The internet is still in its infancy and its potential has yet to be fully realized. Having gotten my bachelors and masters the traditional route, I was skeptical about online learning given the obvious differences it has with lecture hall style education modes. This article helped me understand how online learning can be very beneficial for the right crowd: http://educationcareeradvisors.com/resources/detail/6

Split them into 3: general colleges, university teaching and research facilities.

For all tertiary students, 1 year of general college studies.

Then learning at a university or TAFE college.

Then perhaps post grad and into a research facility outside of a university to do research.

In their present format, universities are now failing the country. They are producing minimal research that benefits the country, and with up to a 30% student drop out rate, they are wasting the time and money of many people. As well, they are filled with feminists and left wing staff, and give the student minimal ability to think for themselves or think outside the box.

What I find is the subjectivity of saying X university has better research output than Y confusing. We can see terrible articles in top tier journals. They do slip through. What is rigorous? Who decides what is quality research? The rankings to me may be good for marketing purposes, but why spend hours aiming for A+ ranked journals purely to be seen to be a high quality university, when there are many factors for publication in such journals. It is totally idealistic, but to be concerned only with publishing as an end to a means is not an ideal situation for higher education. Being in the top 100 is great, but to push a university into a ranking only for image purposes when research in anything from literature to curing disease may in fact be rubbish and done purely to see how many A+ journals the university can get into; not a good strategy.

agree with Big M. The politics of publication is complex.

Thanks moburne. I just feel that to base quality of a teaching university purely on publication output, and to me that's what I am seeing when the amount of effort to post in A+ is often not rewarded by appearance in one or only to those authors that are 'elite' and have 'the network', mostly, does not mean the lecturers are imparting knowledge to their students consistantly. A quality unversity is not just the number of published authors in the world's top tier journals in their fields. Those that do appear tend to be part of a network where X knows Y, so even with blind peer review you will get in. Not saying this is the case 100% of the time, but networks make publications often precluding beginning researchers. You might need to produce 'quality' research but again we do see articles in top tired journals that are appalling in method or conclusions. Research output should be on contribution to knowledge; I cannot picture people rushing to X university purely because you are in so many A+ ranked journals. But this seems to be part of the image game.