
Top tech/popculture site Fusion recently published a profoundly weak piece, "We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life" (just picked up by Boing Boing) in which the author wanders about in the few remaining, empty SL sims that various colleges and universities are still paying for -- or as sometimes happens, Linden Lab simply forgot to remove from the grid. (Yes, that does occur from time to time.) Fusion's Patrick Hogan thinks the problem is that "it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island" in Second Life, which is entirely wrong, because since 2013, Linden Lab has restored its 50% discount to non-profit/educational sims. So the article is pretty incomplete on its face.
As usually happens with warped media coverage of Second Life, a number of enthusiastic SL fans have posted angry replies on the article, and on SL fan blogs, and are critical of the coverage in not very productive ways. For instance, here's Bernhard Drax's comment on the Fusion piece:

Drax is a very talented videographer of Second Life, and just as key, is paid by Linden Lab to promote Second Life as a contractor. (Which any reporter exercising "journalistic research" would quickly discover.) His points are echoed by a Fusion comment from Jo Kay, a talented educator who has long used SL as a teaching tool. I am not questioning the motivations of either, but the plain fact is an outside observer is apt to see them as biased about the topic and be duly skeptical.
In actuality, the Fusion article, while inaccurate, is not wrong about the big picture: Second Life-based campuses, which once existed in the hundreds or more, have almost entirely gone dormant or been abandoned, and we are far from the days when even Princeton and for that matter Harvard were in Second Life. (Yes, they were.)
Why are the universities and colleges all but gone from Second Life, and why has Second Life almost entirely (with a few marginal exceptions) failed as an education platform? A combination of factors, none of which Fusion is aware of, and many of which invested/biased SL advocates might be willing/unable to acknowledge.
As it happens, sim costs were (and still) are only part of the problem, eclipsed by these issues (among others):