What if colleges are doomed?

I am a college professor. I teach in a creative, professionally-focused, 4-year degree program. More than a decade ago, one of the smartest students I have ever taught (and who subsequently went on to be highly successful) asked me this question: “If I can learn everything you can teach me on the internet for free, why am I spending $7,000 a year to be here?”

It was a rhetorical question, sort of. But it has haunted me ever since, and it has shaped the way I approach every class I teach: What is my value-add? What am I going to do in this class today that will (I hope) justify the investment my students are making in being here?

At my institution, students pay $8000 in tuition and fees every academic year, or $32,000 for the four years of the degree. For international students it’s $22,000, or $88,000 total.

A quick breakdown of that number means that every student any of my classes is paying $60 to be there that day. ($165 if there are international students.) Or $850/$2310 for the course (14 classes).

Today, looking at how much focused, quality, professional-grade, post-secondary-level education $850 can buy (or $60, for that matter), it looks to me a lot like a Clay Christensen case-study in how seemingly unassailable market leaders in an industry get disrupted.

What if that were true? Here's a little thought experiment that connects a few dots that point to an asteroid of confluent forces heading straight for traditional colleges and universities, and it looks like this: 

1. Post-secondary education is one of the last big, juicy, valuable (and largely publicly-funded) economic sectors that is as yet largely un-disrupted. Right now, there is a world of very smart, very wealthy, tech-savvy predators who are looking at post-secondary education, and colleges in particular, like it's a fat gazelle at the watering hole. If we in the colleges sector right now aren’t feeling like we're running a Blockbuster Video store in 2010, maybe we should. Some examples:

Udemy, 2U, Chegg, Top Hat; Brain Station; Google Career Certificates; Coursera; Meta + VictoryXR; CourseHero...

Consider this: a purpose-built AI can very effectively deliver both real-time course content and personalized, individual student feedback, at scale. Now add in the power of digital avatars. You want a lecturer who looks and sounds just like you? No problem. Would you learn Calculus better if LeBron James taught it to you? And chatted with you about it any time you wanted? We can do that. Khan Academy already is. As a really basic experiment a few months ago I used Chat GPT to generate a pretty good introductory lecture in college-level Calculus, as delivered by LeBron James, in about 15 minutes; it only took three iterations of the prompt to make it pretty convincing. Add to that some well-constructed licensed celebrity avatars, and that’s a package few university instructors could compete with.

2. The pandemic drove massive, involuntary beta-testing of online delivery models for education. Not that they didn't exist before, and many of them are extraordinarily good (Coursera, Khan Academy, Udemy, BrainStation, LinkedIn Learning, Domestika), but suddenly everything that students were paying thousands and thousands of dollars for from a college or university looked and felt exactly like Coursera. (Or, more usually, much worse.) So, on one hand we in the colleges were prepared to claim that what we provided online was in fact the same product we provided live, since we gave out the same diplomas and certainly charged the same tuition for it. And the same time, the product was demonstrably not better than the low-cost or free options globally available online. 

Hands up every college & university-tuition-paying parent (or student) who asked themselves between 2019 and 2022, Exactly what am I paying for, again?

And yes: online learning is a great and useful tool for many subjects, and we in the colleges have we have learned a lot about how to do it well; but there are no lessons about how we can use online learning effectively that have not also been learned by companies that are a lot better than colleges at the tech side of delivery. Except they are faster, more agile, more innovative, more responsive, more data-driven, more user-focused, better connected with industry, and more capable of executing at scale.

The pandemic also meant that postsecondary institutions world-wide had a good hard hit on the crack-pipe of cost-savings that online delivery generate, and I suspect they will not be letting up on it any time soon. Which means, de facto, they will be competing for the same (global) students in the same online space as non-college companies providing the same product much cheaper, and quite probably better. And undoubtedly better marketed.

3. Screen & streaming culture has killed movie theatres, VR worlds are just part of life, and the big players are 100% in. The kids who played in Minecraft worlds 10 years ago are fully comfortable with the idea of a metaverse for anything. They're pretty much already there. And if in the colleges we’re mostly training knowledge workers, then a lot of them will be graduating into a world of virtual offices and working from home anyway. Just like companies with empty downtown office buildings, colleges need to actually work at convincing students (and faculty, for that matter) that what's happening IRL on our bricks & mortar campuses is worth the huge inconvenience (and expense) of physically commuting to school.

4. Meanwhile, our current Gen-Z customer base has no intrinsic respect for, or trust in, any institution, least of all schools. Or any forms of authority, for that matter – all of which they reflexively distrust. Mostly with good cause. What’s more, when they do come to college, they are bringing a strictly transactional mindset to it: this is about fee for service. We are no longer gatekeepers of knowledge and arbiters of competence. Being in college is not a privilege, it’s a right – one they paid good money for. It stopped being a privilege after the Second World War. But legacy universities and colleges continue to treat their customers as if they should be grateful just to be there. It’s not a recipe for building consumer confidence, or trust in the brand, or a 5-star rating on Yelp.

5. Traditional credentials are, if not actually meaningless, a currency whose career value is in serious decline in the real world of work – along with ROI on a college education. The exception to that being name-brand schools, of which there are very few – the likes of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, LSE; and in Canada, U of T, McGill*, & (maybe) Queens*. Every other credential-granting institution is just another largely undifferentiated credential-granting institution. In my entire career, the only employer that ever asked me for my academic credentials is my current one: an academic institution. So... tell me: exactly what am I getting for my $40,000 diploma?

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian, and the current Premier of the Province of Ontario did not bother to earn a degree at college. Peter Thiel is offering a $100K fellowship that requires its fellows to drop out of college (“The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sit in a classroom”). Warren Buffett claims that “a $100 public speaking course gave me the most important degree I have – and it’s why I’m successful today.” And 1/3 of the rest of world's billionaires don't have college degrees – if that sort of thing matters to you as a metric of success. 

 (* and both of them are facing significant existential crises at the moment. See below.)

6. The broader, socio-political purpose of universities and colleges is under attack world-wide. Arts and the Humanities, as areas of study and inquiry, are in free-fall, if not openly derided in the public sphere. Pace John Henry Newman and his philosophical descendants, The Idea of a University is pretty much dead in the water. University presidents can be fired by public opinion. Public funding of post-secondary education is being aggressively slashed. Enrolment numbers are collapsing, and institutional dependence on inflated, foreign-student tuition fees has been revealed to be a precarious and unsustainable model at best, and flatly immoral at worst. If the financial collapse of Laurentian University was a canary in the coal mine, then the panic-button pressed by the provost of Queen’s University is an explosion in the tunnel, and we need to pay attention.

So… now what?

First, every college now has an obligation to put a firm stake in the ground about what its actual value proposition is for its students. If we can’t do that convincingly, then we have a real problem. We must also accept that our prospects do not already cherish the educational platitudes that we hold so dear to our pedagogical hearts (and which always drive our marketing campaigns). Because they don’t assume college matters. We actually need to convince them that it does. Part of that, to my mind, means backing up the credential with some form of tangible, demonstrable portfolio of work that a student can take away from the experience and show a potential employer: This is who I worked with. This is what I did. This is what I can do. In my profession (advertising) this is the student portfolio, and there is literally nothing more important to my students’ subsequent success than the quality of the portfolio they leave with. It would only to take a little bit of imagination and creativity to figure out what a “graduate portfolio” could look like across other disciplines.

Second, colleges need to lead with their individual strengths and stop trying to sell themselves like they're Harvard. With the exception of a few, high-profile global educational brands (Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and their ilk) students don’t choose institutions. They choose programs of study. They follow the thing they want to do to the place that has a program that will help them do it. Colleges are like Procter & Gamble or Kraft or Unilever. The consumer does not care about Procter & Gamble. The consumer cares about getting their clothes clean – so they care about Tide. (At best, for the consumer, P&G is a trust-guarantor that Tide will work and won't poison anyone in the process, but that’s about it.)

I know this is a hard pill for college administrators to swallow, but colleges are all parity products. Tylenol vs Advil, Toyota vs Honda, Sheridan vs Seneca. Nice campus? Dedicated teachers? Cool gym facilities? Classrooms full of computers? Check, check, check… whatever. From the standpoint of the consumer, there is effectively no difference between their offerings, qua college. (For fun, if you could call it that, try stripping the name off any college ad anywhere, and inserting the name of any other college. It’ll work fine. Half the time you can even plug in any number of other products and it will still work.)

That’s because every college everywhere does their marketing as if they have the same intrinsic value as Harvard, which is: It doesn’t matter what you study at Harvard, what matters going to Harvard! At Harvard, and some few other elite global educational institutions, that is 100% true. Everywhere else... no, not really. But it does matter if you studied animation at Sheridan, or music at Humber, or nursing at Seneca, or culinary arts at George Brown, or computer science at Waterloo. (Harvard, not surprisingly, barely bothers to market itself at all.)

And that means we need to market at the program level, to the people who are interested in specific careers or subject areas. We can do that; we can precision target-market at scale to identify students who are likely fits for all our programs – we just don’t bother. Again: Sell Tide, not P&G. And if you can’t do that, then maybe there might be a problem with your programs.

If I were running the marketing department of a major college or university, I’d hire a top-end marketing team who had serious agency and/or client-side experience selling in two areas: youth-oriented brands, and luxury products. I’d give them a three-year mandate to change the college marketing game, top to bottom – including generally forgotten but crucial brand touch-points like the student registration process. Then give them the budget to do it, and then get out of their way.

Third, colleges must acknowledge that they are selling a luxury, analogue experience that cannot be replicated online – an experience that starts at $10,000 per year at the low end. So start marketing like that’s the case. That means we need to acknowledge that live, in-person learning itself has become a premium product and a key differentiator (and then make damn sure that’s what it really is).

Today, anything that can be digitized can be scaled and commoditized.  

As a result, today, in all realms, Analogue = Luxury.

Anything that by its nature can’t be delivered on a screen and must live offline IRL, is now a luxury product. Paper books and magazines, record players, live opera, mechanical watches, personalized valet service, Icelandic volcano tours, mind- and life-altering experiences and chance meetings with people who could well become the most important people in your life – these are luxury, analogue products – the type of which colleges have always done uniquely well. Colleges cannot compete with the capacity of other players in the market to commoditize higher education. And yet, instead of investing in, and developing and promoting live, unique, irreplicable on-campus in-class student experiences, we are doubling down on more and more digital delivery, where we will inevitably lose on price, if not quality.

I may be completely wrong about all of this. I hope I am.

As it is, I have absolute faith in the quality – the superiority – of our product. I know how good, how dedicated, and how effective my colleagues are at developing the potential of our students – who are generally very successful in their field. But I think it would be prudent for all of us in the world of post-secondary education to take a long, hard, and brutally realistic look at what we offer our customers and prospects, and go forward under the assumption that if we don’t radically and quickly adapt to the current state of their world, we are running a taxi company, in 2012, while they’re hailing an Uber.

A few related links:

Meta Is Helping 10 Universities To Open Metaverse Campuses 

College in the Metaverse Is Here. Is Higher Ed Ready?

The Meta Immersive Learning Project

VictoryXR Higher Education Solutions

Are The Google Career Certificates Still Worth It In 2023?

Lessons from Top Hat's Acquisition Spree

15 Largest EdTech Companies in the World

Nearly a third of the world’s billionaires didn’t graduate college

The Thiel Fellowship

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?