Their real worry:
Distance learning, resulting later in decentralized mixed university subscriptions and radically lower costs, will work on a mass scale; only the useful professors will survive; today’s colleges disappear.
... today’s colleges disappear.
Or as the intellectuals would have us believe...
Sic transit gloria mundi
You have something there. I have reflected on my own college education in the past, and I realized that the vast amount of the courses (undergrad) that I took were commodities. Calc is calc. Physics I & II, always been the same. Finance, accounting, bio, chem, English, etc. have not changed. It is all base knowledge. Why is there such infrastructure and human resources surrounding the instruction of commodity subjects? I get the whole college experience. It was great for me. I was able to do a lot of stupid things in a safe environment before going into the real world. I got it out of my system. But it seems all of that has been lost to completely out of control seriousness. In other words, university administrators take everything too serious - every micro-agression, every major, etc. when in actuality, there need not be such seriousness. The knowledge product is actually pretty basic, and anyone with half a mind can learn it. Someone with talent can teach it. Literally, that is not the commodity. Most profs suck at teaching. Geez, half of them anymore don't speak English as a first language.
So take the talented communicators, have them deliver the commodity subjects using today's technology to the masses. Then keep real professors for research, but for gawd's sake don't spend money researching liberal/progressive tripe.