Montreal has become a university town.Students from around the world have been attracted to the city's skyline of ivory towers and have long been stampeding here in the thousands to attend our local schools, particularly McGill University.
The result has been a boon not only to the universities but to the city as a whole, as those students pour a lot of cash into the local economy.
Montreal ranks as tops in the number of university students per capita in North America. It's also tops in Canada for the number of university students and foreign students enrolled and diplomas doled out.
(It's also a place with the highest level of high school and college dropouts, so there's an undiscussed chasm amongst our population between low-earning townies and high-falutin' school migrants).
But within a couple of years the city could start losing the university crowd, not only because the currently-reigning Parti Quebecois government has cut funding, but because competition has become ferocious in the form of free online education increasingly being offered by other higher-ranked universities.
The trend for free online education is exploding and each week more universities announce that they're putting their product out there for all to consume, anywhere on the planet.
Some universities are finding tens of thousands of people enrolled in courses that previously would have only been able to cater to a couple of hundred.
So the world will become smarter and people who previously couldn't dream of higher education will suddenly be the brightest guy in the room, challenging others for jobs. It will, in theory, raise everybody's games.
Those already-planning to attend university will conceivably be able to shop around for a good professor, bad ones will be quickly outed, shunned or ignored. Free online university will become a sort of Rate My Professor on steroids.
Having done a DEC at Dawson, a BA at McGill and an MA at Concordia, I often bemoaned the fact that a lot of profs just aren't cutting it.
One Dawson psychology teacher spoke inaudibly, another philosophy prof had a thick incomprehensible accent, another German History Professor at McGill enjoyed mocking his students, one Historian at Concordia was "too shy" to teach, a literature teacher at Dawson admitted that he didn't actually read my essay before giving it a low mark and many, many more were just lazy or indifferent.
In two or three years many such professionals of the learning industry will feel the pressure to improve their crafts or be gone.
The world will be watching how they fare and so free online courses is surely a good thing for learning, but not necessary a blessing for our local economy.