It’s hard to say whether America’s higher-education system is fated for disintegration or disruption or demolition. But, as even Roth acknowledges, the landscape is shifting. Will students get the same quality training online as they get in-person? Will a college education be more accessible to more Americans while retaining its caliber? Will "cathedrals of learning" such as Yale still play the same role two decades from now as they did pre-Internet?

2U is a cloud-based software platform focused on higher education, with roughly a dozen university partners, including UC Berkeley, Syracuse, Northwestern, and many of the aforementioned institutions. It was 2U that first approached Yale proposing that it develop some sort of online degree program. James Van Rhee, the PA-program director, heard that the company was on campus, and after hearing about the possibilities he quickly latched onto the idea.

The reason Van Rhee is seeking to expand the PA program to the web is simple: Though PAs are in extremely high demand and command high salaries, many students are discouraged from pursuing the career because they don’t want to move to a new campus to get their credentials, he said. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job opportunities for PAs are expected to grow by 38 percent between 2012 and 2022. That increase works out to roughly 33,300 new positions, in large part because of the aging population and the increased prevalence of chronic disease, among other factors. Glassdoor, a popular online career resource, ranked PAs as No. 1 in its 2015 list of the "25 Best Jobs in America." And the mid-career median pay for PAs, according to Forbes, is $97,000.

Providing the same quality of training as Yale’s on-campus program, the online coursework would reduce the financial burden and stress of relocating to New Haven, Van Rhee said: "They won’t be away from their support systems. They’ll be by their families, spouses, grandparents, siblings … For us not to move them away from that, it makes becoming a PA more enjoyable." It would also encourage PAs to learn and work in their local communities—often rural, underserved settings that are in greater need of these resources. "There are more than enough people who need healthcare around the country that don’t have it," he said. "These students could fill that niche."

But a key question remains: Are students who attend class remotely receiving good-enough training? Or put another way, would the students who do the coursework online get more out of Yale if they were instead enrolled in the on-campus program? A growing percentage of college officials believe that students need more discipline to succeed in an online course than they do in a face-to-face setting, according to a new report by the Babson Survey Research Group, which surveyed more than 2,800 higher-education institutions in the U.S. In 2005, 56 percent of high-level college administrators said they believed the online courses require greater discipline; by 2014, that figure had grown to 69 percent of respondents. Student retention also appears to be a growing concern, with 45 percent of administrators responding in 2014 that online courses have a harder time retaining students than on-campus ones do, up from 27 percent in 2004.