There is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care about.
And another alternative at some universities is the university thesis open archive itself. In Northern Europe I'm told some universities won't even give you your diploma if you don't upload your thesis in their open archive.
Frankly, every university in the world should have an open archive for thesis (and mutualized is even better). It's just the continuation of keeping thesis copies at the university library.
