Concerned parties throughout the United States for some time now have been knitting their brows over the condition their country's higher education finds itself in. Most would agree that it's heading down the wrong path and that it needs urgently to be set on a new one, lest it be irretrievably lost.

Experts cite the following problems as begin both symptomatic and emblematic of the country's postsecondary malaise:

• American students are losing ground to international students in terms of performance in school and on examinations;
• American institutions appear constitutionally incapable of adjusting to 21st-century job-market demands, and thus have been graduating students who are poorly prepared to take their place in the new economy;
• Tuition and fees at most American universities are rocketing well out of reach of those of small and moderate means.

In the search for a remedy many new strategies have been proposed, ranging from conventional to far-out. Yet, perhaps the magic bullet is literally right before you, allowing you to read these very words. A September 22, 2011 BNET.com article asks, "[C]ould the solution really be the internet?"

The BNET.com article quotes a September 19, 2011 Fast Company piece that waxes optimistic about the direction technology has steered education. "Education and training will no longer be limited to the few," the piece reports. "The internet will throw open the doors of opportunity to people in every corner of the world."

This enthusiasm rests on 3 rosy prognostications. These are that:

1. Online education will continue to improve in terms of course content and its delivery;
2. Online education will move from the periphery of higher-education to occupy a central position;
3. Online education will not only produce workers capable of meeting the needs of a modern global economy, it will produce a lot of modern, high-skill jobs itself. (Online education will need much technical and other kinds of support.)

If it falls to online education to save the Ivory Tower's bacon so be it. After all, you can think of much worse transformations -- say, a regression to an earlier state when universities were the preserve of the well-heeled and well-connected. There exist forces that would take postsecondary institutions in precisely this direction, and this would be much more difficult to do if the bulk of universities' products and resources were made virtual.