Post Corona: Higher Ed | No Mercy / No Malice

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 a world class university to offer 80% of a traditional four-year degree for 50% of the price.

Education startups will attract cheap capital and seize the opportunity the pandemic has accelerated. SARS was huge for e-commerce in Asia, and it helped Alibaba break out into the consumer space. COVID-19 could be to education in the United States what SARS was to e-commerce in Asia.

The rookie move is to believe that MOOCs or stand-alone education start-ups will be the big winners. (Searches for “MasterClass” have eclipsed “business school.”) They won’t.

We’ll see a culling among universities. Just as retail closures are accelerating from 9,500 stores in 2019 to more than 15,000 in 2020, we’re going to see dozens, maybe hundreds, of universities not reopen. In academia, we have been preying on the hopes and prayers of the middle class, offering parents the chance to check an instinctive box, giving... See more

MIT/Google could offer a two-year degree in STEM. The myth/magic of campuses and geography is no longer a constraining factor — most programs will be hybrid soon, dramatically increasing enrollments among the best brands. MIT/Google could enroll 100,000 kids at $100,000 in tuition (a bargain), yielding $5 billion a year (two-year program) that woul... See more

Yes, you likely know there’s now more student loan than credit card debt. But did you know the price of a textbook has exploded 812% in the last 30 years (not worth it)?

Similar to other categories, there will be a flight to quality and a concentration of power among a small number of brands.