SRQ Daily Columnist Donal O'Shea is the president of New College of Florida

I’m often asked whether I truly believe that residential colleges or universities like New College will exist one or two decades hence.  At least once a week, a story in a national newspaper about one institution or another poses the same question.  Last weekend it was the New York Times on Arizona State University. And I write with two books, The End of College and College Disrupted, before me on my desk.  

All suggest that higher education as we know it is over. Our great residential colleges and universities are mired in the past and unable to adapt to the rapid changes that technology brings. They are too expensive and inefficient. Why, the writers wonder, would anyone attend a residential university when high quality massive open online courses (MOOCS) are free or nearly free? Not only are lectures available online, but recitations and interactions with professors occur 24/7 in online chat rooms. These incontrovertible realities lead ineluctably to the conclusion that residential colleges and universities face extinction.   

Or do they?  

Yes, universities are old. Yes, technological change is accelerating. Yes, residential education is often expensive and seemingly inefficient. Yes, some online courses are very good and very inexpensive. But not only are the reports of impending death of residential colleges and universities greatly exaggerated, they beggar common sense.

Universities that bring students and professors together in a single place will continue to exist because learning is both hard work and immensely exciting, and because we humans are social creatures and learn best from and in the presence of others.

Online courses will no more replace today’s universities than the printing press and concomitant availability of books replaced the 42 universities founded before 1500. True, well-designed online courses can engage students with one another and with professors in a way that universities do and books cannot. But they cannot replace physical proximity. If they could, television and live streaming would have obviated basketball and football stadiums.  

To learn and to understand deeply—be it some mathematics or music, or a language, or a physical or chemical law—is to undergo microsurgery on one’s brain. Learning requires forging new pathways and connections among neurons. It requires motivation, experimentation, mimicry and persistence. The mix of solitary study and interaction with others differs for different individuals, at different times, and for different subject matter. Learning goes much faster in an environment where others are learning too. And being with others is exhilarating. A good student’s knowledge doubles each year, a rate of growth and maturation that provides a huge competitive advantage and that amply repays the opportunity cost of the time spent in residence.  

That is why universities are among our civilization’s oldest institutions. That is why young people have travelled across Europe to the Universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris, Cambridge and Salamanca for more than eight centuries. And that is why young people will continue to come to Sarasota to study at New College or Ringling College of Art and Design or University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee.

SRQ Daily Columnist Donal O'Shea is the president of New College of Florida