Coffeeshopification of HE?

This is a fascinating article.
The Speculist � Blog Archive � In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop The following quote may give you a flavour of why:

...cheaper ultimately wins. Repeat that story a million times over the next few years and you begin to see how the local colleges – which already are overcharging for their product – begin to suffer in favor of free programs like MITx.

Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, and socialize – reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost.

Phil thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. I agree. Every education would be ad hoc. It would be student-directed toward the job market she’s aiming for.

This trend toward… coffeeshopification… is changing more than just colleges

This seems to me to be very interesting. Not least because it throws into relief what it is that HEI's might be offering. Tuition? Accreditation? The student experience?
I think that probably, at the end of the day accreditation is probably the front runner and in some cases tuition. The question in my mind is whether the coffeeshopification might lead to a disagregating of tuition from accreditation.

Of course, as a HEI chaplain I've got to start to wonder what this would mean for such as myself and indeed the whold and currently growing army of student support workers. The revenue for them (us) comes from degree fees. A disaggregation between accreditation (that is the award) and tuition also disaggregates support and welfare which are then, presumably, remerged into the societal background.
But what of communities of researchers and scholarship? What happens to those in a cooffeshopified HE system? Follow the money: where will the funding come from? How will scholars be supported? I'm afraid the most likely answer looks to me like corporations, NGOs and GOs but in a more ad hoc way.

Hmmm still thinking, but this has certainly got me intrigued.