@mathyone, you can have awful online classes but you can have awful in-person classes. I would think that many of us have had classes where a prof was barely comprehensible, doesn’t organize his/her thoughts and lectures in a manner that aids understanding, and in general is worse than a textbook. Does that devalue an Ivy degree then? Because you can find faculty like that at every Ivy.
I guess my point is, you can always point to the worse examples of something and say that that something won’t take off because of that, but I don’t find that argument terribly compelling.