At a recent conference, college administrators seem to agree that major changes need to happen in college education and they need to happen quickly. Convincing tenured faculty that they have to go along with these changes may be tough. 

They better hurry up, but alternatives are popping up. 

Read Kevin Carey's great article in The New Republic about the some of the alternatives to a traditional college diploma. 

THE FIRST SIGN came in mid-December, when the trade publication InsideHigherEd wrote about a group of adjunct professors at Stanford University who were offering their courses in Artificial Intelligence and other computer science topics to anyone in the world, online, at no charge. Tens of thousands of students had signed up. The availability of free Internet courses itself wasn’t all that innovative—MIT’s Open Courseware initiative is a decade old and elite schools like Yale and Carnegie Mellon have followed suit. The news was that the Stanford professors were letting students in their global classroom sit for the midterm, at proctored sites around the world. Those who did well on the A.I. test and a later final exam got a letter saying so, signed by the professors, a pair of well-known roboticists from Silicon Valley.