I'm just speaking for myself - there is NOTHING that I would trade for with respect to my experience in college. I don't consider the social connections that I made there (whether it was through the organizations that I was in, spending countless hours with the people in my freshman year dorm, watching sports, etc.) to be ancillary or frivolous. If anything, that's what made the entire experience *college*. Simply saying that you can check out books from the library or watch online lectures and learn the same material trivializes the entire experience.
Regardless, it's not what I think. The delivery of lower cost educational models is relatively easy - the "input" demand may very well be there if only because students certainly want to reduce education costs. We all know the technology is in place to spread information quickly to disparate locations. However, what matters for anyone attempting to sell these educational models is the output... or maybe more appropriately, the *perception* of that output. That is, are employers going to recognize those graduates as the same quality as those that went to traditional 4-year universities? If the answer is no, then all of the lower cost input in the world isn't going to convince parents (who are the ones that *really* need to be sold) to think that attending online classes is going to substitute for going to Harvard (or UConn or your typical state university, for that matter). (To be sure, I completely understand that it may depend upon the profession. An employer that wants a pure coder may very well just care about a person getting some type of online technical certification without regard to where he/she went to college. An employer that needs people with a higher level ability to manage a broader scope of issues is not going to look at it the same way.)
What's driving the impetus to design a driverless car? Is it traffic safety? Or, given Apple's and Google's interest in those vehicles, more free time to be connected (and served advertising as well as content).
We're headed to a place where we're wired 100% of the time. It's already difficult to keep students off screens in class. That's only going to get harder. They learn and process information differently than we did. And once screens are become fully integrated with curricula, why a physical building?
You know that part in the Matrix where Carrie Moss has a set of instructions for flying a helicopter sent to her? While that may be a stretch, something like that is coming via some future iteration of Google Glass for many real-life (and career) applications. So the question is, how many professions will really need a learning environment with a campus and buildings?
I see one potential future being F500 businesses investing more in recruiting pre-college and offering scholarships to universities of the business' choice, not the students'. The CIA already does this to some extent.
I graduated UConn in the late 70s. I went to a branch campus for two years because I couldn't afford room & board and had to work nights and weekends. It was not a traditional "college experience" (well, except for Friday night mixers). Yet most of my lifelong college friends came from there, not Storrs. I mention that I see no reason that "physical" attendance can't be better distributed on a local level instead of a main campus once interactive education becomes legitimized and widely adopted.
Where content used to be king, context is assuming power. I can't pretend to know what it's like to have grown up texting and living on SnapChat. But I do know today's kids make friends and build networks significantly differently than we did 40 years ago. And the education model has to adapt in order to remain relevant.
I just don't see college sports as we know it surviving that disintermediation.