The End of College for All?

Your Opportunity in the New Education Economy

Today, right now, there is likely a way for you, as an individual, or your organization, to participate in the education economy. The movement, driven by technology, has put the tools for education creation in the hands of individuals and small businesses. Ten years ago, universities had to partner with educational technology providers to put courses online. Now anyone with a smart phone, lighting setup, and mic can create and sell online courses.

The barrier to entry is low — educational technology is now available by subscription. Course goals and learning objectives? Ask Chat GPT — you can probably figure it out. If you have credibility as an expert, from languages to singing to Excel, or a solid brand as an organization, then you have a golden opportunity to establish trust and become an education provider.

Why become an instructor or education provider? Here are the benefits (as many who have taught as adjuncts or course instructors for universities, or associations - whose standards are much more variable, know):

• Teaching gives you professional credibility.

• Teaching offers an additional income stream, and new relationships of trust (people trust their teachers.) But that’s not the reason to do it.

• The best reason to do it — you can make a positive impact; others can gain immediate value from learning what you know well.

Technology has Democratized Teaching and Learning

It used to be that to teach professionals, you needed a PhD or other advanced degree, and a university to hire you. Well, adding to the pressure on the Higher Ed model, as it turns out, not everyone cares about that anymore. In the great new digital public square where education is for sale, the standards are highly variable. Some instructors don’t even have an undergraduate degree. People vote with their feet on what is valuable. Consumers of education want to understand topics that are not traditional at all. Also, it doesn’t need to be dry. It can be video based and entertaining, even fun. There is a big opportunity here for organizations that have a known area of expertise to begin offering education.

Why Do It? —

• Brand Awareness, Stakeholder Communication, and Marketing

  Sharing your mission commitment, through free, accessible and specific content is the new education, “advertising,” and “top of funnel” marketing all in one. Accessible, engaging video content with personality can tell your story better than an annual report while warming up new audiences for more in depth educational experiences you can charge for.

• Training and Workforce Development

  Offering specific training in what you know best (perhaps combined with support for degrees or partnerships with university education providers) helps organizations retain and grow talent while ensuring their workforce development needs. Curated workforce development and intentional partnership are culture and agility game changers currently employed by companies with a strong sense of mission and specific workforce development needs from Walmart to Google to Gensler.

• Revenue and New Business Generation

  Accessible educational experiences provide a new revenue stream. Whether education is the heart of your business or a part of your business, paying for your educational content creates a promise to deliver equivalent value on your part — with trust being the beneficial impact of the “promise — deliver” dynamic. Creating high value education changes lives, creating a loyal consumers.

Challenges Ahead for Undergraduate “Formation”

I’ve written about the opportunities for entrepreneurial schools within Higher Ed, but not about the underlying issue, which is that traditional liberal arts colleges are getting hit with the downside of disruption. The stated purpose of “college” has been “formation,” teaching young people to think, to write, and interpret their experience, while becoming lifelong-learners. While this is not a bad thing, if it creates decades of debt and doesn’t result in a job, it may have too much downside for many. The Higher Ed business model has depended on a steady supply of undergrads paying increasingly high tuitions. Concerns about value have grown as tuition has increased, an average of 36% since 2010. In addition to concerns about value for money, disruptive forces include a decline in birthrates and growing competition from new market entrants.

Hello Enrollment Cliff

Declining birthrates beginning in the 2000s are hitting Colleges hard. See the Trellis research report on the enrollment cliff. Elite universities may not feel the pressure yet, but for most “regular” universities, a smaller pool of new applicants means the business model is showing cracks. The days of admitting a growing number of residential undergraduates with the expectation of four years of tuition, plus budgeted annual increases, is over. And the enrollment cliff is not the only problem. If you are a parent of a high school student, about to make the biggest investment to date in their future, take note.

Companies are Trying to Do it Better

Employers value degrees less than they used to, and some have decided to do it themselves. A 2024 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 76% of US employers are actively reducing degree requirements for entry-level positions, with 42% explicitly prioritizing high school grads or apprentices over bachelor's holders when skills match. Google, Apple, and IBM have eliminated degree requirements for 50% of their US roles.

Palentir is now getting into the “formation” business. The Wall Street Journal Reports that Palentir thinks college may be a waste. They’ve created their own “Meritocracy Fellowship,” an experimental new program for 500 High School students.

What is interesting about this is not only that a well-resourced public tech company ($300B+ valuation) providing “decision support” is educating their own workforce, but that they are taking on the education of students straight out of High School; Palentir teaches the humanities. Parents of Palentir fellowship winners may express concern, but their brave young people want to try. Where could it lead?

DIY-ing Undergraduate Formation

Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson has created the Peterson Academy. Advertising “higher education at 1% of the prince, Peterson’s courses are bulk priced at $399 per year. The psychologist known for his “traditional” values (marriage is good for men and women) and stoic and religious (old school Catholic) perspectives has put together an alternative to the Great Books curriculum, which looks more like slick, video-based, “MasterClass,” and might be called a “great ideas” curriculum. With 68+ courses taught by experts in multiple disciplines, 55K+ students have already taken the plunge. Peterson himself offers a course labelled as Philosophy/Psychology called “How to Plan Your Life.”

Recommended Reading

• What Color is Your Parachute? By Richard N. Bolles, 2024 reprint. This fifty year old favorite —revamped to advise grads on finding the path from school to work.

• Best Careers in 2025 and Beyond: The Alternative to College: Skilled Trades, Military, Sales and Self Employment – by Michele Ehrlich

The #1 Reason Higher Ed Resists Change

People don’t like to talk about the problems with the institution of tenure. Tenure is lifetime employment regardless of performance. It is available after seven years of service, scholarship, and teaching, based on evaluation by peers. Invented as a safeguard against authoritarianism — it is intended to protect academics to speak and write freely. But the truth is, that is not the primary effect. Indeed, disciplinary bubbles have far more coersive control over what academics write than the deans and presidents of universities. If academics wish to be published, they will write in the dominant mode of their discipline. Americans feel increasingly that there is a “Democratic party” bent to thinking within the humanities and social sciences. The security of an academic with tenure is at least one factor in creating more long-term homogenity in thinking within disciplines.

Tenure Challenges Performance Management and More

Tenure adds permanent costs to universities, regardless of outputs, but this is not the big problem. The big problem is that tenured faculty run university governance even as university teaching is increasingly powered by adjuncts — part time faculty who will teach what they are asked to teach on per course contracts. (The American Federation of Teachers ATF found that almost half of undergraduate courses are taught by non-tenure track instructors.) Tenured faculty are protected by the AAUP, the lobbying organization for academics, and also by their individual professional organizations, who more or less set the standards for each discipline, particularly those that are “softer” in the humanities and social sciences. Tenured faculty have a lot of power over what adjuncts teach undergraduates, and they have a lot of power over what the university offers as its core curriculum. They are a powerful force for conservatism when it comes to conserving what their areas and specialties value and what they enjoy teaching.

Be in touch if you want to explore your opportunity in education. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topics in this week’s newsletter.

Cindy