The coronavirus has erased a large chunk of college’s value proposition: the on-campus experience.
Campuses are closed, sports have been paused and, understandably, students don’t want to pay the same tuition for a fraction of the services. As a result, enrollment is down across the country and university business models are under unrelenting pressure.
The entire athletics program at East Carolina University has been furloughed with pay cuts. Ohio Wesleyan University eliminated 18 majors and consolidated a number of programs to save $4 million a year. And Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University lost 1,000 students to online school within weeks of reopening its campus, sacrificing $3.5 million in room and board fees.
And that’s just in the last few weeks.
As universities struggle, edtech is being positioned as a solution for their largest problem: remote teaching. Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC), created a campus product to help schools quickly offer digital coursework. Podium Education raised millions last month to offer universities for-credit tech programs. Eruditus brought on more than $100 million in the last few months to create programming for elite universities. In some ways, the growth is the story of edtech’s ongoing surge amid the coronavirus pandemic: Remote schooling has forced institutions to piece together third-party solutions to keep operations afloat.
However, while some startups are helping universities offer virtual programming overnight, professors on the ground are warning their institutions to think long-term about what kind of technologies are net positive to adopt.
It’s a stress test that could lead to a reckoning among edtech startups.
‘We’re talking about the next evolution of textbooks’
As the last eight months have taught us, Zoom-based school is a lackluster alternative to the in-person experience. College campuses, thus, are tasked with finding a more creative way to offer engaging virtual content to students who are stuck in their dorm rooms.
Coursera launched Coursera for Campus to help colleges bring on online courses (credit optional) with built-in exams; more than 3,700 schools across the world are using the software.
“Professors would really want super-high-quality branded content that has assessments built into it if they’re going to deliver that learning for credit,” CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said. “That’s not the kind of learning you can get on YouTube.”
For now, though, Maggioncalda says he doesn’t think the death of a physical college campus experience is the future. He’s betting that the product can help colleges save money on faculty costs and reinvest that same money into the campus.
“There will be schools that will continue to offer residential experience, and I think what they’re gonna find is, if your real value proposition is that residential experience, then lead into that heavily,” he said. “But make sure that you’ve got really good content and credentials that are available so that your students don’t have to sacrifice.”
Georgia Tech teacher David Joyner says that MOOCs like Coursera “are good for outreach and access, but are not good for accreditation.” Instead, he thinks edtech needs to be built first and foremost for universities to be most effective.
Podium Education, for example, builds courses in partnership with universities to offer for-credit courses. The newly launched startup raised $12 million in October and works with more than 20 colleges. Eruditus, an edtech startup that raised over $100 million in September, creates courses in collaboration with more than 30 elite universities, including MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, IIT and more.
Coursera, Podium and Eruditus are all signaling a future where universities could be getting a plug-and-play model of asynchronously taught curriculum.
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“It’s not sexy, but I think we’re talking about the next evolution of textbooks,” Joyner said. “Schools can take these programs, add in their local context and add their own spin on things.”
Joyner’s argument is that virtual programs can be used as a standard plug and play among universities, the way that physical textbooks are used, and then enhanced by classroom teaching.
“That’s how edtech should be used,” Joyner said. “But I have no doubt that many universities will use it to cut costs, take short cuts and decrease faculty.”
As Joyner alluded, the argument against virtual instruction upstarts is that many offer low-quality and high-quantity solutions. Administrators might opt for the fast, easy solution such as EdX or Coursera out of necessity, but some in higher ed think that these are short-term hacks instead of thoughtful long-term changes.
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Arizona State University’s Phil Regier, who leads the EdPlus program, isn’t as optimistic about an entire renovation of higher-ed and says he favors companies that provide tools to help students and faculty with efficiency and hybrid learning. Some startups in this category include EdSights, a student-engagement chatbot; Zovio’s Signalz, a tool that helps universities track student engagement to see who is most at risk for dropping out of courses; and Piazza, which launched a tool focused on college and high school student participation.
“Companies that think that they can replace what universities do? That’s where I think that educational technology barks up the wrong tree,” Regier said.
He thinks that coding bootcamps and alternative universities might help students get their first job, but not much after.
“If you get a first job, but you aren’t on a pathway to graduation, that’s not so good,” he said. “There’s a lot of evidence that … lifetime earnings for people who have some type of college degree [are higher]. You aren’t in a fully successful place going forward.”
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The nuance here is that middle-tier colleges might not have the flexibility to think long term right now. Instead, facing record declines in enrollment, universities have to find fast answers, and that can often mean taking on less-than-ideal online programming (even Zoom school) just to make sure the wheels are churning.
The hacks will disproportionately hurt colleges that don’t have elite, brand-name recognition. Colleges such as Harvard or Stanford will always be able to attract students on the basis of their signal and reputation. Even if these institutions don’t attract students in their current state, there are billions in endowment that can help them stay afloat until the pandemic is past us.
What does that mean for the future? In one world, a startup will “win the category” and help middle-tier colleges adapt. In another world, it could look closer to what Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun predicted in 2013. He thought that in 50 years, there would only be 10 institutions in the world that would deliver higher education. The majority of those institutions would be Ivy Leagues or enterprise-sponsored universities. The majority of students would learn from online courses or job-mandated upskilling courses. It would mean the end of the cultural weight of four-year institutions and the beginning of a broader definition of higher education.
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