Building successful university partnerships
Jessica Wang shares strategies and frameworks from her decade-long journey at edtech giant 2U, where she built 30 university partnerships and grew 2U’s placement network from scratch to more than 80,000 locations across all 50 states.
Welcome to the Emerge Product-Market Fit Academy series, where we bring you practical insights and advice from accomplished operators and founders in edtech. This series is dedicated to helping early stage edtech founders navigate the challenging path to achieving product-market fit.
Jessica Wang isn’t just the SVP of Operations at 2U, she’s a master of forging powerful partnerships in higher education (HE). At 2U, she led a 200-person placement team, secured 30 partnerships with university clients, and scaled 2U’s placement network to 80,000 locations across the US. Today, 2U, the parent company of edX, connects +76M learners to world-class, free-to-degree online education in partnership with top universities.
Drawing from Jessica’s decade of experience, we’ll show you how to pivot from being a mere supplier to becoming an irreplaceable strategic partner for HE institutions. Expect actionable insight on product positioning, customer acquisition, navigating bureaucracy, and fuelling growth.
By the end of this article, you will learn how to:
- Position your edtech startup to universities
Align your solutions with university challenges for effective market entry. - Secure university clients
Acquire strategies for navigating procurement processes and establishing credibility to secure university partnerships. - Identify the right decision-makers
Understand the academic hierarchy and how to navigate it to reach the individuals with influence and decision-making power. - Create growth loops with university partners
Discover how to build growth loops through mutually beneficial partnerships.
HOW TO POSITION YOUR EDTECH STARTUP TO UNIVERSITIES
If you’re building a product for HE, the path to forming partnerships with universities can seem daunting, given the deeply entrenched traditions of academic institutions. Jessica shares her three-step process for how to position your product or services to appeal to a university.
1. Know their strengths
Before thinking about presenting your product, understand the areas where universities have been historically strong. Jessica points to scholarship and teaching as areas that are generally strengths for universities. You can certainly enhance these areas, but there are better ways to position your products with universities if you are to become indispensable.
2. Identify weak areas
Impactful partnerships occur when you can offer something that the university lacks. Whether it’s a shortfall in effective student recruitment, adjusting to class overflows, or something else — these are key opportunities for an edtech company to support a university and demonstrate immediate value. For example, Cadmus has seen immense popularity with universities by transforming assessments — and in the age of generative AI, this has never been a higher priority. Another example is Unibuddy, helping universities with student recruitment, including reaching Gen Zs, whose trust in HE is currently at an all-time low.
3. Consider blind spots
Can you identify an area that lies neither in universities’ strengths nor weaknesses but in their blind spot? Can you find untapped value in the ecosystem that institutions have not yet considered? For example, Mentor Collective’s tech-enabled peer mentorship platform tackles myriad challenges for universities, from reducing dropout rates to closing equity gaps.
Cracking the university market as an edtech startup isn’t just about having a great product; it’s about understanding your potential partner deeply and positioning your product accordingly.
HOW TO SECURE UNIVERSITY CLIENTS
After identifying where your edtech solution can make a real impact in a university ecosystem, the next question is how to secure partnerships effectively. Many founders take the approach of honing in on target clients and approaching them individually to pitch their product. However, Jessica notes that this direct-to-target approach is not the best strategy when dealing with the HE ecosystem.
Instead, she advocates for a relationship-first approach, building out your network with individuals whose ecosystems would benefit from your product or services. Build trust with those individuals and they can help you collaboratively sell your product to their institution, but can also use their network to help you get access to other relevant institutions. This approach is especially important given that university faculty moves between institutions more often than you think, while maintaining their own deep networks.
“We tend to think about the faculty member in the tweed jacket who has been at Harvard or Cambridge for 20, 30, 40 years or a full career. But the reality is that these individuals tend to move around a lot, and especially those who are most innovative. So those relationships really create these webs in and of themselves.”
Start with relationships and build a network that enables you to reach the relevant institutions without needing cold outreach.
IDENTIFYING THE RIGHT DECISION-MAKERS
You may get an introduction to an institution but this could be many steps removed from an institution’s actual decision-makers or influencers. Here’s Jessica’s two-step process for navigating the complex hierarchies in HE.
Step 1: map the terrain
The first aspect to focus on is understanding the decision-making stakeholders and process within a given university structure. Unlike corporates, where it is easier to pinpoint who to sell to, universities have a federated decision-making process, typically featuring a multitude of stakeholders. You should be aware of the following stakeholders:
- Innovation head: start by identifying if there is someone in the institution charged with innovation or bringing new technologies on board. They can be a useful entry point but their reach may be limited.
- Provost or dean: they may have decision-making power, but it might be restricted to a department, school or a specific programme within the university.
- Faculty: They may have a say in the decision-making process. Sometimes, the process might even come down to a vote, which can affect timelines.
- Legal and financial offices: these are often centralised and must be navigated separately.
- Non-traditional entities: some universities have arms that are more focused on customers and end users that are not within the traditional university space eg executive education.
Step 2: navigate the landscape
After you’ve mapped out the decision-making landscape, it’s time to understand the dynamics between these stakeholders. For Jessica, whiteboarding these relationships has been a helpful tactic to create a visual guide to the internal workings of a university. Within your stakeholders, you should identify the following:
- Most resistant: identify the individual who is most resistant to your offering. Knowing the objections in advance can help you prepare your pitch more effectively.
- Least resistant: find the person for whom your product will solve the most significant problem. They can be your biggest ally in moving your project forward.
- Influencers: these aren’t the decision-makers but they have the power to sway opinion. Get them on board to create a ripple effect in your favour and influence the most resistant stakeholders.
Mapping the internal decision-making landscape of universities enables founders to strategically position their edtech solutions. By identifying key stakeholders, their influence and resistance level, founders can secure contracts more effectively while gaining the broad acceptance required for a successful long-term partnership.
CREATING GROWTH LOOPS WITH UNIVERSITY PARTNERS
After you’ve successfully identified the key decision-makers and influencers within a university, the next frontier of strategic engagement is creating growth loops. These aren’t just cyclical relationships; they’re self-reinforcing systems that continually enhance the value of your product for every stakeholder involved.
At 2U, this was exemplified by aligning university partners with a network of facilities for student placements (eg hostpitals for medical students or mental health clincis for aspiring psychologists), thereby enhancing value for both educational institutions and the facilities. The more universities that joined 2U, the more valuable it was for facilities and the more they grew in number, and vice versa.
Given the competition that exists between many of university programmes, fighting to attract the top students, this was no easy task. It was a slow burn. Let’s dive into how Jessica was able to align these partners and tap into these growth loops.
Step 1: establish good bones
Build a solid foundation first by over-delivering value to your initial university clients, before building a strategy for growth loops. This strong starting relationship serves as the framework that enables your team to focus on creating subsequent growth loops.
Step 2: solve dual problems
Extend your network to include other beneficial stakeholders and align incentives. These parallel relationships work in tandem with your university partnerships to reinforce the growth loop by making your solution increasingly appealing to both. In 2U’s case, universities needed facilities for their students to gain hands-on training as part of their licensure and the facilities benefited from the pipeline of high quality students.
“Imagine a hospital who is helping us by having students go to that hospital for multiple different programmes. But we’re continuing to feed them high quality students who are well trained, who ultimately are going to graduate, gain licensure and be able to staff their shortages.”
Step 3: mitigate competitive fears
Open up channels of communication among your university partners to mitigate the perception of competition. Demonstrate the mutual benefits of participating in a larger network to pivot their viewpoint from competitors to collaborators.
Step 4: activate network effects
When universities recognise the shared value, network effects (and fear of missing out) take over. This not only makes it easier to onboard new partners but also strengthens the value proposition for your existing ones, keeping the growth loop in motion.
The art of establishing growth loops with university partners lies not just in building relationships, but in weaving a complex web of interconnected value propositions. Be aware that mitigating fear of competition takes time and requires a strong network of initial customers who have built trust with you.
SUMMARY
You’ve read Jessica’s proven methods for advancing from a standard vendor to an indispensable strategic partner in HE. Her practical framework revolves around three core elements: precise product positioning, meaningful relationship-building with decision-makers, and establishing growth loops that deliver mutual value.
The next steps? Start by contextualising these methods to your startup’s unique challenges and opportunities. Identify the exact pain points your product solves within a university setting, and engage directly with the institutional stakeholders who matter. As you roll out your solution, keep an eye on long-term value creation: is your partnership bringing ongoing benefits to both sides?
Emerge is a global pre-seed fund backed by 100+ of the world’s best edtech operators. Our vision is to democratise access to opportunity — by being a catalytic partner for early-stage edtech founders. If that’s you, get in touch and submit your deck on our website.
This article is part of our Product-Market Fit Academy, where we bring you practical insights and advice from our world-leading community of Venture Partners. To keep up to date with our episodes, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, YouTube and Spotify. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our latest insights for early-stage edtech founders.
