Bill Gates thinks something is going to die anyway.

No, it is not physical like Nicholas Negroponte’s book – not, Gates think that the idea of young people have to continue to university to get an education will go quickly enough. Well, as long as they learn self-motivation.

“Five years from now on the web for free you will be able to find the best in the world of college,” Gates said in a conference Techonomy in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It would be better than one university,” he continued.

He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Is it MIT degree or if you have everything you knew from college on the web, there should be a way to highlight that.

He made sure to say that educational institutions are still important for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where children can spend up to 80% of the time they are very involved with the study.

But colleges need less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

But the overall point is that it is too expensive and too difficult to get the top-level education. And education-based college will soon place five times more important than now.

One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is a text book. Even in elementary school, they can be 300 pages for a book about mathematics. “They’re huge, intimidating book,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth was there?”

According to Gates, our text book three times longer than the equivalent in Asia. But they beat us in various ways with education. The problem is that these things are built by committee, and more things just added on top of what is already there.

Gates says technology is the only way to bring education back under control and develop it.