Text 1 　　Higher education is one of the great successes of the welfare state. What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars. 　　Now a revolution has begun, thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university. 　　The first two forces would be pushing change. A third—technology—ensures it. The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will overturn higher education. Now the MOOC, or “Massive Open Online Course”, is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree for a fraction of the cost of attending a university. 　　MOOCs started in 2008; and, as often happens with disruptive technologies, they have so far failed to live up to their promise. Largely because there is no formal system of certification, drop-out rates have been high. But this is changing as private investors and existing universities are drawn in. One provider, Coursera, claims over 8 million registered users. Though its courses are free, it bagged its first $1m in revenues last year after introducing the option to pay a fee of between $30 and $100 to have course results certified. MOOCs will disrupt different universities in different ways. Not all will suffer. Oxford and Harvard could benefit. Ambitious people will always want to go to the best universities to meet each other, and the digital economy tends to favor a few large operators. The big names will be able to sell their MOOCs around the world. But ordinary universities may suffer the fate of many newspapers. Were the market for higher education to perform in future as that for newspapers has done over the past decade or two, universities’ revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30% and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors. The rest would need to reinvent themselves to survive. 　　Politicians will inevitably come under pressure to halt this revolution. They should remember that state spending should benefit society as a whole, not protect tenured(终身的) professors from competition. The reinvention of universities will benefit many more people than it hurts. Students in the rich world will have access to higher education at lower cost and greater convenience. MOOCs’ flexibility appeals to older people who need retraining. In the emerging world online courses also offer a way for countries like Brazil to leap-frog Western ones and supply higher education much more cheaply.