This review, co-authored with Sara Goldrick-Rab, first appeared on Inside Higher Ed

Kevin Carey has written a book called The End of College – by which he means the end of college as we know it... and he feels fine. At least we assume he does, because The End of College is a celebration, not a lament. The traditional college education is dying, he says. As it should, he adds. No more buildings, no more exclusively face-to-face classes, no more libraries, no more graduation ceremonies. Everything will fall by the wayside, Carey predicts. The good news, he posits, is that it will all be replaced by what he calls the University of Everywhere.

Carey's book comes at a time of rising college costs, swelling student debt and cuts to university courses, faculty and majors. From students to parents to taxpayers, everyone is alarmed about higher education's most pressing challenges. As an education technology writer and scholar of higher education policy, we are too. Unfortunately, many people will find false hope in The End of College and its fantastical promises of the University of Everywhere.

"The University of Everywhere is where students of the future will go to college," Carey writes. "The University of Everywhere will span the earth. The students will come from towns, cities and countries in all cultures and societies, members of a growing global middle class who will transform the experience of higher education."

How will such a thing be possible? The Internet, of course: the University of Everywhere, says Carey, will be digital, personalized, networked, virtual, intellectually rigorous, hybrid, cheap if not free and lifelong.

Parents of future undergraduates will be understandably relieved to know that someone finally has figured it out. To know they will not need to mortgage their home or take that second job. To know that technology is coming to save them. Like Netflix or Amazon, like Uber or Fitbit, the University of Everywhere will soon emerge from the cloud, ready to disrupt the status quo with its flexible, accessible tools. Or so we're told.

The University of Everywhere is the response, led by venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs, to "ancient institutions in their last days of decadence," Carey argues. And we are to believe that an end will come soon for the oppressive regime created by colleges and universities, as he personally has numbered the days until they either "adapt" or become extinct.

In the book and with his platform with The New York Times's Upshot blog and in various essays on the subject written from a perch at New America, Carey professes to possess a deep understanding of higher education. He genuinely believes his plan for online degrees will disrupt recalcitrant institutions, unleash individual ingenuity and power the jobs of the 21st century. He is "angry" about the "chronic neglect of undergraduate education" that he assures us he has witnessed in personal meetings and read about in a single volume with hotly contested findings, and he isn't going to take it anymore. This book is his response.

One of Carey's strongest objections is to the way in which higher education confers enormous benefits on the privileged and powerful (an issue that we agree is a major problem and have each written about time and again). And so, in this age of extreme inequality, Carey declares that the University of Everywhere will serve to flatten and erase hierarchies of social status and socioeconomic privilege. The future of education in his vision will be, as edX C.E.O. Anant Agarwal has also pronounced, "borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind and bank account-blind." It will be, in other words, the ultimate meritocracy.

This vision of the University of Everywhere is endowed with such grandeur that it can leave one breathless; it is so hopeful about the future that any doubt or critique may seem unkind, even inappropriate. Why ask questions about how or why or who or what? Carey and his University of Everywhere want you simply to believe. And if you do have questions, you must be a defender of the status quo, an insufficiently "careful reader," or, worse yet, a professor in a traditional institution.

Indeed objections seem to offend Carey, as they would any true believer. He promotes the online and hybrid future of higher education and extols the innovations that have spun out of Stanford's artificial intelligence lab - startups like Coursera and Udacity - with a fanatical sustained passion that sets aside the far more conflicted reality of these initiatives. While the University of Everywhere purports to be a meritocracy that will save us all from social inequities, it's worth noting that it is being built and promoted by three of the most elite of America's universities: Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T.

These universities are at the center of the recent push for massive open online courses (better known as MOOCs), which are the cornerstone of Carey's University of Everywhere. In his telling of their history, the Golden Three and their new MOOC initiatives can do no wrong.

Except they have already done much wrong. Take the experience of San Jose State University with MOOC-like instruction provided by Udacity. Beginning in early 2013, this experimental effort at one of the most racially diverse universities in the country was promised to "end college as we know it." Yet the data show that the pilot was an unmitigated disaster. The students in the Udacity-run classes - remedial algebra, college algebra and statistics - did far worse than students in traditional, face-to-face classes. Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun blamed the students, whom he said "were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives… [For them] this medium is not a good fit."

Here is Thrun in a Silicon Valley tech blog: "If you're a student who can't afford the service layer, you can take the MOOC on demand at your own pace. If you’re affluent, we can do a much better job with you, we can make magic happen." Incredibly, as Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted, the University of Everywhere is also magically postracial. No wonder, since, as the data from MOOCs around the country clearly show, this university is for the highly educated, not the underserved.

Given the sheer vehemence of his argument and a professed lack of responsibility to warn off "careless misinterpretation," perhaps it is unsurprising that Carey omits the evidence about the real and disturbing flaws of online and even hybrid education. To support his contentions that information technology can lift all boats, he turns to William Bowen, author of a study using a randomized experiment to assess the effects of online versus face-to-face instruction. He reports that Bowen found no differences when it came to the outcomes he measured: course completion rates, scores on final exam questions and a standardized test.

"Bowen had previously been skeptical of the idea that technology could fundamentally change higher learning. Based on his new research, he wrote, 'I am today a convert. I have come to believe that now is the time.'" Rather than question the wisdom of sudden conversions based on single studies, Carey wonders, why didn't colleges immediately hop on board and begin embracing what he calls "a golden opportunity to charge students less money without sacrificing the quality of instruction"?

The answer, of course, lies in empirical research and respect for the scientific process, both of which Carey has little time for. Bowen's 2012 study was then and remains today one of only a tiny number of such studies producing these sorts of results. Despite efforts, including those of Ithaka S&R, where Bowen works, to suggest that instructional format does not affect outcomes, there are just four rigorous yet also stylized and idiosyncratic studies that even somewhat support the conclusions that Carey promotes. And the most robust of them, a study of 700 students at the City University of New York, identifies negative impacts for lower-achieving students placed into online-only courses.

Moreover, none of the studies examine the outcomes commonly used to assess the utility of educational interventions - for example, year-to-year retention and graduation rates. A thoughtful reader of the research might ask: What responsible educator, and indeed, what responsible educational policy expert, would recommend wholesale changes in higher education based on such a paltry body of knowledge? When a long and detailed body of scientific evidence (the most recent example is the evaluation of ASAP at CUNY) details the intensive attention required to bring first-generation and low-income students from college entry to graduation, why run in the opposite direction, offering less personal contact and coaching?

Carey's book invokes education research only when it serves his narrative. Otherwise, education research - indeed all manner of research - is framed as one of the many flaws that weigh down certain elements of our current higher education system.

Carey does not ask questions of experts who are unlikely to agree with what he is arguing, including noted economist David Figlio. "When I look at the weight of the evidence, it looks like online education might come at some sacrifice to student learning," said Figlio in a recent article. "Thoughtful administrators will need to weigh those sacrifices against the cost savings. You can see a situation where schools for the haves will continue with face-to-face instruction, perhaps enhancing it with technology. And the have-nots will get this mass online instruction. That can be potentially problematic from an equity perspective." Of course, Figlio works at one of those "traditional" institutions that Carey abhors and thus he can be ignored.

Credentials like those held by Figlio will not matter in the future, we're told, thanks to the University of Everywhere. The prestige associated with certain institutions will be flattened. Opportunity, access, biases - all swept away by the Internet.

The University of Everywhere, in Carey's telling of it, will be free of racists, trolls, harassers or stalkers. Despite all empirical evidence that the single greatest change in higher education over the last 50 years is a remarkably diverse and diversifying student population, Carey's vision for U.S. higher education also has no race, class or gender. These are unexplored and unmentioned in his book. In his version of the future, the Internet, site of the University of Everywhere, is open equally and safely to everyone. Who cares that M.I.T. emeritus professor Walter Lewin, once the star of YouTube for his videos demonstrating various physics experiments and featured by Carey in The End of College, has been accused of sexually harassing female students in his MOOC? M.I.T. has scrubbed much of Lewin's course materials from the Web. But the University of Everywhere remains unscathed.

The University of Everywhere that Carey promotes cares not for intellectual property, neither the professors' nor the students'. He writes, "We can already, today, replicate much of what colleges are charging a great deal of money for and distribute that information electronically at almost no marginal cost." Students can hand over their content and data to technology companies to mine, with the promise of more efficient personalized learning. By transferring their data to technology companies and not to universities, "people will control their personal educational identities instead of leaving that crucial information in the hands of organizations acting from selfish interests," he writes. Universities, not the tech sector, are the ones with selfish interests here, according to Carey. Similarly, faculty will manage their classrooms, including their syllabuses, lectures, lessons and course design via those same companies.

As for research, it will happen elsewhere, beyond the University of Everywhere, as Carey argues that existing universities have erred by trying to fulfill a mission of both research and teaching. The University of Everywhere is "unbundled." That is because the "roaming autodidacts"" of the University of Everywhere do not need these services. The learners of the University of Everywhere need their MacBooks and Wi-Fi, and the world is theirs. As such, they don't look much like today's students in community colleges. Nor will their experiences look like the experiences of undergraduates working with faculty in university laboratories today - experiences that studies show are demonstrably effective at creating cadres of scientists from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Without an explicit attention to diversity, the University of Everywhere will ignore this - much like Silicon Valley has already proven to do as demonstrated by the demographics of its employees and investment portfolio and much like Carey's history of the development of higher education does as well.

Echoing Silicon Valley, the University of Everywhere envisions a meritocratic labor market, just waiting to be filled by those with badges and certificates, though not necessarily by those with bachelor's degrees. The person with the right badges and MOOC certificates will get the job and the promotions, and there will be no discrimination based on prestigious universities; indeed there will also be no discrimination based on race or gender or sexual identity. These are the proclamations and promises made over and over in the book despite their direct contradiction to rigorous studies of how employers treat job candidates with nontraditional credentials from new or no-name institutions.

Such facts matter little as Carey sweeps his readers through the book into this magical world and takes them into a new age of higher education in a text that makes no mention, offers no analysis of race or gender or sexual identity. These facets of today's life simply do not exist in his dream. This is a story told by a white man about other white men - indeed, all other voices, with the exception of Daphne Koller's, are mute. The story is set entirely in an America that isn't part of global communities. Despite the nod to "Everywhere," there are apparently no universities in the rest of the world that might respond to the technological imperialism of MOOCs or to the cultural imperialism of standardized general education classes.

As should be clear by now, this entertaining narrative about higher education is an inch deep in shallow waters. It zooms past debates of history with barely a note of documentation for its claims (indeed a total of 21 endnotes are provided for 5 entire chapters of text, with some supporting statistics about "achievements," such as those about the new "elite" online college Minerva, provided by unverifiable sources including the founder of the school himself). Research findings that fit the storyline are termed "shocking" and "mind-boggling," while those that contradict the tale are simply left out.

Certainly, Carey is not alone in constructing such accounts. There is a plethora of higher education prescriptions funded by respectable think tanks and nonprofit organizations. They are issued nearly weekly, many hopping onto the excitement and hype (and hefty venture capital funding) for MOOCs and other education technology efforts. Carey references very few of these even when his arguments are clearly influenced by them (think of the formative DIY U by Anya Kamenetz and the forward-thinking prescriptions offered by Andrew Kelly and Rick Hess). Many in this space value "outsider" takes on higher education for their supposed unbiased clarity. They also seem to value the insights of wealthy technologists and data scientists who pose as being too serious for identity politics or culture wars.

In this political economy, the experts on education are rarely experts in education, and that is just the way an increasing number of powerful people seem to like it. Books like these and the speeches and essays accompanying them eat up the landscape of popular discourse. With the microphone, these voices have the gravitas of maleness and whiteness and wealth. They are so loud they must be expert. They look like, walk like and talk like leaders.

And the story that they tell is quite comforting for many who look at the rising cost of college and the fragile economy and hope that their children will be able to follow the right path toward a more secure future. As such the University of Everywhere is a consumer fantasy of the future of higher education, a fantasy that purports to be about freedom for learners, about more personalized learning, but that is traced through the history, at least in Carey's book, of programmed instruction. Machines will teach. Artificial intelligence will replace teachers and tutors.

Swept away by the mystical magic of technology, Carey sees a world of possibility. That is the moral and the lesson of The End of College, his prescription far more than his analysis. Carey promises, as the title of the opening chapter suggests, a new "secret of life." It's a secret that, once unleashed and fulfilled, will disrupt institutions - much like Uber, which Carey describes with fascination and glee when he visits Silicon Valley. Designed to replace the taxi service - like higher education, a service that's deemed outmoded - all you need to summon an Uber is a mobile app. Like the future of higher education that Carey predicts, Uber is always on, always on demand. It is also unregulated, well funded by venture capitalists, collecting personal data not simply for efficiency and algorithms but for dubious purposes, and based on a precarious labor force. But we're not supposed to ask questions. No one should ask questions when the end is nigh.