Productive engines as they are, universities are flawed. They’re expensive, inefficient bureaucracies that are often inequitable. I have confidence universities

Productive engines as they are, universities are flawed. They’re expensive, inefficient bureaucracies that are often inequitable. I have confidence universities can be disrupted, and new, stronger ideas will take their place in society in due time – the imperfections are too fatal in the long term to brush away. There is no shortage of interesting companies and experimental policies trying to find alternatives to universities as a product. But whatever takes the place of universities will also have to fill the role they currently play to the communities that grow around and beyond it, into the rest of the world. And fortunately to those who manage to reinvent this community engine, with a strong and growing community by your side, building great products become much less risky. People also mean tons of different things, some very tenuously related, when they talk about "universities." Even among students at a given university, goals/desires may differ enormously: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz.... The "elite" university (which means it has fairly competitive entrance criteria) only consists of a couple hundred schools. They'll likely be fine, and they're also likely the entrepreneurial hotbeds the author references. It's all the other schools where we might see the greatest transformations, particularly in the short and medium terms. Another challenge "the next university" faces is the subsidies the current university system gets right now. Whatever might replace the current system will either need to tap those subsidies itself or be so good that it can compete with the current crop of subsidies.