Higher Education in America

In 1997, anticipating the vast potential of online teaching, Peter Drucker even proclaimed that the traditional college campus would become as obsolete by 2020 as the typewriter and the quill pen.

Nor could the trends be explained by larger numbers of students going to school part-time or taking longer to finish.

In a national survey from 2009, half of the seniors reported that they had not written a single paper over

On the contrary, they say, professors who are active in research are more motivated than their unproductive colleagues to keep up-to-date with their field.

she found that twenty-five of the thirty participating universities realized significant gains in learning.

From 1961 to 2004, according to a series of self-reports from large samples of students, the average amount of time that

lower. One study issued by the US Department of Education found that among the high school graduates of 1992 who were college-qualified, only 52 percent of low-income students and 62 percent of middle-income students had entered a four-year college by 1994.

More than 100,000 people worldwide signed up for a course on machine learning but only 13,000 completed the course. Introduction to Data Bases drew 92,000 enrollees but only 7,000 finished.

In the most rigorous evaluation yet conducted of an online course, William Bowen and his colleagues found that students in dozens of courses who were taught statistics in the blended, Carnegie Mellon manner learned as much as those taught in the conventional lecture course format.