> To be quite honest I don't see the internet usurping them either.

I mean, OK. The internet is a big damn deal. But it's not a quantum leap as the printing press, steam or telegraphs were. It has antecedents in all those three technological revolutions.

The printing press was the first time knowledge could be cheaply conveyed to masses of people without needing someone to manually sit there with the learner and communicate with voice. It totally upended the concept of how individuals could receive their education. It didn't replace the university.

Steam was the first time that production and transportation could happen faster than muscle power or wind could move objects. It didn't cause a meaningful change to the university model.

Telegraphs did to thought and knowledge what steam had wrought in the physical world. One could be anywhere on earth and communicate to anywhere else on Earth within the hour. Minutes in some cases. You could use it to form communities of like-minded learners, and people did exactly that. It didn't unseat the universities.

For some reason, the concept of a vertically-integrated, physically co-located community of scholars and students seems really, really hard to shift. Technologies come along and modify this or that part of it, but students plucked from Bologna in 1088, from Oxford in 1167, Harvard 1636, Sydney 1850 and so on and so forth would find that the modern experience is broadly the same beneath all the pizazz.

Students relocate to be near a community of scholars. They pay for access. The scholars read aloud. The students take notes. The scholars test the students and write letters of introduction that verify that the student knows the subject.

What has changed throughout that long string of technological revolutions -- technological revolutions that destroyed the universality of the Catholic Church in Europe, revolutions that destroyed feudalism and absolute monarchy, revolutions that totally upended the whole model of the entire world -- is almost nothing. Hardly any damn thing.

Given that the internet is new only in degree and not in kind, forgive me for being skeptical that it will do away with such resilient institutions.