First of all, it is not true that most learning is done from the text. If that were the case, colleges would have gone away with the advent of affordable publishers of books, not just online universities. If you went to institutions at which this was the case, then you didn’t go to very good ones!

Secondly, as well as cutting costs, you are again ignoring quality. A few years ago, I went to an alumni association meeting at which the Dean spoke about why they had made the decision NOT to go into online learning. He said that they had done a study, and had calculated that to produce one course at a level which was equivalent to that they offered on campus would cost them $500,000, and they could use it exactly twice before the material would become obsolete. Obviously, the majority of schools now offering courses online are not at that level, but then neither are their brick-and-mortar courses at the level of that institution. Most of the brick-and-mortar institutions I’ve spoken with have admitted that their online courses aren’t as good as those held on campus, but they do it to meet demand so that they can increase enrollments.

Another issue is the fact that most traditional students aren’t self-motivated enough to follow through on online courses. The only thing that makes school bearable for many is that they can get together with their friends or meet new people in a way they are not doing online. I don’t foresee that going away.

In short, I think that while there will continue to be a growth (and hopefully an improvement) of online offerings, I don’t see an imminent danger for traditional colleges. Most students want to go full-time and get through quickly, rather than taking twice as long to finish (witness the struggle in part-time MBA programs these days; students are getting younger and more full-time than they ever were before). I think another factor is that there are so few good jobs available for those who haven’t graduated from college yet; high school graduates want more to do than just to sit in their parents’ living rooms doing online homework. I don’t see that changing, so there will certainly be a market for traditional colleges in the near future.

In truth, the only people that have negative attitudes towards online education are people who never legitimately took college level online classes from regionally accredited non-profit Universities. Unlike them, I have taken classes both on-campus and online, so I can honestly say that college level online classes can be better than traditional classes in many cases.