The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.

下一代在線教育是學生的福音——也是大學的災難。

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor』s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn』t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn』t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

和成千上萬的其他美國人一樣，Barbara Solvig去年丟了工作。50歲的她是三個孩子的母親，多年前，她在東北伊利諾伊州大學讀書，不過未能拿到文憑。此後，和有本科文憑的同事相比，她的工資總要低一些。所以，一月份她被芝加哥一家醫院的人力資源部門被辭退時，她知道自己該獲得一張本科文憑了。這麼做可不容易，因為四年文憑要求Solvig生活缺乏的兩大奢侈品：離開勞動大軍數年，還有一大筆錢。

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. 「It sounds like a scam,」 Solvig thought—she』d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

幸運的是，現在有了新選擇。她上網搜索了適合她錢包和時間的東西，然後有一則廣告引起了她的注意：一家名為StraighterLine的公司在提供會計學、統計學、數學等在線課程。這其實並無非同尋常之處——成百上千的機構在網上兜售學歷。不過讓StraighterLine脫穎而出的是她需要的那麼多課程，公司每月只收取99元。「簡直像騙局」，Solvig這樣想——她在網上遇到的騙子公司和硬性推銷戰術太多了。不過區區99元，為什麼不冒個險？

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.

Solvig全心投入到學習中，每天學習18個小時。出乎她的意料，這些課程正是她要找的。每天早上她坐在餐桌旁，登陸網站，接觸課程資料，讀課文，看視頻，聽播客，完成練習，然後參加考試。也有在線學習羣，她可以通過郵件列表和即時通信與其他學生協作。StraighterLine的課程由具有博士學位的教授研發監督，還給她委派了一名顧問，可以通過電子郵件聯繫。如果Solvig停滯不前，需要幫助，真實的老師隨時都在，不論白天黑夜，只要一點滑鼠即可。

Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

對於Solvig——她需要儘快回到勞動大軍中——很關鍵的是，StraighterLine讓學生按照自己的進度快慢學習課程。一旦一門課結束了，Solvig可以繼續下一門，而無需多支付費用。在不到2個月的時間裡，她已經完成了整整4門課，總額還不到200元。如果在東北伊利諾伊州大學，同樣的課程要花她2700元以上，在卡普蘭大學則為4200，鳳凰城大學為6300， 而在私立名校，則大概相當於中美小國的國內總產值了，而且這些學校花的時間要長2-3倍。

And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college』s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn』t doing much teaching. 「He just stands there,」 Solvig』s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.

如果Solvig需要任何證明表明在線教育貨真價實的東西，某天她女兒從當地社區大學回來抱怨數學課時，她找到了這種證據。當Solvig看了看教材，意識到女兒用的教材和她在StraighterLine用的完全一樣，都由教科書巨擘McGraw-Hill編寫。唯一的區別是，她女兒花的錢比她多得多，而且只能按照學校的課表進行。雖然有個教授，也不怎麼教東西。「他就往那一站，」Solvig的女兒說，而學生們都自學。

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.

StraighterLine是伯克·史密斯的創意，他是一位互聯網企業家，執意要對已有500多年歷史的高等教育DNA進行改革。史密斯希望看到學生們能夠無縫結合從眾多在線提供商處得到的學分和學位，每位提供商都專攻某些課題——最重要的——價格競爭激烈，而非囿於象牙塔內或面對無名的校園，史密斯本人可能是改革大學的人物，也可能不是，但有辦法有遠景徹底改變學生體驗高等教育並為之買單方式的人勢必要出現。

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It』s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They』re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

近些年，美國人已經習慣了生活在曾經輝煌的各種工業的烏煙瘴氣殘骸之中——汽車製造業破產、華爾街的品牌銀行倒閉，報業垂死掙扎。在這種環境下，我們很有衝動從學院和大學的永久性中找安慰，認為我們舉世無比的高等教育體系肯定會培養未來幾十年的研究和知識工人，但這只是幻象。在信息產業中也有那樣的一個時期，技術讓銷售信息的成本之低，跌破了記錄，甚至不穩定。

In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.

這兩種趨勢結合起來動搖了當代大學的基礎，和其他貌似堅不可摧的機構被四分五裂的方式大同小異。在有些方面，巨變倍受歡迎。學生們將從極其低廉的價格中大受裨益——尤其是像Solvig這樣缺乏可隨意支配的收入又亟需高等學歷在日益惡劣的經濟環境中競爭的人。不過，這些巨變也嚴重地威脅著大學提供教學以外的能力，而這種能力正是社會所依靠的：科學、文化、代與代之間的文化傳承。

Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it』s coming, and sooner than you think.

這種轉變是好還是不好，毫無意義——事情正在發生，而且比你想像的要快。

I met Burck Smith in his office on L Street in downtown Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008. Thirty-nine years old, with degrees from Williams and Harvard, Smith looks remarkably like what you』d expect an Ivy League alum named 「Burck Smith」 to look like: Michael-Lewis-minus-ten-years handsome, open-collar shirts and sport coats, the relaxed confidence of privilege. He talked like someone who』d seen the future and was determined to be there when it arrived.

2008年春天，我在華盛頓特區的L街伯克·史密斯的辦公室同他會面。39歲，擁有威廉姆斯和哈佛的學位，史密斯屬於典型的常春藤校友：同邁克爾·劉易斯一樣英俊，但要年輕10歲，襯衫敞開衣領，運動裝，帶著因為優越而放鬆的自信。他談話時彷佛看到未來一樣，而且註定了與未來共進退。

Smith was full of optimism about StraighterLine, which he planned to debut in September of that year. It would be the realization of an idea he』d been dreaming about since he was a graduate student at Harvard』s John F. Kennedy School of Government in the late 1990s. In 1999, after finishing his master』s degree, Smith wrote a 「looking back from the future」 article, set in a hypothetical 2015. By that time, the higher education landscape would look 「dramatically different than it did at the turn of the millennium,」 he predicted.

史密斯對StraighterLine完全充滿樂觀，他計劃當年九月推出該項目。這實現了他自上個世界90年代末期在哈佛約翰肯尼迪政府學院讀研時就一直存在的夢想。1999年，在拿到碩士學位之後，史密斯寫了篇名為「從未來回顧」的文章，背景是假想中的2015年。到那時，他預測，高等教育前景將與「千禧年伊始的教育千差萬別」。

Technological change was the spark that ignited the wildfire of change. Like a hole in a dike, cheap and instantaneous Internet-based content delivery and communication nibbled away at barriers to institutional competition… . Suddenly, a student seeking an introductory statistics course could choose from hundreds of online courses from anywhere in the world… . Feeling the effects of low-cost competition, site-based education providers started cutting course costs and prices to attract students.

技術變化是點燃變化的火種。千里之壩，潰於蟻穴，廉價即時的互聯網內容提供及通訊蠶食著機制性競爭的障礙…突然之間，想找統計學入門課程的學生可以從世界各地成百上千的在線課程中選擇…感受到了低成本競爭的影響，校園教育開始消減課程成本和價格以吸引學生。

That same year, Smith took the first steps toward achieving this vision, launching an Internet startup company called Smarthinking, which he cofounded with Christopher Gergen, the son of well-known Washington insider David Gergen. Smarthinking provided on-demand, one-on-one tutoring in a range of introductory college courses, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The tutors, people with bachelor』s and master』s degrees in their fields, communicated with students via computer, using an onscreen, interactive 「whiteboard.」 Math students typed in questions, graphed equations, and interacted with their tutors in real time from their own PCs. Writing tutors gave feedback on essays within twenty-four hours.

同年，史密斯邁出了達到此目標的第一步，推出了名為Smarthinking的互聯網創業公司，這是他與華盛頓知名業內人士David Gergen的兒子Christopher Gergen合建的。Smarthinking根據客戶要求，就很多大學入門課程提供一對一的輔導，一天24小時，一週7天。導師們都有各自領域的學士和碩士學位，他們通過計算機用視頻互動「白板」和學生溝通。數學學生在自己的電腦上提問、寫方程式，與導師實時互動。寫作課老師會在24小時內就學生的作文給出反饋。

Smarthinking survived the dot-com crash because, unlike most of their entrepreneurial peers, Smith and Gergen had actually come up with a working business model. Their clients were colleges and universities which, looking to cut costs, outsourced tutoring in the same way companies farm out IT work, back-office support, and customer service to call centers overseas. Smith and Gergen knew that tutoring could take advantage of the same powerful economies of scale that made call centers profitable. It would be cost prohibitive for a single college to provide on-demand 24/7 tutoring for a few sections of, say, organic chemistry—the college would have to hire teams of full-time workers to work in eight-hour shifts, and much of their time would be idle. Smarthinking pooled the demand from hundreds of colleges and tens of thousands of students while hiring credentialed tutors in places like India and the Philippines. As long as 「on demand」 was defined as a high likelihood of being served within a few minutes, economies of scale and cheap foreign labor could be combined to drive per-student service costs to unheard-of lows.

Smarthinking頂住了網路公司泡沫的衝擊，依然存在，不像大多數企業同儕，史密斯和Gergen已有了運作成功的商業模式。他們的客戶是學院和大學，都在力爭削減成本，跟公司外包IT工作、辦公室後勤支援、將客戶服務外包給海外呼叫中心一樣，他們也在外包教學。史密斯和Gergen知道教學可以利用使呼叫中心盈利的強大有力的規模經濟。讓一所大學按學生要求在少數幾個領域比如有機化學提供24/7輔導成本上不允許——大學必須僱傭全職教師隊伍8小時輪班，而大部分時間他們都無事可做。Smarthinking將幾百所大學成千上萬學生的需求彙集在一起，然後僱傭印度和菲律賓等地有資格認證的導師。只要「按需」可以定義為在幾分鐘之內就能得到服務，規模經濟和廉價的外國勞力就可以聯手將學生人均成本減到前所未有之低。

As a result, colleges could buy multihour blocks of 24/7 tutoring in subjects like biology and calculus from Smarthinking for much less than it would have cost them to provide that service on their own. By 2008, the company had 386 clients, ranging from big research universities to community colleges and the U.S. Army. Major publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin packaged hours of Smarthinking tutoring with college textbooks and instructional software.

因此，大學可以從Smarthinking購買生物學微積分等學科24/7多時段模塊教學，費用比他們自己提供此類服務要低得多。截止2008年，公司已擁有386名客戶，從大型研究型大學到社區學院到美國軍隊。大型出版商如Pearson和Houghton Mifflin將Smarthinking的課程和大學課本及教學軟體打包。

But Smarthinking still fell short of Smith』s ambitions. He had built a particularly efficient cog in the mammoth, long-established higher education machine—but he hadn』t yet transformed it.

但Smarthinking仍未能滿足史密斯的抱負。在歷史悠久的高等教育的龐大機器上，他打造了格外有效的齒輪——但還未能改造這臺機器。

To be sure, much had changed in higher education. Technology had indeed altered how people went to college—that much Smith had gotten right back in 1999. Broadband access had become ubiquitous, and textbook companies had converted their standard introductory course content into inexpensive, Web-friendly form. While college students in 1999 were still making the transition to a Web-dominated world, 2008』s undergraduates had never known anything else. Both traditional colleges and for-profit companies like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix were diving headfirst into the online market, and students—especially people with day jobs like Barbara Solvig—were signing up in record numbers. Over four million college students—one-fifth of the total nationwide—took at least one online course last year.

誠然，高等教育發生了翻天覆地的變化。技術其實已經改變了人們讀大學的方式——跟史密斯1999年的預想差不多。寬頻接入無處不在，教科書公司已經將他們的標準入門課程內容轉換成便宜的網路友好格式。1999年的大學生還在努力過渡到網路主導的世界，2008年的大學生除了網路，一無所知。傳統大學和贏利公司如卡普蘭和鳳凰城大學都勇往直前沖向在線市場，而學生們——尤其是像Barbara Solvig這樣白天還要上班的人——都在報名，數量打破了記錄。去年，超過400萬名大學生——全國的1/5——至少參加了一門在線課程。

But the other shoe had yet to drop. Even as the cost of educating students fell, tuition rose at nearly three times the rate of inflation. Web-based courses weren』t providing the promised price competition—in fact, many traditional universities were charging extra for online classes, tacking a 「technology fee」 onto their standard (and rising) rates. Rather than trying to overturn the status quo, big, publicly traded companies like Phoenix were profiting from it by cutting costs, charging rates similar to those at traditional universities, and pocketing the difference.

不過另一隻鞋子還有待落下。雖然教育學生的成本下跌了，學費增長卻幾乎是通脹率的3倍。以網路為基礎的課程沒有提供承諾的價格競爭——事實上，許多傳統大學對在線課程額外收費，在他們的標準（而且日益高漲的）費用上又增加了「技術費」。公開交易的大型公司如鳳凰城大學並沒有試圖推翻現狀，而是通過消減成本，收取與傳統大學相當的費用，將差額裝入口袋。

This, Smith explained, was where StraighterLine came in. The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call- center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses à la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run. Burck Smith simply decided to get there first.

史密斯解釋說，這就是StraighterLine進入的地方。在互聯網上存儲和溝通信息的成本幾乎已降為零。標準入門課程的電子課程內容已成了低成本商品。高等教育中唯一昂貴的東西就是勞力，即只有人才可以的時候僱傭聰明博學的人來幫助學生的價格。而獨一無二的Smarthinking的呼救中心模型也使這變得更便宜。通過把這些東西放在一起，史密斯可以按照學生要求提供大學入門課程，而訂購價格可以少一位、兩位甚至三位數：99美元/月。經濟學告訴我們在長期中，價格降至邊際成本。伯克·史密斯就想第一個到達。

To anyone who has watched the recent transformation of other information-based industries, the implications of all this are glaringly clear. Colleges charge students exorbitant sums partly because they can, but partly because they have to. Traditional universities are complex and expensive, providing a range of services from scientific research and graduate training to mass entertainment via loosely affiliated professional sports franchises. To fund these things, universities tap numerous streams of revenue: tuition, government funding, research grants, alumni and charitable donations. But the biggest cash cow is lower-division undergraduate education. Because introductory courses are cheap to offer, they』re enormously profitable. The math is simple: Add standard tuition rates and any government subsidies, and multiply that by several hundred freshmen in a big lecture hall. Subtract the cost of paying a beleaguered adjunct lecturer or graduate student to teach the course. There』s a lot left over. That money is used to subsidize everything else.

對於任何目睹其他以信息為基礎的產業最近變化的人，這些含意可謂一目瞭然。大學向學生徵收天價學費，一部分原因是他們可以這麼做，部分原因也是因為他們不得已。傳統大學龐雜而昂貴，提供的服務從科學研究到研究生培養，到通過鬆散附屬的職業運動特許提供大眾娛樂。為了資助這些活動，大學想盡辦法開源節流：學費、政府資助、研究撥款、校友和慈善捐款。但是最大的搖錢樹卻是層次較低的本科生教育。因為提供入門課程很便宜，利潤相當大。這個算術題很簡單：把標準學費和任何政府補貼相加，然後和演講廳裏的大一新生人數相乘，減去助理講師或研究生的上課費用，剩下不少錢。這個錢就用於補貼其他東西。

But this arrangement, however beneficial to society as a whole, is not a particularly good deal for the freshman gutting through an excruciating fifty minutes in the back of a lecture hall. Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter—and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.

但這種安排，不論對社會整體多麼有益，對於要在演講廳後面經歷痛苦的50分鐘的大一新生而言，並非好事。在向傳統大學支付幾千元和向StraighterLine等公司支付區區數百元就得到更便捷更針對他們需求的服務之間，大多數學生都願意選擇後者——大學少了成千上萬的錢用於圖書館、棒球隊、中國古詩詞專家等等。

What happens when the number of students making that choice reaches a critical mass? Consider the fate of the newspaper industry over the last five years. Like universities, newspapers relied on financial cross-subsidization to stay afloat, using fat profits from local advertising and classifieds to prop up money-losing news bureaus. This worked perfectly well until two things happened: the Internet made opinion and news content from around the world available for nothing, and the free online classified clearinghouse Craigslist obliterated newspapers』 bedrock revenue source, the want ads. Suddenly, people didn』t need to buy a newspaper to read news, and the papers』 ability to subsidize expensive reporting with ad revenue was crippled. The result: plummeting newspaper profits leading to a tidal wave of layoffs and bankruptcies, and the shuttering of bureaus in Washington and abroad.

如果如此選擇的學生變成了大多數，會怎樣？想想過去5年裏報界的命運。和大學一樣，報紙仰賴財政交叉補貼才得以經營，用當地廣告和分類廣告的豐厚收入來彌補虧損的新聞部門。這一切都運作完美，直至兩件事情發生：互聯網讓人們可以免費得到世界各地的觀點和新聞內容，而免費的在線分類信息交換Craigslist使得報紙的暴利來源招聘廣告不復存在。突然之間，人們不需要買報紙看新聞了，而且報紙用廣告收入補貼昂貴的新聞報道的能力也大打折扣了。結果：報紙一落千丈的利潤導致潮水般的裁員和破產，華盛頓和海外大批辦公室紛紛關門大吉。

Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education』s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound. Ivy League and other elite institutions will be relatively unaffected, because they』re selling a product that』s always scarce and never cheap: prestige. Small liberal arts colleges will also endure, because the traditional model—teachers and students learning together in a four-year idyll—is still the best, and some people will always be willing and able to pay for it.

像Craigslist一樣，StraighterLine威脅了一個大型產業利潤最豐厚的部分：大學新生課程，類似於高校中的分類廣告。如果有足夠的學生轉向StraighterLine這樣的公司，高等教育面臨當前體系建構之上的商業模式的解體。其後果將會極其深遠。常春藤和其他名校相對不會受影響，因為他們出售的是稀缺而昂貴的產品：聲望。小的自由藝術學院也會持續，因為傳統模式——在四年田園牧歌式的生活中師生一起學習——仍然是最佳選擇，總有人情願也能夠為此買單。

But that terrifically expensive model is not what most of today』s college students are getting. Instead, they tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn』t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return.

但是那個超級昂貴的模型並非當今大多數大學生所得到的。其實，他們更傾向於在相對籍籍無名的2年或4年制公立學校報名，然後找份跟工作有關的專業，比如商業、教育、護理或工程。他們上的入門課都一樣：統計學，會計，經濟101。教授這些課程通常條件都很差——助理講師上課的演講廳可謂教育死角——可在此之前，學生別無選擇。地區公立大學和普通私立大學面臨StraighterLine等公司的挑戰最大。它們可能走上當地報紙之路，受到地理、集團以及昂貴的勞工結構的致命束縛，過度依賴一去不復返的利潤。

By itself, the loss of profitable freshman courses would be devastating. And in the long run, Web-based higher education may not stop there. Companies like StraighterLine have the hallmarks of what Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen and entrepreneur Michael Horn describe as 「disruptive innovation.」 Such services tend to start small and cheap, targeting a sector of the market that established players don』t care much about—like tutoring in introductory courses. 「This allows them to take root in simple undemanding applications,」 Christensen and Horn write. 「Little by little, the disruption predictably improves… And at some point, disruptive innovations become good enough to handle more complicated problems and take over, and the once-leading companies with old-line products go out of business.」

失去盈利的大一課程，後果不堪設想。在長期中，網路高等教育不可能停滯不前。像StraighterLine這樣的公司具有哈佛商學院教授Clayton Christensen和企業家Michael Horn所說的「破壞性創新」的特點。這些服務起步都是小規模經營，價格低廉，目標是成熟玩家不在乎的市場領域——比如入門課程輔導。「這讓他們植根於簡單應用，」Christensen和Horn寫到。「可以預言，這種毀滅會一點點地改善…..在某個時點，毀滅性創新會完善，足以應對複雜問題，並且佔領市場，而只提供過氣產品一度領軍的公司則會失去生意。」

The pattern has played out in industries ranging from transistors to compact cars. When Japanese companies like Honda first began selling small, fuel-efficient cars in America, the vehicles were markedly inferior to the chrome- festooned behemoths rolling off the assembly lines of invincible Detroit giants like Ford and General Motors. But they were also inexpensive—and, when gas prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, suddenly more attractive as well. Japanese cars gradually improved while American companies lapsed into complacency, and the rest is history.

在各個產業，從晶體管到小型車，這種模型都在上演，範圍很廣。當本田等日本公司開始在美國銷售小型燃油節約型汽車時，這些車與底特律無敵巨人福特和通用汽車生產線上下來的合金大型車相比，處於絕對劣勢。可是，它們那麼便宜——當1970年代汽油價格飆升時，突然之間就變得炙手可熱了。日系車逐漸改善，而美國車卻沉浸在自滿中，從而成為了歷史。

Econ 101 for $99 is online, today. 201 and 301 will come. It』s no surprise, then, that as soon as Burck Smith tried to buck the system, the system began to push back.

99元是今天在線課程Econ 101的價格。201和301會來。那麼當伯克·史密斯嘗試鬆開系統時，系統開始倒退，也不足為奇。

The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors. And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they』re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online. To compete, Smith needed StraighterLine courses to be as inexpensive as they could be.

在推出StraighterLine時，史密斯遇到的最大問題就是認證過程。隨著時間推移，高校在自己的學術城邦周圍修建了堅實的城牆和很深的護城河。學生只為可以得到學分普遍認可的學位課程買單。學分和學位只能由聯邦批准的認證中心官方認可的機構頒發——而且只有用聯邦撥款和貸款買單的學生才能獲得。而最具聲望的認證機構只承認這樣的機構：有學術系部、高學歷的教職員工、行政機構、圖書館以及現代大學所有的所有其他不菲裝備。這些東西使得高等教育更加昂貴，如果你只想提供在線入門課程，這些都不必要。為了競爭，史密斯需要讓StraighterLine 課程儘可能便宜。

So he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become 「partner colleges」 that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.

所以他在認證壁壘之下，設計了很巧妙的方法，與少數幾家傳統贏利認證機構達成協議，成為「夥伴院校」，可以將StraighterLine課程轉化為學分。在學分認可之後——憤世嫉俗者可能說是學分被洗之後——理論上，學生可以將這些學分轉入任何高教系統。夥伴院校也從中獲利。他們都有自己的在線課程，但需要巨額營銷投入才能不斷吸收新生。學校的說法是，StraighterLine關係會使他們接觸潛在的新生，而有些StraighterLine客戶甚至還想上他們的高級（昂貴）課程。

One of StraighterLine』s original partner colleges was Fort Hays State University, just off I-70 in Hays, Kansas. Smith had met the school』s provost, Larry Gould, at a higher education technology conference back in 2001. Soon after, Fort Hays became one of the first clients for Smarthinking』s tutoring services. When Smith approached Gould in late 2007 with the StraighterLine concept, the provost paid four faculty members to review StraighterLine』s curricula and course materials—a level of scrutiny, he notes, that far exceeds that given to most credits students transfer in. 「Right now students can bring in up to sixty credits from community colleges,」 Gould told me, 「even though we often don』t know who taught those courses or even what the syllabi look like. The StraighterLine people we know, and the course materials are there to see.」

StraighterLine最初的夥伴院校之一是Fort Hays州立大學，就在堪薩斯州Hays I-70洲際公路 邊上。在2001年的教育技術會議上，史密斯遇到了該校的教務長Larry Gould。很快，Fort Hays成了Smarthinking輔導服務的第一批客戶。當2007年末，史密斯向Gould推出了StraighterLine概念，教務長花錢請四名員工審查了StraighterLine的課表和教材——他說，審慎程度遠遠超過了學生們要轉入的學分審查。「目前，學生可以從社區大學獲得60個學分，」Gould告訴我，「即使我們不知道誰給這些學生上課，或者課表如何，我們看得到StraighterLine的人和教材。」

But as word of the StraighterLine deal spread around the Fort Hays campus, professors and students began to protest. By early 2009 a Facebook group called 「FHSU students against Straighter Line」 had sprung up, attracting more than 150 members. 「Larry Gould,」 they charged, 「has taken steps that will inevitably cheapen the quality and value of a degree from Fort Hays State University by placing our university in bed with a private corporation… . [T]he end result of this move is that FHSU would have a viable reason to eliminate faculty positions in favor of utilizing services like Straighter Line.」 The English Department announced its displeasure while a well-known academics』 blog warned of the encroaching 「media-software–publishing–E-learning-complex.」 Gould was denounced in the Fort Hays student newspaper.

但是，隨著StraighterLine交易的消息傳遍了Fort Hays校園，師生們開始抗議。2009年初， Facebook上出現了一個名為「FHSU學子反對Straighter Line」的羣組，吸引了150多名成員。 「Larry Gould,」 他們批判道，「採取措施讓我們學校與私人企業同牀共枕，勢必會削弱Fort Hays州立大學文憑的質量和價值… .這個行動使FHSU有充分的理由削減教師職位，利用諸如Straighter Line等服務。」英語系宣佈其不滿，而一個知名的學術博客則警告大家當心不斷入侵的「媒體-軟體-發布-電子學習的聯合體。」Fort Hays 學生報紙公然抨擊Gould。

Soon the story was picked up by the national higher education trade publication Inside Higher Ed, which caught the attention of the accreditor that oversees Fort Hays. The accreditor began asking questions, not just of Fort Hays but also of some of the other partner colleges, including for-profit Grand Canyon University and Ellis University. This prompted more news coverage and Internet chatter; one blog led with the headline, 「Something Crooked About StraighterLine?」

很快，全國高等教育商業出版物Inside Higher Ed報道了該故事，引起了監管Fort Hays的認證機構。該認證機構開始質疑，不僅僅質疑Fort Hays，也質疑其他合作大學，包括盈利的大峽谷大學和伊利斯大學。這導致了更多新聞報道和網上討論；甚至有篇博文的標題就是，「StraighterLine不誠實？」

Within months, Grand Canyon and Ellis had ended their involvement with the company. The controversy eventually took a toll on Fort Hays as well; in June the university informed StraighterLine that it was considering bringing the relationship to an end. Smith had to recruit several new partner colleges to stay afloat.

數月中，Grand Canyon和 Ellis不再參與該公司事務。這個矛盾最終也使Fort Hays遭受重創；6月份，校方通知StraighterLine他們在考慮結束合作關係。史密斯不得不招募幾所新院校才能順利經營。

When I spoke with Smith again in June, the whole experience had left him frustrated. 「A couple of posts from grad students who』ve never even seen or taken one of the courses pop up on Facebook,」 he said, 「and North Central [the accreditor] launches an investigation. Meanwhile, there are horror stories about bad teaching at regular universities on RateMyProfessors.com」—a popular student feedback site—「and they don』t give it a second look.」 Since traditional colleges provide virtually no public information about how much students learn in their introductory courses and won』t even agree on a common standard for how such results could be measured, there was no way for Smith to prove the quality of his courses in the face of accusations. And Smith』s Facebook critics weren』t looking all that closely at their own institution; even as they warned, 「If we don』t fight against Straighter Line, it will be the death of the awesome, face-to-face education that FHSU has provided students for decades,」 the university was itself teaching thousands of students online through the Fort Hays 「Virtual College,」 and using Smarthinking tutors to do it.

6月，我再次與史密斯交談時，整個經歷讓他倍受挫折。「有些根本沒有看過或上過我們課程的研究生在Facebook上發帖，」他說，「然後North Central（認證中心）開展了調查。同時，在RateMyProfessors.com（一個很流行的學生反饋網站）上出現了對常規大學惡劣的教學質量的恐怖報道，他們甚至都不再多看一眼。」由於傳統大學幾乎不提供學生在入門課程中學到多少內容的公開信息，甚至沒有衡量結果的公用標準達成共識，在面臨指摘時，史密斯無法證明他的課程質量。而史密斯的Facebook批判者也沒有仔細看看自己的學院；甚至就在他們警告「如果我們不與StraighterLine對抗，FHSU數年來為學生提供的令人敬畏的面對面的教育就會死亡」的同時，大學本身卻通過Fort Hays的「虛擬學院」在線教授數千名學生，並且還利用Smarthinking的導師這麼做。

Meanwhile, Smarthinking』s executive management team (the company is privately held) began questioning why they were spending so much time and effort beating against the accreditation wall. StraighterLine enrolled a few hundred students in its first year of operation, accounting for only a marginal piece of Smarthinking revenues. The company』s core business was serving colleges and universities, they reasoned, not competing with them. By the end of July, Smith had stepped down as company president and was finalizing negotiations to take over StraighterLine as a separate business.

同時，Smarthinking的執行管理團隊（公司為私有）開始質疑為什麼他們花這麼多時間和精力打破認證壁壘。StraighterLine第一年運作時招募了幾百名學生，對於Smarthinking的利潤只是杯水車薪。他們認為該公司的核心業務是為學院和大學服務，而非與之競爭。7月底，史密斯辭去了公司總裁的職務，最終談判，將StraighterLine當做獨立業務接管下來。

Smith』s struggle to establish StraighterLine suggests that higher education still has some time before the Internet bomb explodes in its basement. The fuse was only a couple of years long for the music and travel industries; for newspapers it was ten. Colleges may have another decade or two, particularly given their regulatory protections. Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.

史密斯創建StraighterLine的艱苦掙扎表明，當互聯網的炸彈在地下室爆炸之前，高等教育仍有時間。對於音樂和旅遊業，保險絲只不過是幾年時間；報業則是10年。高校可能還可以拖10、20年，尤其是他們有政策保護。想像一下，如果本田為了在美國市場上競爭，按照聯邦法律必須採用現有的勞工慣例、管理結構、經銷商網路和通用汽車的系列產品。再想像一下，本田只能通過通用汽車的經銷商出售。這本質上就是認證機構強加於高等教育中具有破壞力的改革者的條款。

There』s a psychological barrier as well. Most people are so invested in the idea of education-by-institution that it』s hard to imagine another way. There』s also a sense that for-profit schools are a little sleazy (and some of them are). Because Web-based higher education is still relatively new, and the market lacks information that allows students to compare introductory courses at one institution to another, consumers tend to see all online courses in the same bad light. 「The public isn』t good at discriminating,」 says Larry Gould. 「They read 『online course』 and they think 『low quality,』 even when it』s not true.」

還有個心理障礙。在大多數人頭腦中，在學校接受教育的想法如此根深蒂固，難以想像其他方法，而且還有一種感覺，贏利學校質量有點差（有些確實如此）。因為網路高等教育相對而言仍是新事物，市場缺乏信息供學生比較兩種機制的入門課程，所以，消費者都傾向於用相同的不滿態度看待所有在線課程。「公眾不善於鑒別，」Larry Gould。「他們看到『在線課程』就想到『質量惡劣』，哪怕情況並非如此。」

But neither the regulatory nor the psychological obstacles match the evolving new reality. Consumers will become more sophisticated, not less. The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do. All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate than any other—and a whole lot cheaper in the bargain—for the consensus of consumer taste to rapidly change. The odds of this happening quickly are greatly enhanced by the endless spiral of steep annual tuition hikes, which are forcing more students to go deep into debt to pay for college while driving low-income students out altogether. If Burck Smith doesn』t bring extremely cheap college courses to the masses, somebody else will.

但不論是法規還是心理障礙都不符合不斷發展的新現狀。消費者會更精明。文憑認證的壁壘會倒塌，如眾多人為障礙一樣。想讓消費者偏好同意迅速變化需要的是一代大學生把在線課程當做合法課程——而且價格要便宜很多。由於每年學費暴漲，這種事情發生的可能性大大增加，迫使更多學生舉債讀書，而低收入的學生根本就上不了學。就算伯克·史密斯不能帶給大眾極其便宜的大學課程，也會有其他人去做的。

Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won』t be missed.

這意味著那一天終將來到——比大多數人想像得要快——有大量的錢突然從高等教育體系中不翼而飛，就好像其他產業一樣，信息流量前所未有地便宜而且收取方便。這筆錢大部分都會以更低廉的價格留在學生的口袋中，當高等教育是繁榮的關鍵時，這既是便利條件也是必須條件。大學專門從事他們有比較優勢的地方，而不是對所有人都面面俱到。大批愚蠢而超級昂貴的東西——虛榮的建築、圈錢的運動項目、對教學或研究貢獻寥寥無幾的終身教授——都會從記憶中淡出，而且無人懷念。

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that』s the higher education world to come.

但是這些機構的其他方面也會受到威脅——支持當地社區和合法學術的關鍵部分，讓世界成為更文明更富裕的居住場所。正如世界需要報紙迅速關閉的海外分設，它也同樣需要不同尋常的小型大學報紙，莫臥兒王朝紡織品歷史學家，還有付費讓他們思考深入但在經濟上沒有產出的思想的人。大學的每個部分都必須找到新方法以獨樹一幟，而不是淹沒在大融合中。對於一直以來十分安逸的大學而言，未來毫不穩定，充滿艱辛。無論你是否喜歡，未來的高等教育世界就是這樣。

Kevin Carey is the policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C.

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