#35 Disruption in HigherED - We are ready for it!
Hello, and welcome to another free edition of my newsletter. I’m Shweta, I write about EdTech, Startups, and Products. Feel free to reach out to me on any of these areas, I’ll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice. 🤜🤛
Quality education at scale - the holy grail that all of us in Education are after. However, higher education has been facing a lot of large problems globally.
# 1 - Lack of Student Outcomes - Higher education is not fulfilling its promise: students are leaving college woefully unprepared for life after graduation. They enter the job market unprepared. It's a highly complex world, and they're not getting or learning how to use the cognitive tools they need to deal with it.
# 2 - Education at the right value - For most students, college ends up costing much more than it was worth, with little in the way of payoff.
#3 - Bad Student experience - Learners have often been intellectually absent during much of their time in college. Students spend much of their time during college learning things that don't really interest them: They don't attend class or comprehend anything being taught. Four years of undergraduate are spent with little motivation
#4 - Lack of Access - Many capable students are unable to go to a first-rate college. For example, American universities tend to have quota policies that limit the number of non-US students they admit. For instance, on average, Harvard accepts about a dozen students from India and China for each of its approximately 1700-student classes.
The question of what constitutes a college education isn't nearly as important as it should be.
Nevertheless, the demand for higher ed is going up, like never before, over the next few decades. The enrolments for 2020 have been around 250 million, but it is estimated that by 2030 there would be 377.4 million and 594.1 million students by 2040.
Of this larger demand, East Asia & the Pacific is expected to remain the region with the highest volume and share of enrolments, increasing to 148.8 million (39.4% share) by 2030 and 257.6 million (43.4% share) by 2040.
South & West Asia is expected to be the region with the second-highest volume of enrolments, increasing from 52 million in 2020 to 91.4 million by 2030 and then increasing to 160.4 million by 2040 for a global share of 27.0%. India is where a lot of this action is happening with a majority of 37 million enrolments of the total 52 million enrolments in the region.
There is a global mismatch between the location of academic excellence and the location of demand for high-quality, globally recognized tertiary qualifications. This disconnect is driven primarily by countries like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia and has profound implications for the structure and delivery of higher education in the 21st century.
At the current growth rates we cannot build enough physical universities to sustain demand. Also , attracting more international students to physically travel to the west is also far from sustainable — for context, today there are only 5m international students globally (source), 1m of whom are in the US (source) and 1.7m in the EU (source), with high costs (often double for international students in the EU) of education and politics acting as key bottlenecks. - Emerge Education
Of these global numbers, only 300,000 are Indian international students. There is still a huge gap between the access to quality education that 37 million students in India have. Can the existing universities in the country fill the gap? Surely they can reinvent the pedagogy and change to the demands, but it’s an extremely slow and sluggish process.
While we’ve witnessed efforts to extend global learning and reach the masses through online technology, we have not seen hundreds of thousands (let alone millions) of international students enroll in certificate or full degree programs online.
So then, can global boundaryless universities be created to fill in the void?
YES! Enter Challenger Universities - Universities with no campus. Mostly online enriching social experiences. Learning experiences with no textbooks. Meaningful employment as a default, not an exception. Student-oriented and co-created experiences. Pedagogically grounded, agile curricula.
I love how Emerge Education puts together a case for the Challenger Universities. Summarizing some of my key takeaways for the series, sometimes quoting them verbatim, to ensure no information loss.
By definition - Challenger universities are full-term, in most cases degree-awarding (or aspiring towards accreditation), institutions that have emerged or fully reinvented themselves in the last couple of decades. They offer a holistic learning experience driven by in-house innovation centered around at least one key innovation and focus area that distinguishes them from traditional organizations.
Length and depth: 1–4-year holistic learning journeys often equivalent to undergraduate/BA or postgraduate/MA degrees covering a depth of learning outcomes furthering both skills and knowledge. NOT short 3 to 12-month diploma/vocational experiences that are primarily skills-focused.
Independence: organizations that drive innovation in house and have it at their core, and own each part of the value chain from student acquisition, delivery of teaching to student success, rather than relying on or being third parties such as online program managers (OPMs)or massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Innovation: programs that have distinguishable features across at least one of the following traits: student experience, student outcomes, program scalability, and target audience.
The key strategic choices challenger universities face can be captured across the following 4 dimensions:
Teaching at scale: Rethinking the role of campus and faculty with a technology-first and often cheaper and more flexible proposition. The fact that most faculty need to be Phds and teach without ever having worked in industry is mind-boggling.
Student experience: Offering a student-inspired, personalized, adaptive, and pedagogy-informed experience.
Student outcomes: what we wanted our students to be able to do after they graduated. Delivering objectives-driven, the employer informed and focused modular degrees.
Target audience: Prioritising target populations with offers specifically suited towards life stages, passions, geographies, and desired outcomes.
Tech first, targeted and built for scale
Extremely innovative, in most cases stripping down fundamental traditional pillars of education including fancy campuses and increasing tailoring of the student offer and potential for scale. I sense immense opportunities for universities across the globe to be innovative in approaching large markets like India.
An MBA in your pocket? — Quantic School of Business & Technology is a mobile-first, selective but free if you get accepted, business school designed for the modern leader with a bite-sized, pedagogy-led, and industry-relevant curriculum that you can complete on the go.
Foundry College - Foundry College is a new kind of college that offers live, face-to-face classes in an online environment that promotes the community of a traditional classroom experience. Every class combines live, instructor-led lectures with small-group active learning sessions to ensure that new skills and knowledge are effectively integrated, retained, and can be put into immediate practice. Foundry College's proprietary learning management system, the Forge, can host up to 200 students per session and uses performance data to facilitate student learning and success.
Online first, with small campus as HQs
Southern New Hampshire University (USA) — started its journey as a traditional campus-based university in 1932, reinvented itself during a period of struggle and, in 2009, focused on online courses for working adults, becoming one of the fastest-growing HE institutions in the world with an enrolment of 132k+ students
The Open University (UK)— was established in 1969 and for decades was light years ahead of its time. As an institution that started offering education over TV and radio during late-night hours, it transformed into, at its peak, the largest university in the world with more than a quarter-million fully online students, in most cases working adults taking part-time degrees
An extension to a fully online learning experience can be later established. In a hybrid model, where more than 80% of learning happens online, there could be offline centers established for student career support, networking, and community
Data from the US suggests that students are more likely to choose an online program that is close to where they are situated in the US. For example, in 2015, 73% of exclusively online students studied in-state in California, compared with 26% from another state and just 1% outside the US.
Leading national online degree programs also offer city-based study and social groups, where fellow students connect with each other in-person.
Colleges and universities can choose to focus on building on-the-ground partnerships in the new country - could better position to build awareness, understanding, and ultimately commitment.
This could be with a local university, establishing an overseas branch office, or even establishing a full degree-granting institution in-country. A solution anchored in a traditional approach that complements additional high-tech experiences.
Campus-based, with better experience and outcomes
Due to high dependence on offline campuses and though not a solution to the imbalance in education access in the enrolment growth geographies, these are institutions redefining the outcomes and experience dimensions.
NMITE and TEDI are organizations that are redefining what it means to study to be an engineer. Instead of learning and memorizing theories and then scrambling to get jobs to try and apply them, these organizations offer hands-on, applied, project-based work and help develop real-world ready engineers. Indian engineering universities may want to take a cue from the truly path-breaking approach these institutes are taking!
The time may never have been better to further the cause of these challenger universities.
The lopsided demand and supply of quality education in the Asian continent will fuel the case of these challenger universities even further. The next decade is going to be an interesting time to see how this evolves.
If institutions take an approach to higher education where the only real metric of their success is the success of students—and the incentives are aligned so that this is true for all stakeholders. For example, faculty/mentors receive stock options, which will occur when our learners aligned to them achieve a predetermined outcome - faculty are doubly motivated (both intrinsically and extrinsically) to help the students learn and succeed!
Interesting times ahead - India is looking at the World and the World is eyeing India as we start the new decade and era of EdTech disruption!
This topic merits a series and a deep dive. Coming up over the next few weeks in this series -
India's New Education Policy and how it would affect the expansion of some of these Global Universities into India.
What are the Pros and Cons for the Challenger Universities to enter India/Asia? What should be their GTM?
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