The traditional sit on you butt on campus for 4-5 years college education is obsolete as well. They just don’t know it yet.
I read a history of higher education. It developed as it did mostly because of the inability to transmit knowledge except in person. That fact required knowledgeable people to gather in one place so that, for efficiency, many people could learn from them at once (professors, lectures, classes). It also required that books, which were not published in unlimited quantities and were very expensive, be gathered together in one place (great university libraries) as that was the only way many people who wanted to learn from those books could have access to them.
Nobody needs to go anywhere these days to have access to someone knowledgeable in any field imaginable. A kid in Kansas can learn Polish online, from a school in Poland if he wants.
Nobody needs to go anywhere these days to have access to books necessary to learn any field of knowledge. Indeed, before long most books that are out of copyright will be online for free.
Sure, there may be a continued value to getting together with people studying in your field. But there need not be a university or college setting to make that happen.
I think within the next 20-50 years, the on-campus college “education” will become more and more discredited and anachronistic. Bright people will pursue online and other types of distance learning that will be developed to truly educate them.
I think the future paradigm will be that people will go to universities to get “shingles”, and people will read (hard and soft data) on their own to get educated.
There is a "social" element to learning - group play, group dynamics, learning how to behave among peers.