been done yet.)

I'm in the same position learning-wise that I was last year: All my classes feel beneath me, and in the areas of my expertise I'm quite a ways ahead of most of my peers. So last year I was considering dropping out rather than transferring and paying a shitton of cash - If I'm not learning, I reckoned, surely I could survive for a decade on the same amount of money and learn on my own?

Yes, but I'd lose a few instantly material things. I'd lose access to the career drive that my university provides: I'm expected to leave here with a portfolio good enough to land me anywhere I want to go, and the university will insist on my making it as good as possible. I'll lose the creme-de-la-creme of the professors here: Right now I get tutelage under Emmy Award-winners and studio executives and all sorts of people whose experience is much more useful to me when delivered in person over hours-long conversations. Finally, I'll lose the access that I have now to thousands of talented beautiful people looking for a way to spend an evening. Two days ago on a lark a kid and I finagled our way into an interview with a bestselling author and a movie star. That's quite an experience, and it's one that wouldn't have happened without the particular synergy of the guy I worked with to get the interview (I wouldn't have had the ambition to secure my way in, he wouldn't have known what-all to ask about). When you're with a unique group, there's a pulse that colleges are specifically designed to attract. Not all of them do this, and I don't know which ones do and which don't (I have my doubt about the Ivies, actually), but the ones that do will find themselves prized as always.

Now, what I do think will happen is that live-in colleges will change their path. We're going to see education happen faster and more in-depth at younger and younger ages. I suspect colleges will respond by specializing more and more, which is a good thing - it will create stronger and stronger communities of people. College sizes will shrink, as large schools become more difficult to keep interesting. College may also not be viewed as an essential part of finding employment, which is also good - it will strengthen the value of the experience for the people that choose to go.

I don't see why colleges have to beat every other option. That's like the argument that one form of entertainment will rule supreme over others, that books will be killed by plays will be killed my movies will be killed by video games, with all the other little anal arguments in between. For college to survive, all we need are a few dozen thousand people to decide that the fantastic experience of college is worth quite a lot of money, and I suspect it won't be hard to find them. There are enough people who've had real college experiences (now myself included) that the core ideas that made the experience so good will continue for a long time to come.