The digital revolution reaches higher education

With smartphones, tablets and other devices providing digital content anytime anywhere to anyone with a stable internet connection, higher education - a trillion dollar market - can also feel the digital wind of change.

Featured last week as The Economist's cover story, 'The digital degree' disrupts established higher education practices on three fronts:

1. Funding
   While governments are decreasing there support, colleges are increasing their investment in teachers, technology and admin. This leads to higher tuition fees for some students, and possibly bankruptcy for colleges where students are no longer willing to pay the premium.
   
2. Online learning
   Formerly expensive courses can now be found for low or no charge online, which significantly increases access and scalability of courses. Will this replace or complement classroom learning?
   
3. Lifelong learning
   Training and retraining for a large number workers throughout their careers is gaining in importance.

Even though providers of digital higher education, among others, MOOC, are still struggling with low degree completion rates and some technical difficulties, they could particularly challenge mid-tier undergraduate universities. Limits to online degrees currently seem to be highly complicated subjects (where digital participants' failure rates are extremely high) and Ivy League institutions where the value of the network of classmates is still unrivaled.

Overall, we can expect digital higher education to provide opportunities to many who could not afford - financially, time-wise or logistically - to attend university, to anyone seeking lifelong learning in their field, and to new educative content providers like Google and Bertelsmann.