Peter Drucker on Higher Education: "Bad Moon Rising" for the Educational Bureaucrats

Gary North

This interview with Drucker, who died in 2005, appeared in Forbes in 1997.

The Web was barely visible. The University of Phoenix, with its 300,000 students, was not visible.

The accreditation system is all that is holding back his scenario.

Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book.

"Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care--without it the kids have no future.

"Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis."

Crisis means that things will get either much better or much worse. Things will get much different, Drucker says.

"It took more than 200 years (1440 to the late 1600s) for the printed book to create the modern school. It won't take nearly that long for the big change.

"The unsuccessful misfit of diversification should be put out of its misery as fast as possible."

"Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. Today's buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded."

Drucker, though a lifelong academic, will shed no tears for the present system. "High school graduates should work for at least five years before going on to college," he recommends. "Then it will be more than a prolongation of adolescence."