Oh aye. I don't discount that side of things. This is obvious. But corporations are the number one consumer of college educated people. That's essentially what most degrees are for in the first place- so the degree holder can go out and use it to find work in the corporate world. You can't disconnect that from the equation.
Universities exist because industry exists. But the reverse isn't necessarily true. There was a time when it was, but no longer. Most technological and scientific advance in the world today is made in privately owned laboratories and research departments not in the venerated universities.
What I was addressing is the future not the present. Things are speeding up. More and more. This has been noted all across the technological spectrum, not just in the computing world. This is operating at an exponential rate. In twenty years we will be much more than twenty years advanced.
To further an anology to the computing industry- the bottle neck Moore's Law faces is the physical limit on minituarization. They must solve this problem or they will run into a wall soon. The same goes for this problem with education turnover. As things speed up more and more the time you spend specializing your education in a univeristy will be wasted. Not because it is bad knowledge but because you aren't actively applying it to something and by the time you get your degree there will be nothing to actively apply it to. If you were in a productive environment for those years you could profit while you learned and so could industry.
Obviously, there's still going to be downsizing and corporate bankruptcies. You can't remove that from the loop either way, but the time you spend in university is non-productive. Eventually, that will have to be fixed.
Note, too- I'm not saying you would go to work and then sit in a class while a corporate teacher taught you- that would be the same thing in the end but run a bit more efficiently. No, what I'm saying is you do away with the 3 month holiday for school children, clean up violence and other distractions out of schools. Education Grades 1-12 would become HARDCORE. You're there to learn how to survive not to play graba$$ or learn how to save the rainforests. By the time you got your high school diploma there would be no need to go on to college because you would've already packed that amount of learning into the same time period. A person could then move on to the work place where all their further education would be hands on- this is how humans learn best anyway. "Monkey see, monkey do" isn't just a funny saying it's the truth.
Vast amounts of money that could otherwise go into the ecoonomy are thrown into the big institutions of higher learning but the returns we receive are diminishing. The universities today are actively engaged in the political goal of destroying a person's ability to think critically. Sure, the liberals benefit at the ballot box, but industry suffers when they get people who don't understand reality well enough to manipulate it, to build it. Industry will eventually have to solve this bottle neck and this is one way I see for them to do so.
I think you have it backwards. Universities existed before large scale industry did. Your suggestion that corporations take over higher education would be completely disastrous.
When you speak of 'corporations' & 'the corporate world', I am not sure I understand exactly of whom you speak. Could you flesh that out a bit please.
Not entirely true - much of the basic science research is done in universities - corporations tend to avoid much basic science work for the obvious reasons - it's highly risky and not always guaranteed to lead to a profitable product.