One thing that I think should change is trend towards fewer but larger universities. There has been a trend since at least the massification of higher education after the Korean War to make institutions more efficient by making fewer of them and making them larger. There are obviously some important parts to this. Of course universities would save money by moving as many people as possible onto as few campus’ as possible. Services could be used by multiple people greatly increasing the efficiency of a university system. For instance landscaping or lawn care would be cheaper if they didn’t have to move from place to place and could just focus on one yard.
The question then becomes are colleges losing anything when they gain efficiency in this manor. I think very obviously they are. Classes become larger, students become less of an individual and more of a statistic, and professors are stretched thinner and thinner as they try to serve all of these students.
Especially in the humanities I think that students do much better when they get more individual attention, something that is impossible under the current mega-schools.