Nun, ich “stecke” nicht im amerikanischen Hochschulwesen, aber was Clay Shirky hier als das unwiederbringliche Ende des “Golden Age of American academia” beschreibt, ist sicher eine, wenn nicht die Erklärung für das gegenwärtige MOOC-Phänomen.

“The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.”
Clay Shirky, Blog, 29. Januar 2014