Headlines and blog posts offer a cacophony of mostly bad news about US higher education: rising costs, reduced public subsidy, little measurable learning, sleazy market players, tepid completion rates. In my remarks I synthesize ten years of research to provide a larger and ultimately optimistic vision of higher education going forward. Fundamental changes in how college is paid for and measured mark the end of a 20th-century golden age. Yet the next era — if we build it right — could make higher education more accessible, flexible, cosmopolitan, and humane than ever before.
