After 30 years of “greed is good” even Gordon Gekko is having second thoughts. Arguably, the extreme accumulation of wealth promoted by Reagan-style politics is finally producing the first hints of what might be an entirely new age of philanthropy. After the steel and railroad magnates were allowed to amass huge fortunes, they gave back at least a fraction of the wealth to libraries and universities and museums. Something similar seems to be emerging now.

The poster child for the new philanthropy is the Gates-Buffet plans to give away billions, much of it to health and human services programs in the developing world. Whatever criticism you might have of these efforts, they are at least an attempt to get at root causes. As dramatic as the Buffer Gates plan sounds, between them and the other top five billionaires, there’s more than a 100 billion dollars in their hands. I know what I would like for Christmas.

I think that if these new philanthropists really want to create a permanent, long lasting change they should get together and agree to donate at least 10% of their fortunes to a permanent fund for college. They could then browbeat the next, say, twenty or thirty richest people for another 10 or 15 billion. That would create a permanent fund worth 20 to 30 billion or more. The application for funds should be short and simple and leave everything else up to the colleges.

If you can get into the college of your choice, community college to Harvard, the fund will pay. If you can stay in college, that is if you can meet the requirements of full time status at the college of your choice, the fund would continue to pay until you graduate. The only requirement is that you could not work elsewhere for money– internships and the like are fine. The fund would be generous too, paying room and board, a stipend for incidentals, as well as textbooks.

You can use the fund once in your life for an undergraduate degree, but it could be used it at any time in your life. The fund is a sliding scale. If your family makes less than $150,000 a year in combined income, the fund would pay 100%; it would pay less in small increments until your income reaches $300,000. At that point you don’t need any help. In a single swoop philanthropy could lay the foundation of a completely different culture and economy.

It’s nearing the end of the year and so it’s time for the proliferation of top ten lists and predictions for 2011. It’s always both enjoyable and, often, more than a little irritating. I just read a piece in Campus Technology, “5 Higher Ed Tech Trends To Watch in 2011,” by Bridget McCrea. Most of the list is boring and very predictable– cloud and mobile technology dominate– until you get to the very last item: “A Retreat from Technology Overload is Imminent.” It’s an intriguing idea, I think, although the shape of the retreat is debatable.

Arguably, what we are seeing is a bifurcation of the use of communication technologies along class lines. It’s an emerging picture that’s both hazy and complex. On the one hand there’s the emergence of technologies that are either so expensive or so time consuming to master– the I-PAD and many so-called new media technologies might be good examples– that they are difficult to implement outside of elite settings. This sort of bifurcation is aided by the increasing cost of education, of course.

On the other hand there’s some indication that elite institutions may be retreating from new communication technologies. If we wanted to be optimistic, we can hope that this is becuase they’ve realized that certain kinds of learning– particularly those associated with social capital– are facilitated by face to face interaction. If we want to be cynical, we might suspect that these institutions are attempting to strengthen their brand identification by creating a sharper contrast with the ever growing use of technology elsewhere.

The community colleges and for profit schools continue their embrace of educational technologies such as the internet, and continue to serve working class and poor communities increasingly ignored by the elite institutions. Meanwhile, the elite schools seem to be racing away from even the middle classes. In this sort of environment, the use of technology in the classroom may eventually become a sign of a lesser education, rather than the mark of innovative experimentation. Now that’s a trend worth watching.