Readers of this blog will know that I think that education is a ripe market for innovation.  It’s something that I’m excited about and that we as a firm have been focusing on recently.   Most of the time (for the sake of practicality) I talk about education on a micro level – thinking about specific companies that can disrupt particular market segments.

But just for fun, I want to start a discussion here on how higher ed could be completely revamped on a macro level.  It’s just a thought experiment really – and I recognize that the suggestions below may be impossible to implement.  But let’s suspend our disbelief a little bit – sometimes you need to redefine the end goal to figure out what steps are needed to get there.

First, the Problems in a Nutshell:

Very succinctly, college is too expensive and poorly designed for the vast majority of people. Actually, I think the poor design is the main driver of the cost.  Is sitting in a classroom for 4 years, listening to lectures, taking tests, reading textbooks, and getting drunk at frat parties the most efficient use of our education dollars? I think not.  I informally polled dozens of people to ask them what % of the material they learned in college is really relevant to what they do.  The answer was almost unanimously 15% or less.  Most folks though did say that they got tremendous value from the relationships or the college “experience”.  But couldn’t that be delivered in a more cost effective, and maybe less time consuming way?

Suggestions to Completely Change Higher Ed

1. Significantly reduce the number of institutions of higher ed that operate in the current “traditional” format. I think there is a place for the existing model, but I think it should be the exception rather than the rule.  I think alternative educational delivery methods should arise such that excellent students have to make a very real choice about whether to go to a standard university or something different.

2. Replace traditional universities with excellent vocational programs. Instead of the traditional 4-year university experience, I think there should be a proliferation of high-quality vocational programs for everything from medicine, to accounting, to engineering.  The focus of these programs should reduce the time it takes to complete a degree and the readiness of the graduate to participate in their desired field upon completion.  Also, the instructors in these programs don’t necessarily need to have PHD’s in their fields (isn’t it kind of silly to have a PHD teaching intro economics)?

3. Establish a broad community service or military service program for high school graduates. Before you think I’m completely crazy, remember that this happens all the time all over the world. University graduates from Singapore or Taiwan often say they made their best friends and build the foundation of their professional network in the military.  This adresses the cameraderie and “life experience” value of the traditional campus experience. And I’d rather have my kid learning this while helping underserved communities rather than playing XBox in their dorm rooms.

4. Significantly leverage the internet to deliver foundational education. One of the missing pieces in 1-3 is that some of the core liberal arts training might be lost.  Also, foundational courses should be more efficiently delivered in a much larger setting vs. a vocational school.  I think part of the solution here is to significantly improve high school education.  But in the absence of that, I think core courses could be conducted quite effectively online.  And it does not necessarily need to be an inferior education.  The advances in online media delivery means that students can have very rich interactions with teachers, students, and the material that surpass what they would get in a classroom setting.  This education could also happen in tandem with #3 depending on how demanding those programs are designed.

These are obviously huge changes, and I’m curious to hear what others think.  But if these options existed when I was graduating from high school, I think I would seriously consider a community service + online + vocation combo vs. a traditional college experience.  And I think it could be delivered more cost effectively and get students better trained for the real world as well.  What other models would you propose?