I apologize for being unclear. Late night, complicated issue.
I should have just said we have empirical evidence that teachers themselves aren't that necessary. At the bottleneck where most failures happen -- lecture hall weed-out classes -- students have essentially the same non-relationship with profs that they have with lecturers on YouTube.
But even supposing universities are 30% better, internet learning is a classic disruptive technology. Old players in the market are too big to innovate. The new technology looks like a toy. It's lightweight and flexible. It's $200k cheaper. New players will emerge to capture some of that savings in exchange for removing some of the inefficiencies. Eventually they reach feature parity with the old guard, but with a lower price point, etc. etc.
I should have just said we have empirical evidence that teachers themselves aren't that necessary. At the bottleneck where most failures happen -- lecture hall weed-out classes -- students have essentially the same non-relationship with profs that they have with lecturers on YouTube.
But even supposing universities are 30% better, internet learning is a classic disruptive technology. Old players in the market are too big to innovate. The new technology looks like a toy. It's lightweight and flexible. It's $200k cheaper. New players will emerge to capture some of that savings in exchange for removing some of the inefficiencies. Eventually they reach feature parity with the old guard, but with a lower price point, etc. etc.
The worst case is Worse Is Better. I'm bullish.