It’s easy to sell books and oth­er com­modi­ties on the web. It’s not easy to deliv­er a qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion. But two con­verg­ing trends point toward a future when we will see the tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ty give way to an online alter­na­tive — some­thing I was­n’t will­ing to bank on two years ago. First, Sil­i­con Val­ley is final­ly focus­ing on e‑learning. Udac­i­ty, Cours­era, Kahn Acad­e­my, EdX — they’re all look­ing to lift e‑learning out of a long peri­od of stag­na­tion. And, sec­ond, times are tough, and the tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem does­n’t care enough about man­ag­ing costs, while wrong­ly assum­ing that it has a cap­tive audi­ence.

This week­end, The New York Times took a good look at the financ­ing of a col­lege edu­ca­tion and high­light­ed a few stag­ger­ing data points.

• The U.S. has racked up more than $1 tril­lion in stu­dent loans.
• Today 94 per­cent of stu­dents earn­ing a bachelor’s degree take out loans — up from 45 per­cent in 1993.
• It’s esti­mat­ed that the “aver­age debt [per stu­dent] in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 per­cent owing more than $54,000 and 3 per­cent more than $100,000.”
• “Pay­ments are being made on just 38 per­cent of the bal­ance of fed­er­al stu­dent loans, down from 46 per­cent five years ago.”
• Final­ly, state fund­ing of edu­ca­tion is going down, and tuition is going up, which means that the fig­ures above will just get worse.

You don’t need me to spell things out. Pay­ing for a col­lege edu­ca­tion is get­ting unsus­tain­able, so much so that many expect a cri­sis in the col­lege loan mar­ket in the com­ing years. And then you con­sid­er this. Many uni­ver­si­ties seem indif­fer­ent to the dif­fi­cul­ties stu­dents face, if they’re not inten­tion­al­ly exac­er­bat­ing the prob­lem. At one point in the Times arti­cle, E. Gor­don Gee, the pres­i­dent of Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, goes on record say­ing, “I read­i­ly admit it … I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have giv­en sig­nif­i­cant thought to the impact of col­lege costs on fam­i­lies.” Now lis­ten to the lat­est episode of Plan­et Mon­ey, The Real Price of Col­lege (audio), which under­scores a more galling fact — many col­leges think that they gain a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage if they have a high stick­er price. For many schools, low­er tuition is a sign of weak­ness, not strength.

Uni­ver­si­ties can behave this way because they think they have a cap­tive audi­ence. Because col­lege grads still earn con­sid­er­ably more than high school grads, col­leges assume that stu­dents will keep enrolling. But what will hap­pen when cash-strapped stu­dents are pre­sent­ed with a viable alter­na­tive? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I would­n’t be sur­prised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year mod­el (and the human­i­ties too) and offer stu­dents a very tar­get­ed online edu­ca­tion in “prac­ti­cal” fields — from account­ing to cod­ing to nurs­ing to law and busi­ness — at a dra­mat­i­cal­ly low­er cost. Here, the edu­ca­tion cycle gets short­ened to per­haps two years, and then stu­dents get cre­den­tialed (maybe by a trust­ed third-par­ty provider) and go to work, only to return lat­er in their careers to take more cours­es in spe­cial­ized areas. This mod­el will require the right tech­nol­o­gy plat­form (some­thing that will get worked out fair­ly soon) and a change in the expec­ta­tions of employ­ers and soci­ety more broad­ly (some­thing that will take time to devel­op, but less time than com­pla­cent col­leges think).

The new sys­tem won’t be bet­ter than the cur­rent one in many respects. It won’t offer a round­ed edu­ca­tion. The teach­ing will be less per­son­al. Long-last­ing social bonds won’t be made as eas­i­ly. (You’ll need to pay the big bucks at a tra­di­tion­al school for that. No, they won’t all go away.) And the teach­ing jobs cre­at­ed by these uni­ver­si­ties won’t be ter­ri­bly ful­fill­ing or lucra­tive. But the new sys­tem will offer a more focused and afford­able edu­ca­tion to stu­dents on a mass scale. And when stu­dents grad­u­ate most­ly debt free, they won’t com­plain. Nor will they be forced to forego col­lege alto­geth­er, as some would now advo­cate. There’s per­haps some­thing inevitable about this shift. But the insou­ciance of admin­is­tra­tors and fac­ul­ty inhab­it­ing the cur­rent sys­tem won’t do any­thing to delay it. Stick around, and you’ll prob­a­bly see that I’m right. And if you think my look into the crys­tal ball is wrong, let me know.

In the mean­time, we give you anoth­er take on how to solve our world’s edu­ca­tion­al prob­lems — Father Gui­do Sar­duc­ci’s Five Minute Uni­ver­si­ty:

For oodles of free cours­es, don’t for­get to vis­it our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.