There have been predictions that technology will drag
down textbook publishing, just as it did the music industry. Now, some experts suggest
that the same consumer demand for single tunes will impact higher education as a
whole.
“This last decade of the music industry presages the
coming decade of education,” wrote Martin Smith, chief revenue officer of
Noodle, a company that creates interactive tools designed to help students with online
research, in an essay for Quartz. “Choice is expanding at every level, from
pre-K to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is
becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education,
are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services.”
While Smith may have a point, it doesn’t mean he is
right. Music lovers may have had little trouble turning away from $20 compact
discs in favor buying a song for 99 cents or paying a monthly fee for a music-streaming
service, but students deciding on college are not the same sort of consumer.
“The consumer choice is for the bundler—the brand, the
label, university—and not the individual course content,” Derek Newton, senior
communications director at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, wrote in
an article for The Atlantic. “Consumers buy Stanford or Princeton in a way no one ever
bought EMI or Universal.”
To Newton, turning the college experience into
individual courses may provide plenty of great content, but also much less to
study.
“In the current system, it may not be efficient to
maintain fine-arts programs, but most people think it’s important to have
them,” he wrote. “It has long been part of colleges’ mission to expose students
to new ideas and disciplines. On campus, even business students, for example,
are typically required to study literature and other topics in the humanities.
Some may call that inefficient; others call it essential.”
