In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, MIT's new president Leo Rafael Reif argued that higher education is facing a crossroads the likes of which it hasn't seen in about 500 years. Not since the invention of the printing press, he wrote, has academia seen technological disruption as pronounced as what we are seeing right now.
Reif was talking about blossoming on- line learning technologies. What's more, higher education has got a long-simmering financial problem that's coming to a ...