Everyone’s favorite treasury secretary college president piñata economist Lawrence Summers opined about higher education in the Times over the weekend, and, lo, it was good. Two important points, widely shared across the education industry:

“1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. This is a consequence of both the proliferation of knowledge — and how much of it any student can truly absorb — and changes in technology.”

“6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data.”

This affects how instructional materials are made. More on this another day.

Unfortunately, he also believes, perhaps correctly, that there will be fewer and fewer textbooks, or whatever you want to call them, done by the “best” people, who constantly revise them (now possible because of digital technology). I guess this sounds to him like a meritocracy, but to me it carries a whiff of oligarchy.

Once the few giants have been selected, don’t the barriers to competition rise high? Will the current generation of innovation tend to stifle future innovation? Can textbooks become “too big to fail”?