Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, on the Future of Education
Greetings readers,
Welcome to another edition of PIE, where we offer insights from the brightest entrepreneurs and VC’s from around the world. Anant Agarwal, founder and CEO of edX, spoke to students through the Harvard College in Asia Program, and today, I am delighted to share his lessons about the future of education and his experience of building the edX platform.
edX is a non-profit, massive open online course (MOOC) provider. Through partnerships with the world’s leading universities and organizations, its mission is to apply digital technology to education and transform the industry by increasing access around the globe. The platform is built off the premise that education is a human right and therefore everyone should have access. edX currently has 2,200+ courses in subjects such as humanities, math, and computer science, 18 million+ registered learners worldwide, and 60 million+ enrollments across edX courses.
What might education look like in the future?
“In my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, they would work for 30 years and the retirement age in India was 55. Now, people are living a lot longer which impacts the nature of work. Let’s look at 2030. What fraction of today’s jobs will still be around in 2030? 50% of today’s jobs will be gone because of AI and digitalization. 50% doesn’t seem like a big number, but imagine looking at one of your friends or colleagues and imagine that one of you will not have a job.
The whole nature of work in the future, the whole nature of education, is going to change. Interestingly, the largest number of jobs today are not in computer science, but in data science. It’s just been about 10 years since this field has gotten a name. Business has become about business analytics, marketing has become marketing analytics, finance has become about fintech and financial engineering. We realized that we need to re-skill workers so edX has many choices, such as a certificate in fintech, a MicroMaster’s in cryptocurrency, or digital marketing in communications from Wharton.
You will be shocked about what is possible in the future of education. Imagine a dream of open admissions. Imagine, for example, if Harvard has an amazing program in history and MIT has an amazing program in supply chain, and another university in another program. Just imagine that in the future, a little kid in say Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa can learn different things from all of these institutions without admissions and get a bachelor’s degree. Everyone from anywhere can get a bachelor’s degree at their own time and at their own schedule. They’d have to pay a little bit, but it will not be the typical $40,000 or more. We can enable that.”
What are major trends that you foresee in the education space?
“I see three major trends: modular education, omni-channel education and lifelong education. Today, education is one-size-fits-all. You come in and if you study history, you spend your time and classes in history, and get a bachelor’s in history. But what if I want a piece of a master’s? Right now, this can’t happen. Modular education is the notion that education can come in smaller chunks and a MicroMasters is one example. We needed a new credential that will transform and motivate people, so MicroMaster’s allows you to pass graduate level courses and, if you choose to, can accelerate your time at the accredited university to achieve a complete master’s. In the future, a modular education is where you can stack parts of your master’s.
The second thing we can do is we can stack across institutions. We just launched master’s degrees at great prices. For example, we launched a master’s degree from UT Austin for only $10,000. Additionally, what a lot of people are projecting is that soft skills will become more important such as critical thinking, how you will speak, and how you will write. Suddenly, from people arguing that everyone should be learning STEM and downplaying humanities, I believe that humanities will be the winner in the future.”
What motivated you to build edX as your own independent nonprofit venture as opposed to an arm in a larger institution?
“A lot of credit goes to MIT and Harvard who are our largest funders for choosing this structure. We wanted to launch this independently because we knew that a lot of technologies like self-driving cars are set to transform the world. By making it a nonprofit, we could make decisions that are good for the world and not just for the bottom line. We made our platform open source, which means the technological platform that powers edX is open. You can go to Github and download our software so essentially anybody anywhere can launch their own platforms. Many other countries have adopted this as well. edX is a 501c(3) organization and one of the reasons why we chose for it to be independent is from a theory of innovation proposed by Clayton Christenson, that it is very difficult for large corporations to disrupt itself. This is why we spun it out as a small speedboat that can go off the main mothership — edX can go where it wants to at a very high speed. Politically, we may make the right decisions for humanity, which we may not make if it were a part of an already existing large institution. It is very forward looking for MIT and Harvard to fund this platform because in some way they might be disrupting themselves. It’s just amazing that it was done this way.”
It’s amazing that you are offering these courses and micro-masters at such competitive prices, yet in many countries $1000 is still very high. So in your mission to make education still accessible, how do you plan to address this issue?
“First of all, the learning on edX is free. The videos and the learning exercises are free. If you want the credentials and graded assignments, then you have to pay. One thing is that we have copious amounts of financial aid. If you go to edX.org and go to the financial aid section, you only have to answer two or three questions and we will provide a response. Finally, the last thing is that as a nonprofit, if we find surpluses, then we can one day give even more financial aid and give geo-pricing.”
What is your advice for student entrepreneurs deciding between their startups versus larger corporate positions?
“When you are young, you have very little to lose so it’s a good time to try to a build a startup because it can be much harder to do this later in life. When you are younger, there are less opportunity costs, so I really advise that students should go out there and try.”
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Anant Agarwal received his Bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stanford University. He currently serves as the director of CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT alongside his work as CEO of edX.
Interested in reading more? Check out other interviews from Profiles in Entrepreneurship (PIE) here!
