Is this the moment where the balance of power finally shifts to Internet-related employment?
After this morning’s job report, I thought I’d run graphs of three industries where job growth seems healthy. Over the past year, jobs in electronic shopping establishments are up 11% (the zigs and zags come from holiday employment). Jobs in “internet publishing, broadcasting and web search portal” establishments are up 20%. Employment in computer systems design, programming and related is up 5%, but that’s off a much larger base (please excuse the funky formatting…my power is still out).
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Mandel on Innovation and Growth 
That’s nothing, just the beginnings of the avalanche that’s coming. Most colleges and universities will be bankrupt within a decade or two as online learning takes off and gets rid of most teachers. 90% of doctors will be replaced by medical decision software. Every existing newspaper or magazine will be gone, including the NYT and Economist and WSJ, replaced by a sea of bloggers online. Every existing major software company, ie Microsoft or Apple or Google, will fall in the rapid change and tumult that will be unleashed. Notice that for every one “job” created in some of these markets, many more will be destroyed, particularly in extremely backwards and wasteful markets like education or medicine. But the internet will also open up whole new types of work, so there will be plenty of new opportunity also.
Rubbish. I just started my MBA and everyone I managed to speak to yesterday said that they decided to take the course as it was one of the key courses near me that actually offered face-to-face tuition. For your information, all classes at this school at all international locations are full and oversubscribed.
Judging by the emails and calls that I am still receiving from other schools with a large online component, the same cannot be said for them.
DS, you are right that the the biggest barrier to online learning is the irrational notion of many students that “face-to-face” is somehow better. However, irrational notions have to face reality eventually and when your fellow students are having their jobs taken from them by online students who paid less than a tenth of what they did and are outperforming them, they will finally realize that. If I were you, I’d drop out today, as I bet you are paying a lot of money for what is soon to be a worthless degree. It is also true that what few online institutions currently exist aren’t that great, but simply because online is a more competitive environment, online learning will quickly surpass most current colleges.
As for what “everyone” currently thinks, we are currently in the middle of an education bubble, much larger than even the housing or medical bubbles. If I asked the same dimwits whether I should buy a house 6 years ago or get into the stock market 4 years ago, I bet they’d have been all gung-ho about those “investments” also. I wasn’t because I knew the fundamentals were bad. The education bubble is in for the biggest collapse of them all, as it is the most propped up by government support and is about to be obsoleted by new technology on the internet, just ask the newspaper industry. 😉
The education bubble is extremely near to popping. The cost has risen far faster than anything else, while the value being delivered is the same (arguably less).
University budgets have bloated not from the addition of faculty or researchers, but from administrative positions like ‘Diversity Coordinators’, etc. In fact, since universities are now less about education and more about leftism, many schools have discontinued computer science while keeping ‘Women’s Studies’ and ‘LGBT Studies’.
All this has to go, and it will soon. It will not take years, but rather 18-24 months.
Oil and gas.
Seriously? Those wonderful gains you are touting are about 100,000 jobs over 4 years. That’s peeing in the wind when we have 14 million unemployed. There just aren’t enough “new” jobs to replace the “old” jobs people used to do. It’s all very well offshoring them for least cost, but people need to do something, even if it is not rocket science to do. People assembled things or dug holes in the ground. You didn’t need a college degree to do those things. Most people don’t and won’t have college degrees, unless you dumb them down. Not everyone is cut out for ‘thinking’ jobs. How many jobs have been taken over by Internet retailers, just to put brick-and-mortar retailers out of a job? Looked at a Borders lately? And even Fedex and UPS aren’t seeing too much of a rise in business, and the USPS is a basket case of falling activity levels. As for programming and systems design – yes, a bit of an uptick, but we lost a lot of jobs in the early 2000s. But we’ve at least discovered US-based people are better for resolving complex problem where you need face-to-face interaction on design and coding; its often not worked to offshore those tasks to India, the requirements and specifications don’t get properly established and you waste more time and effort on rework than you save.