DisruptEDU: Peak Higher Ed and the Rise of the Rest

Authorship uncertain. 

In the early part of the decade, it was all anybody could talk about: education would be changed forever. Every school in the country desperately jumped onto the bandwagon, setting up courses that could be taught from a distance, and enrolling 4x more students than in all the nation’s colleges and universities combined. Within a decade though, most were calling the courses sub-par (or worse), and only a tiny fraction of enrollees actually completed the courses. Faculty and administrators quickly lost interest, and the enthusiasm for distance education was lost.

That was nearly 80 years ago, when mail-based correspondence courses took America by storm, only to be called out for what they were: lackluster and incapable of replacing higher education. Today, many naysayers, especially those employed in higher education, make similar claims about MOOCs. A March survey of Professors showed that only 28% believe those that succeed in MOOCs deserve formal credit for doing so. Yet for every higher education professor claiming that things aren’t changing that much, there are 10 outside of higher education that see the beginnings of a creative destruction much larger, and possibly more violent, than anything before it.

Peak Higher Ed

There is a term in the oil business called Peak Oil. It is the belief that globally, oil production has peaked, and will now decrease each and every year until there is no more left in the ground. The idea is scary for some, whereas for others, it’s a simple reality that must be dealt with and planned for.

There are many in education today that believe we are getting very close to reaching Peak Higher Ed. That the spending, employment and revenues associated with traditional higher education are reaching a maximum point that is unsustainable, and that we must prepare for a world where this huge infrastructure will be replaced by new, lower cost ideas that offer similar benefits. Sebastian Thrun of Udacity has gone on record saying that in 50 years, there might be only 10 universities still delivering “higher education”. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, believes that printed textbooks – a $6B industry – should be made obsolete. 

In many ways, the top institutions in higher education are going along with the idea, by making large swaths of content available for the potentially destructive price of Free. Although it’s hard to argue that educational content feels like it should be free, in many ways it could prove to be the cardinal sin that begins the trend towards a smaller, more nimble and fragmented education system. Professor Michael Cusumano at MIT makes the point: “Free is actually very elitist. In education, ‘free’ in the long run may actually reduce variety and opportunities for learning as well as lessen our stocks of knowledge.” Cusumano worries that the result of Free could eventually create a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of causalities. 

Publishing & the Internet Redux

For those that have followed journalism and publishing, it’s easy to see the parallels. An industry is transformed with technology that eliminates the primary barriers to entry: the costs of creating and distributing content. Millions of competitors, many willing to work for free or unlivable wages, enter the fray. The incumbents tries every option, but ends up contracting to a fraction of its size, leaving just a few survivors to split a much, much smaller pie.

Of course, the creative destruction of journalism and publishing was not without its gains. In the place of hundreds of shuttered newspapers, magazines and other publications were the rise of new types of content providers. Curators, Celebrity Bloggers, Aggregators and new tools such as Twitter and Tumblr were created, and it’s difficult to make the argument that as a society, we aren’t better off with today’s content options than we were two decades ago, even if journalism is no longer as lucrative an industry as it once was.

The Rise of the Rest

Another consequence of the changes in publishing brought by the internet was a rebalancing of where we get our content. Pre-Internet, large publishers like the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and others enjoyed substantial advantages – printing press, delivery & subscriber base, advertiser & press relationships — that allowed them to cement their audience and reach, creating an oligopoly of sorts. Sure, a new newspaper or magazine could get started and make meaningful headway, but it would take a long time or a lot of money (or both) to close the gap with an established player.

As these advantages have evaporated, we have seen new and innovative content creators grow to rival or even exceed the reach of the incumbents. New publishers like the HuffingtonPost, CNET, BuzzFeed, the DailyBeast, iVillage and TMZ, as well as individual mega-bloggers like Perez Hilton, Matt Drudge and Michael Arrington now rival the largest magazines or newspapers in audience and influence.

The lessons gained by the demise of hundreds of publisher were that when anybody can read anything at anytime, there is far less room for mediocre or unoriginal content. And much like there is little need for 40 national newspapers writing near-identical stories, there is also little need for 200 professors all delivering the same Biology 101 lectures. 

Although it’s early, we can already see MOOCs have begun to act as gatekeepers to determine which professors have the combination of entertaining and engaging lectures and solid credentials and experience to be theauthority. As David Stavens, a co-founder of Udacity has said, “We reject about 98 percent of faculty who want to teach with us. Just because a person is the world’s most famous economist doesn’t mean they are the best person to teach the subject.” Dr. Stavens sees a day when MOOCs will disrupt how faculty are attracted, trained and paid, with the most popular “compensated like a TV actor or a movie actor.” He adds that “students will want to learn from whoever is the best teacher.”

This process will only get more competitive as MOOCs begin to supplant lectures at more brick and mortar universities across the country, and no less than Thomas Friedman has called on professors to raise their game, saying “the world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.”

The (Growing) Long Tail

So in this new world of education, where just a handful — perhaps hundreds — of professors are teaching the vast amount of content to those in higher education in a lecture-style format, what does that mean for the rest?

If we take publishing as the example, we can expect three things to happen.

First, there will emerge a new set of tools that will give rise to new forms of educational content. Although the typical course structure has endured for hundreds of years, the format is still depending on a largely top-down educational model that is not fit for a more fragmented ecosystem. Adobe Indesign is fine for magazine creators, but it wasn’t until WordPress, Tumblr and Twitter that publishing was truly democratized.

Second, these new tools will enable the rise of the “Alternative Professors” that will come from industry and entertainment, and will aim to offer something different — a new way to learn, new skills or a new way to think. We can imagine C-level executives, famous athletes or movie stars, or innovative engineers teaching one-off courses that are attended by millions, as a way to bolster their individual brands, but also to spread educational content that has more depth and meaning than a typical blog post. 

And finally, there will be a significant fattening of the “long tail”. We will see the rise of millions of amateur teachers, emboldened by these new tools, but also seeking to help fill the gap between the small set of celebrity professors and the rest of the worlds’ learners. These millions of teachers will create new and original educational content on a regular basis, shifting their focus to wherever demand is, and supplementing the content generated by the now small group of celebrity professors. A few of the best of these teachers will also rise up based on their uniqueness to join the elite.

A Good Thing?

Like all changes, this creative destruction will bring good and bad. On the good side, this approach will lead to a more agile and dynamic education system that will be able to adjust better to market forces, train our youth for in-demand jobs and careers, and retrain those that are being made obsolete by the relentless push of technology and globalization. New tools will popup to help individuals organize and make sense of educational goals, as well as new credentials to capture this fragmented learning. It’s also likely that this new world will have less infrastructure and offer more global parity — reducing the need for sprawling (and expensive) campuses. 

While all this sounds good, we are likely to see some losses as well. It’s likely that this new academia will have a tougher time achieving goals that require deep infrastructure or wide coordination of many professionals on a large scale. Research, broadly, is likely to suffer, as it will be harder to support professors in fields that are not supported by industry — like the humanities. The quality of labs and research infrastructure will decrease with less funding available, leading to slower progress on more difficult societal problems. The best universities will continue to prosper, but will also be forced to narrow their scope to only what they do best, as innovation in the long tail will pull the best talent in emerging fields away from them. And thousands of students will likely forego a traditional brick-and-mortar college for an online education, likely saving money, but also losing out on the invaluable holistic experience that past generations have taken for granted.

We’re in the First Inning

Many of these trends are already occurring, and have been for some time. MOOCs are simply an evolution of what began with the Internet and continued with Wikipedia and Open Courseware. It is doubtful that MOOCs represent the last major innovation in how we, as a society, educate ourselves. It is more likely that this is the equivalent of Geocities, and we’re still quite far away from the WordPress and Twitters of the future. However, if history is any guide, the future of education will be cheaper, more fragmented and far more dynamic than what we’ve had for the last century. And on balance, that sounds like a very good thing.