I haven't seen any evidence that Big Name universities are going to lose their prestige any time soon (a point which is actually not addressed much in the artic

I haven't seen any evidence that Big Name universities are going to lose their prestige any time soon (a point which is actually not addressed much in the article). When I tell people what Top-Ranked college I went to, the immediate response 4 times out of 5 is something like, "wow, you must be really smart!" However, I think if the average "intelligence" (however you want to define that) is higher than the population at large, it's more that the lower ~30-50% of the intelligence spectrum is severely underrepresented, and the upper 1% is maybe twice as common as you'd expect. There's still plenty of people with normal talents. All of which is to say that the prestige of my undergraduate education far outweighs what it might actually be worth. While there might be a significant cultural shift, I frankly think that the cultural bias is too ingrained to change radically any time soon. What I think is likely to happen is that self-designed courses of study are more likely to become perfectly acceptable alternatives, rather than something stigmatized as weird.