Is the end of universities coming?

 The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools around the world to conduct classes remotely. It was not entirely successful and research shows that many people prefer traditional classes at school and contact with their peers. However, standard colleges and universities may soon become history.

Open online courses (massive open online courses - MOOC) have been present on the "market" for several years and are gradually developing. The greatest specialists in the IT industry got involved in them. For example, Andrew Ng - former Google Brain project coordinator, founded Coursera. He has contracts for the provision of educational services with the Universities of Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and Pennsylvania, John Hopkins, and the California Institute of Technology. Harvard and MIT jointly created the EdX platform. Sebastian Thrun from Google X created Udacity.

Already, MOOCs are said to be "the budding global Internet revolution in higher education." Some go further and say that open online courses can "unlock billions of minds that will solve the biggest problems in our world." The challenge remains to make employers perceive the certificates of completion of such courses as equivalent to the diplomas of traditional universities. If it succeeds, the functioning of the higher education sector will change forever.

The verification of MOOC participants will be solved by face recognition algorithms and identification algorithms based on the speed of typing on the keyboard. Plagiarism will be caught by automatically comparing written papers with cavernous databases. MOOCs will issue references not just for attending classes, but for passing special exams that will test specific competencies.

This mechanism, however, will impose a "winner takes all" system. Students will be able to take part in online classes conducted by the stars of world science from Harvard or Stanford for free and receive recommendations important for future employers. Who will decide to pay tuition fees in such a case? So it is estimated that by 2030 half of American universities may go bankrupt. Even if some schools survive, they will see a drastic decline in enrollment and income, and massive layoffs in both administration and teachers.

It is also justified to ask about the resistance of the part of the academic community that does not work infamous global universities. Because it is these people who will go into oblivion if it turns out that most young people will choose George Church's online genetics lecture, instead of the boring classes at their alma mater by uncharacteristic retired professors. And so, out of over 25,000 universities in the world, there will be perhaps 100 left to replace the rest.