Not to get all circa-1999-internet-utopian about this, but a student or anyone else with an interest in design in Portland or Omaha or anywhere else on earth can indeed read the New York Times at nytimes.com.
On the other hand, while I think most kinds of information and discourse are well-suited to the web, I think print – newspapers but especially magazines – has a singular, visceral, artifactual power as a venue for writing and reading about and looking at design.
I’m curious what we mean when we say that American education is deficient in terms of design. Do we mean the education of designers and people who write about it, or the educable design fluency of ordinary educated civilians? Because if it’s the latter, I can’t imagine what might practically be done to improve things. Or even, I guess, what ought to be.