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And online learning, because of its flexibility, increases both the educational and profit potential of mid-career education.
Lifetime learning, a recurring revenue model, presents an enormous opportunity for universities to take a page from the private sector (Amazon Prime, Netflix) and evolve to a superior business model.
Tech creates scale, and scale increases both access (social good) and revenue (necessary fuel).
Scale is also bait. It will lure the biggest predators in the jungle to an industry that has largely escaped their notice—big tech.
Education start-ups will attract cheap capital and seize the opportunity the pandemic has accelerated and expanded.
The second-greatest accretion of stakeholder value in business, behind Amazon’s entry into healthcare, will be big (and some small) tech firms partnering with world-class universities to offer 80% of a traditional four-year degree for 50% of the price. This is the gangster cocktail of the fastest-growing analog consumer brands in history (Southwest Airlines, Old Navy, etc.).
MIT and Google could jointly craft two-year degrees in STEM. The
MIT/Google could enroll a hundred thousand students at $25,000 per year in tuition (a bargain), yielding $5 billion for a two-year program that would have margins rivaling . . . MIT and Google. Bocconi/Apple, Carnegie Mellon/Amazon, UCLA/Netflix, University of Washington/Microsoft . . . you get the idea.
Universities will dramatically increase their spend on technology and, in many cases, outsource entire programs (for example Duke’s continuing ed). There will be enormous opportunity to substantially upgrade SaaS teaching tools, as anybody who has used Blackboard can attest.
For now, the pandemic has cleared the competitive field for virtual learning.
In the interim, the college experience is going to be a shadow of its former self, with masks, distancing, grab-and-go food, daily temperature checks, and few of the traditional rituals and rites of passage that other generations experienced.
By the time the virus is contained, we may have raised a micro-generation of innate distancers. Even post corona, and a return to proximity, the temporary elimination of the college experience will have catalyzed a question American households were afraid to ask: Is it worth it?
Schools could encourage or even require students to spend a year or more away from campus, or invest in satellite campuses, as my school, NYU, has done in Dubai and Shanghai.
The U.S. needs a Marshall Plan to partner with states to dramatically increase the number of seats at state schools while decreasing cost for four-year universities and junior colleges.
Tax private K–12 schools to supplement public K–12 education.
We should be investing vastly more in our public primary and secondary schools.
Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5 times the rate of population growth.
A dean of a top-10 school needs to be a class traitor and reevaluate tenure so as to limit it to cases where it’s truly needed to secure academic freedom, rather than the expensive and innovation-killing employment perk it has become.
We need firms (like Apple) to seize the greatest business opportunity in decades and open tuition-free universities that leverage their brand and their tech expertise to create certification programs
Apple training, certification, testing, and reporting would lead to bidding wars among their graduates—the secret sauce for any university.
Google announcing, in August 2020, that the company will offer courses awarding career certificates that it and other participating employers will consider equivalent to a four-year degree in that area.
Gap years should be the norm, not the exception.
We fetishize a university degree, but for many it’s prohibitively expensive and unnecessary.
Expanding the variety and efficiency of certification programs can not only retrain workers in dying industries, but can position a young person for a rewarding entrepreneurial career.
College needs to be more affordable, but we don’t need to subsidize the wealthiest households in America, who send 88% of their children to college.
In short, we need to take government seriously—as a respectable, necessary, and noble institution—so that we can return to taking capitalism seriously, as a vibrant, sometimes harsh, but productive system that betters lives.
The chance to participate in a system that rewards smarts and hard work is a beacon for industrious and ambitious people globally.
That’s the trick of capitalism. By directing our ambition and our energy toward productive labor, it turns selfishness into wealth and stakeholder value. And ultimately, the wealth it creates becomes the spoils needed for productive altruism.
Capitalism leverages our species’ superpower: cooperation.
When people coordinate efforts, the whole is vastly greater than the sum of the parts. The capitalist U.S. corporation is the most productive generator of economic wealth in history.
