I’m not an academic, and therefore don’t customarily preface my writings with a C.V., but inasmuch as this blog is geared toward a largely academic audience, I’ll begin this piece with a description of my credentials (such as they are).
I went to college in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I’m also self-educated to a significant degree, i.e., I do a lot of self-directed reading. I was a rolling stone; I acquired my undergraduate credits at three public universities in different states. Most of my graduate school credits are from Seattle University, and my law degree is from the University of Washington. I also took classes at several community college in subjects I was interested in. I didn’t have freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years in the traditional sense, because I crammed four years of education into three years by carrying heavy class loads and going to summer schools.
My first year was a formative experience. That’s when I acquired my work ethic. I spent that year attending an urban commuter college where most of the students were older, more mature, and juggled classes, families, and factory jobs. They were as motivated as any students you’ll ever see. There were no dormitories, fraternities, or sports teams, just classrooms and instructors who made you work. Grading wasn’t on a curve; to get a “B” you had to do “B” work, and “A” grades were very rare. At times it bordered on cruelty, but this sweatshop college generated in me the rocket fuel that propelled me all the way through law school and also turned me into a voracious reader and prolific writer. I wouldn’t have turned out the way I did without this experience.
My second and third years were more typical of standard college life. My class schedule was split between advanced liberal arts courses and professional courses in the journalism school. Following a two-year interruption for military service, I completed law school on the normal 3-year schedule, and about 10 years later I attended evening classes in Seattle University’s graduate school of public administration, by which time I also had family responsibilities.
I wasn’t preparing for an academic career, so I didn’t need to attend a major research university or take classes from professors with big reputations. For someone like me getting a budget education, large classes in a lecture format were an acceptable evil for first-year introductory courses, but I quickly realized that real learning requires small classes where you can participate in discussions and kick around ideas with the professor and fellow students. I don’t see how you’d get that in online classes or so-called “distance learning.”
Nowadays, employers demand degrees for most of the desirable jobs, so we have this societal thing where people feel they need a degree to make a decent living, but they’re not into learning for its own sake and only do enough in college to satisfy the graduation requirements. Teaching these students, who comprise the vast majority of the student body, can’t be much fun for the professors. If you ask the professors how many of their students are committed to learning and love knowledge for its own sake, they’ll probably say not nearly enough, but it’s these students who keep them going and keep them in the game.
I think for a college to be worth the name, you’ve got to find ways to get professors and these students into small rooms together. They’ve got to have enough time together for the chemistry of learning to occur. They need freedom to challenge old ideas and invent new ones. These things tend to be incompatible with the business and administrative aspects of running a large institution whose lifeblood is its huge cash flow. The problem is, when you let bean counting trump esoteric educational values, you’re not a university anymore, you’re just a trade school. In that case, you might as well get rid of your bricks and mortar campus with its expensive overhead and move the whole shebang online. The only justification for having a campus is so people can mix and interact, and what you hope comes out of it is they will 
reinvent the world and make it better.