In another effort to use technology effectively, Carol Twigg has been working with colleges to reconfigure the way their professors teach large introductory courses in a variety of subjects ranging from chemistry and biology to English, fine arts, and sociology.

In 1997, anticipating the vast potential of online teaching, Peter Drucker even proclaimed that the traditional college campus would become as obsolete by 2020 as the typewriter and the quill pen.

is to diminish the number of lectures by (high-priced) professors while employing technology to allow more problem solving and active learning through the use of collaborating groups with graduate student tutors on hand to help when students get stuck.

Still remaining is the possibility of achieving major cost reductions through the use of online courses. It is quite possible that technology will permit colleges to offer an education of equal (or better) quality with fewer professors and thus bring the same type of cost savings to higher education that industry has long enjoyed through

A staggering 98 percent of all published articles in the arts and humanities are never cited, and the corresponding figure for articles in the social sciences is 75 percent, a figure only slightly less dismaying.

According to Page Smith, a longtime professor at UCLA, “the vast majority of the so-called research turned out in the modern university is essentially worthless.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reports that more than two-thirds of the almost 300,000 students in its 2012 survey used social media “sometimes” during class, while 39 percent of freshmen and 31 percent of seniors did so “frequently.” Promoting Student Learning and Institutional Improvement: Lessons from NSSE at 13 (2012), p. 18.

More than 80 percent of government research money goes to just one hundred academic institutions.3

lower. One study issued by the US Department of Education found that among the high school graduates of 1992 who were college-qualified, only 52 percent of low-income students and 62 percent of middle-income students had entered a four-year college by 1994.