Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Remember college? you were away from home, you discovered all sorts of people just like you and not just like you, you stayed up all night with people of the same and opposite sex, you read great books and pondered great questions, you made terrible mistakes that turned out not to be fatal -- you lived. And if you were lucky enough to go to a school something like Williams College, then you lived in an enclosed garden, a place set apart from the world for which you were being theoretically prepared. What you learned best, you learned almost unconsciously, from immersion in this world devoted to books and ideas. The notion that the Internet can in some sense supplant this world seems ludicrous -- as if in the future we'll be eating dinner by Internet. But to think this way is to misunderstand the nature of higher education in the United States. There are 15.6 million Americans in college; an insignificant fraction of them go to schools like Williams. Nearly eight million students attend a community college, which generally means they are living at home. Even among four-year institutions, very few are genuinely selective, and very few pay much more than lip service to those Great Books; with a college degree becoming an indispensable passport to middle-class life, both the colleges and the students take an increasingly utilitarian view of the transaction that results in a degree. Higher education is a $228 billion enterprise; private, for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix or DeVry Institute are gaining increasing legitimacy. One of the fastest growing segments of the marketplace consists of institutions like Motorola University; Gerald Odening of Chase predicts that the number of "corporate universities" will rocket from 480 to 1,600 over the next few years, and adds that many of them will be offering accredited courses toward an undergraduate degree or a technical certificate. The distinction between the proprietary and the nonprofit, and between education and training, is blurring. Almost all colleges, and not just the private ones, now see themselves in overtly competitive terms. Schools market; students shop. The Internet is perfectly suited to this overtly utilitarian and swiftly expanding world. The authors of "Dancing With the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education," a book of essays published last year, argue that the university as currently constituted can not satisfy the exploding demand for learning; it is not "scalable." The Internet is. One professor can address thousands of students, and can do so either simultaneously or "asynchronously." The Internet allows adults who need to be at home to go to school in their living rooms; it renders the bricks-and-mortar facilities that make college so expensive virtually irrelevant. And because the Internet permits interactivity, it can function as a simulacrum of a classroom. James Duderstadt, the former president of the University of Michigan, suggests in "Dancing With the Devil" that the time may not be far off when a small number of academic celebrities, a larger number of "content providers" and a still larger number of "learning facilitators" create and administer "learningware products" for "an array of for-profit service companies" who in turn sell these products to students. "Quite a contrast with the current enterprise!" Duderstadt writes cheerily.