Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
3) Personal growth. Whether it be a professor, coach, clergyperson or even an older friend, every student needs a mentor or two who will take an interest when life knocks their personal gyroscope out from under them. Often this person teaches and guides through modeling; that is, by demonstrating how they live, much more than what they say about living. Modeling is extremely difficult to achieve online.
4) Social growth. Clubs, groups, weekends at the university place in the mountains, all provide an invaluable part of the benefit of higher education. Facebook is a laughably inadequate replacement for real opportunities to learn and practice social skills. Only in-person interactions can partially fill the hollow place in all our hearts that is the inevitable result of our potentially overwhelming sense of separateness as individual human beings.
5) Post-graduate reference support from professors. It is awfully hard to write a meaningful letter of reference for a student you have never met, although I have to attempt it all the time.
6) Lifelong education. This is a little off our track, but there will always be a place where the need for new skills and knowledge meets the need to be socially engaged. That is where the short courses and light content of lifelong learning and the recreational side of continuing education comes in. I recently attended a three-session course on Wagnerian Opera at something called the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Texas Tech University. Everything I learned about opera I could have easily studied on the internet. It didn't matter. I had a great time reconnecting with my tribe of older people sharing certain cultural interests. I will do it again on another topic soon.
A Vision for the Future
Having seen what SRUs are good at and what they are not very good at, it is time to grab a glimpse of where SRUs need to be headed.
When technology is fully embraced because the need for a better and cheaper product finally trumps the political protection of the status quo, the state regional university will be replaced as part of new state university systems in which local institutions will play a very different role. These new local institutions could be called Learning Satellite Centers (LSCs).
These new university systems will support the shift of undergraduate higher education to pre-employment training in marketable skills. General education courses that were previously considered necessary to producing the theoretical "educated man/woman" will be optional. They will be readily available for those who wish to take them but, in addition to, and not replacing, the marketable skills courses. They should also be available at any time during a graduate's life at no additional tuition charge. Graduation with a professionally oriented degree should come with a free lifetime subscription to all the personal enrichment courses you wish to take.
Actual course content in the pre-employment programs will be delivered electronically from a very few University Centers across the state. These centers will likely be housed at the currently recognized flagship institutions. In Texas, that would be Texas Tech, the University of Texas-Austin, and Texas A&M University-College Station. Whether or not semester-long courses are the best way to package this content will depend on what a particular aggregation of content needs to accomplish in the context of preparing the student for extended apprenticeship experiences in their chosen field, as managed through the LSC.
Much content will take the form of high-budget, high-quality multimedia productions with delivery available to all popular devices, from desktop computers to cell phones. Access to learning materials, from course movies and podcasts to reading materials, will be through an expanded electronic distribution system that will eliminate the need for paper-based academic libraries.