Alex Tabarrok writes,

I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities.

What he is suggesting is a form of disintermediation, in which the professor’s brand is stronger than the university’s brand. Read the whole post.

One way to quickly improve any university would be to eliminate the bottom 25 percent of teachers and replace them with online instruction from outside the university. Maybe online instructors cannot compete with high-quality in-person professors, but they can certainly replace the worst.