The disruption to come

By R.A. THIS week's Free exchange column looks at the economics of online higher education:
Two big forces underpin a university’s costs. The first is the need for physical proximity. Adding students is expensive—they require more buildings and instructors—and so a university’s marginal cost of production is high. That means that even in a competitive market, where price converges towards marginal cost, modern education is dear.
It is also hard to raise productivity. University lecturers can teach at most a few hundred students each semester—the maximum that can be squeezed into lecture halls and exam-marking rosters. Because it is so labour intensive higher education relies on large numbers of instructors paid relatively modest salaries. More...