Five reasons I’m optimistic about the next 20 years in education
I have spent the last 20 years working in education — as a teacher, someone starting schools, a network of schools, an online tutoring network, and now as an investor. The last twenty years saw the rise of the Internet and the first few experiments to move learning from one to many in physical locations, to an abundance of learning available wherever you are. There are a few reasons I think we are going to see an enormous amount of progress in education over the next twenty years:
- The failure of higher education.
This is a strong statement. U.S. higher education is considered the best in the world. But several related factors have combined to create a crisis. First, education is one of only a few industries to resist technological change, causing continual increases in annual cost for students over the last 30 years. Second, all of higher education’s cost is born by students, a student-pay system, resulting in enormous personal loans necessary for students, with often ruinous impact. Third, universities have always had an uncomfortable relationship with job training. They want to believe that they are about teaching students to think and become better people. But in fact, for most students, they are believed to lead to great jobs. However, that has become disconnected over the last thirty years. Now, students are spending four years, paying enormous tuitions, and failing to get jobs.
2. The crisis of under-employment.
Independent of higher education, we are going through a shift in employment as significant as the change from agricultural to industrial. The change from industrial to the information economy has the positive effect of making goods and services more affordable every year, lowering the cost of living. However, it also means that people who had very good industrial jobs are left unemployed as those jobs go away. While this crisis is incredibly painful, as witnessed by our national politics, it also creates the opportunity to try completely new models of instruction, because people are desperate for a different way.
3. The infrastructure to conduct live online instruction.
The Internet has been with us for a little over 20 years now and the mobile Internet for a little over 10. A lot of things have happened in that time like the rise of social networks and video streaming. But as most educators know, much of learning is about a relationship between a teacher/coach and the learner. That is one of the most difficult things to automate. My experience is that a blend of teachers and personalized curriculum is the best way to learn. However, live online instruction has really only been viable with services like Zoom and Slack over the last couple of years. Slack really could not have happened until everyone got used to social networks. Zoom could not have happened without a lot of early experiments by Skype, Webex, and Google cuasing a behavioral change where more people were comfortable conducting their meetings online. The unexpected beneficiary of tools like this are that it became possible to create a truly immersive learning environment.
Lambda School for example runs a totally online computer science program. It is free to students until they get a job, and runs on Slack and Zoom. When you are in Lambda, it feels nothing like the dead boring asynchronous instruction of the past. Lambda has culture. It makes sense that these Future of Work companies will be the innovator’s, because they don’t have any legacy geographic businesses to coast on. But how long until every college is forced to move from the broken MOOC model to offer synchronous online learning?
4. The narrowing of k12 education.
For many good reasons, the accountability movement in the U.S., with a focus on math and reading results, has been a positive, especially for low-income students. At Rocketship, my second company, we deeply believed that student success’ in these subjects was crucial to their future. Unfortunately, with that positive also comes an over-focus on the subjects being tested, to the exclusion of others. Many parents and students desire many other academic experiences, creating an opening for third parties.
A good example of a company filling this need is outschool. They are a marketplace of live teacher-led small group classes. By its nature, a marketplace creates a long tail of content. Teachers are teaching Harry Potter, statistics through baseball, and all kinds of things far more interesting than a normal classroom. It is my belief that over the next 20 years, the movement that began as homeschooling will take off, with many more families opting out of their local public schools and going to schools which enable this kind of rich experience.
5. China and India
Given the above, it is the perfect time for new countries to emerge who do not have long established education systems. China, and to some degree, India, are figuring out how to educate students at a scale that is unheard of. Both of these countries have extremely strong education cultures, where parents believe it is their job to ensure a great education for their children. They have never had strong education systems like the West, so they do not rely on them. This is proving to be an enormous advantage, because they have leap-frogged directly into online synchronous learning. Companies like VIPKID, Lingochamp, 17Zuoye, and others are just the beginning of a very large market for much richer experiences for students than a classroom of 30 students at desks. It is likely that the most innovative work in education will come from these countries in the next twenty years and then filter over to the Western world.
Is it possible that the entrenched systems will continue to keep education expensive and impersonal? Sure, but I think it’s more likely that as these legacy systems fail to deliver, first edges of society and then a broader swath will seek new ways to learn, using the power of technology and always-on connectivity.
