Without Ed Tech, 700 Colleges Could Be Dead Within the Next Decade

    A few colleges are already on the path to dominance
thanks to online teaching and other innovations… the rest need to catch up immediately or lose the game forever.

William Bowen, former president of Princeton University, can tell
you why Ed-Tech is an unstoppable trend in a single sentence:

“Two forces are combining: extraordinary technological progress with economic need.”

America has never experienced an educational upheaval like this before. As demand for college is rising, the unexpected is happening.

One by one, colleges are failing.

More than 700 colleges could die in the next decade or two, according to The Economist.[i]

That may actually be optimistic. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen believes that up to half of U.S. colleges could fail in the next 15 years[ii].

The only thing that can save many of these colleges now is Ed-Tech. Especially online classes.

The Greatest Education Boom Ever Is Just Starting

The problem of meeting surging college demand must be solved, and not just because schools would rather survive.

Going on to college after high school is a good-life, bad-life decision today. The New York Times reports college grads now earn 98% more per hour than everyone else.

Even if students wanted to accept lower salaries by skipping college, it’s a choice that they won’t ge

An Oxford University study recently concluded, “around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category… jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two.”[i]

Students know it. They’re choosing more education.

Last year, two of three high school students went on to college. The majority will graduate with 4-year degrees[ii]. In 1940, only one in 20 students achieved college degrees.[iii]

But here’s the irony—colleges can no longer afford to build more traditional classrooms to meet demand.

That’s why Ed-Tech is successfully changing the classroom itself.

The Classroom Replicator Is Broken

On most scales, top ranked Harvard may be different from Clark Atlanta University, which Washington Monthly put on its list of 20 worst colleges. But their classrooms looked the same until recently.

The basic classroom hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

  That stagnation is exactly why most investors cannot see how vital Ed-
Tech is to schools’ survival.

During the Vietnam War years, the answer to exploding enrollment was
simple. Keep building.

Big universities doubled and quadrupled in size, 251 new four-year
colleges[i] opened their doors, and 450 community colleges were born
between 1960 and 1975.

Today, rising tuitions have made that solution unthinkable.

Building for Demand Is Out of the Question Now

College tuitions rose 421% from 1982 to 2012.

Students cannot bear much more.

In 2000, tuition only had to pay for 20% of the cost of education at a public university. Government support covered the rest.

Today, students are paying nearly half of a much higher cost, while governments continue to cut support every year.

Private schools are feeling the heat, too. Forbes has noted that 57% of students who are accepted at their first-choice college decide not to go there after all. “Too expensive,” is the number one reason.[i]

Ed-Tech is the answer to education more students at prices they can afford.
How to Graduate from Harvard for $32,000

Four years of tuition at Harvard College come to $181,000, without housing. A degree from its extension school, Harvard University, costs 82% less. Extension students take nearly all their classes online. And yet, they still learn from real, top Harvard professors.

Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other forward-thinking schools were early leaders in the trend to online classes.

And since these prestigious schools already have brilliant faculty, they have a strong advantage when it comes to enrolling more students without building more classrooms or hiring more faculty. They simply offer high-quality classes online.

Or, they may license them, as Boston University does. BU charges 18 other affiliates $40 to $100 per student per day for its continuing ed programs, and earns $1.2 million a year doing it.[ii]

If it costs $100,000 to put a complete full-credit class online, the first 50-100 students will pay for it at $1,000 to $2,000 a head. The next 50 students will be nearly pure profit.

Schools that use Ed-Tech well will survive the pressures of education today. And those that resist will be victims of the greatest surge in education we have ever seen.