IMS Global: Online enrollment is increasing at a rapid pace as residential enrollment on today's campuses has largely plateaued. How do you think these changes will impact our society? And what form will future learning take?

JVL: While the higher education marketplace continues to diversify in terms of institutional and delivery structures, this development simply expands the populations that have access to much of the content of higher education. These changes make content more easily and readily available to many people, especially those who work in careers or who do not have the financial or other opportunities to participate in traditional higher education. One of the consequences of this is that many traditional institutions will become more complex, offering not only traditional residential programs but also extensive online programs to expand their scale beyond what's possible on a physical campus.

As online delivery continues to expand, it's likely that we will see an increasing specialization in the educational content available to consumers. The generic liberal arts education or the ordinary business or engineering degree, built on the assumption of full-time residential attendance at institutions where content is only one part of the service provided, will not necessarily serve many new consumers of higher education content. These newer consumers will want specific content, for specific purposes, and will seek out programs that deliver content with minimal extraneous enhancement.

One impact of the separation of content from the context of delivery is that the continuing fragmentation of the higher education marketplace will accelerate. The prestige institutions will maintain and probably increase their exclusivity, the alternative delivery mechanisms will gain market share, and the less prestigious traditional institutions will struggle to maintain a place in this highly differentiated market.

The separation of content from context will also change our understanding of the result of post secondary education. The simple notion of a baccalaureate degree being the token of having done something significant (college) will probably give way to a wide variety of outcome degrees or certificates of competency or other tokens of achievement that for many will be more than sufficient, or may be the additional value added onto a traditional degree to give an edge in the employment market. How that works out is not easy to predict. We could see a retail marketplace for higher education with elite stores that charge high prices for high touch services and the presumption of high quality, generic stores, or supermarkets of higher education that provide content of high quality at low prices with low touch and little attention to prestige, and similar manifestations of highly differentiated consumer product or consumer service marketplaces.

The challenges to regulators will be significant, and we'll see lots of specific outcome testing to ensure that the business graduates who profess a certain level of accounting knowledge actually have it. The current exams for nurses and other professionals, CPA's for example, are models for this, and as society seeks specific competence for specific purposes, colleges will find themselves more and more focused on producing people who can pass those competence, content-based exams. While we'll pass through a critical thinking kind of testing phase, this will likely give way to much more specific knowledge-based testing that will give employers guidance on the skill sets of the people who they want to hire, and as those skill sets change, the tests will change, forcing people to return to the educational services sector to acquire the content to pass the next round of competency test.

Equally significant will be what we do with the production of knowledge, the research engine that has been the primary force for American global success for many generations. This research engine, constructed primarily on the base of the traditional college/university model, may become much less integrated into the educational process and migrate into more focused, research intensive enterprises affiliated with or part of universities, but not necessarily part of the educational enterprise. This will respond to the tremendous cost of supporting research and the inability of institutions to offer lifetime tenure to researchers whose output is unpredictable over long periods. Instead, we'll see research organizations with faculty who have 5-year rolling tenure, based on their performance in the competitive world of research. If they continue to succeed, they will continue to be supported, but if they fall out of the competition, they will be asked to find alternative employment. This is also a reflection of the specialization that is characteristic of highly diversified and highly competitive industries.

Similarly, the role of faculty will continue to change, with the proportion of fully tenured full-time faculty, outside of elite institutions, continuing to decline in favor of contract or contingent faculty who teach and have the skills to teach within the multiple delivery mechanisms and institutions that have appeared and will continue to proliferate. These faculty will find ways to enhance their value by focusing on high productivity in content delivery, on the maintenance of expertise, and on skills related to the creation of content for the various delivery institutions. These individuals may well end up well paid, although at present, they have not found a way to translate the high lifetime value of the traditional tenured faculty career into an equally high value proposition for a contingent faculty career. The competitive context for faculty, in any case, will clearly become more intense as it has for employees of other high value consumer service industries.