In a decade, lectures halls like this one could be ghost towns, with no students to populate it, and no funding to keep the lights on.

It is a point that has been made dozens, or even hundreds of times everyday in newspapers, magazines and blogs around the world: higher education is changing, and the future is free.

Although many online courses have actually been available for free for for several years through MIT’s Open Courseware or iTunesU, 2012 was the year that saw the rise of the MOOC — the Massively Open Online Courses, where universities are putting entire courses – lectures, homework assignments, tests and all – online for anyone in the world to use.

The majority of commentaries you’ll see about MOOCs focus on the incredibly growth they have experienced — over a million students signed up for Coursera, a leading MOOC provider, in just 4 months — faster than either Facebook or Twitter. Some are talking about how to improve MOOCs so that they deliver more value, including how to prevent cheating or how to allow students to collaborate with professors in a scalable fashion — it’s hard to do office hours with 10,000 students in your class.

Earlier this week, MIT Professor Michael Cusumano made a point that few have expressed, but is hugely significant. In the April 2013 issues of “Communications of the ACM”, Professor Cusumano challenges the idea that “free” is all it’s cracked up to be.

Cusumano points out that the disruption of “free” from the internet is not always a good thing. The disruption of previously costly consumer products and services such as phone service, email, newspapers and magazines has seen these large powerful industries morph into much smaller, less populated sectors. The result of this disruption, most would agree, has been less revenues, and in some cases, lower quality or quantity or even both.

The most relevant example is newspapers and magazines. With the cost of running a blog being nearly zero, and the number of amateur ‘writers’ and ‘reporters’ exploding over the last decade, many magazines and newspapers had a very tough time competing against “free” content. Most responded to this explosion of content by going free themselves, and hoping that advertising and greater readership would make up the difference. We now know that this was not the case, and hundreds of media companies shut their doors, likely a mistake that the entire industry would like to go back and change. The few remaining players, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, reduced their headcount and salaries, and are now moving back to a hybrid model, with some free content, and subscriptions for the more avid consumers of content.

The effect of this disruption has increased the quantity and variety of content dramatically – that is hard to disagree with. However, by reducing the total number and the career prospects of reporters and professional writers, it can be argued that the overall quality of content has gone down. Sure, the NY Times continues to employ some excellent writers, but what about the 30 other newspapers that went bankrupt — do 200 amateur blogs replace the professional reporters and writers that lost their jobs? And how many fewer students are looking to become journalists today, with ever-worsening career prospects?

If we take the analogy of media to education, we could end up in a world where there are hundreds of thousands of blogger-like teachers, but a much smaller number of teachers that are actually experts at their subject matter, and understand the art of teaching itself. So sure, MIT and Harvard will still be around, and their professors might even be teaching millions of students each year, making their schools even more elite than today. But as Professor Cusumano says in his article:

“I am mostly concerned about second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges, many of which play critical roles for education and economic development in their local regions and communities.”

What happens to them? Certainly, there are a range of outcomes, and most of us hope that the disruption of higher education does not look like what happened with music or newspapers. But as Cusumano said:

“Will two-thirds of the education industry disappear? Maybe not, but maybe! It is hard to believe that we will be better off as a society with only a few remaining megawealthy universities.”

More Resources:

• If you want to take free online courses, check out SkilledUp’s OpenU, a collection of over 850 free open university courses.
• You can also find way to enhance your skills with the online course finder, offering over 6,000 free skill-based courses.