The Achilles Heel of the Education Establishment
By Sam Allen
email: sam (at) darwinsnet.org
(1,530 words – 5 minute read)
Introduction
America’s K-12 schools, colleges and universities cannot be reformed unless outside competition forces them to reform or die. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs haven’t been able to put real pressure on these schools because they erroneously believe they need to get a slice of the government funding pie to compete against them.
The problem with government funding is that it also requires obedience to government regulations, and these regulations inhibit the kind of innovation that would reform the education market. Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward but overlooked way for entrepreneurs to out-compete traditional schools without accepting any government money.
If entrepreneurs focused on serving students who just want to get on with the rest of their lives, they don’t need to provide full-service schools like those that dominate the market today. They can offer alternatives that are at least an order of magnitude more efficient at delivering education.
Force-Coupled Degrees Disincentivizes Innovation
Since most knowledge is already free online, the cost of an education shouldn’t be so high. But it is because the only way to get an academic degree, which is still required in many segments of the labor market, is to also get an education from a traditionally accredited school. Students are essentially captive customers of the education establishment and traditional schools have no incentive to make their educational services better, faster or cheaper.
Students in the K-12 and higher education markets currently spend anywhere from 12 to 22 years in school. The actual cost of a low-end high school diploma starts at $250k while college degrees can add tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to the total bill, depending on the school that students attend.
What’s crazy about these accredited degrees is that they have very little objective value in the labor market. Way too much of their curricula is politically or bureaucratically driven and since accreditation agencies don’t actually require students to meet objective standards to graduate, their degrees don’t actually represent a minimum, guaranteed level of education. This dramatically reduces their utility to students and employers.
To make matters worse, since standardized tests aren’t widely used to measure student performance, consumers can’t even use the results of these tests to identify which teachers and schools are actually good at delivering education. The education market is essentially a market with no objective metrics that can be used by consumers to measure quality or value. Consumer opinions are almost always driven by the “cachet” of a school or its degree, not by any demonstrable value.
Entrepreneurs can change all this by offering a different type of degree that is much cheaper and faster to acquire while also being much more responsive to the needs of the market.
Niche-based Degrees
In the human environment there are millions of individual niches, each with its own unique set of educational requirements. While many of these niches share common requirements, the more specialized niches have more specialized needs.
If entrepreneurs were to survey the people currently occupying these niches, they could compile a database that describes what knowledge and skills are needed to successfully compete for them. This information could then be parsed into individual logical learning units (LLUs) that help students learn what they need to learn.
Entrepreneurs could then create standardized exams (SEs) to measure how well students master the skills and knowledge these LLUs describe. The more tests they pass, the more niches they will be able to compete for successfully. Essentially, multiple LLUs could be mixed and matched into niche-specific “degrees” that more perfectly align with the dreams and aspirations of students.
No longer would students be forced to buy one-size-fits-all subject-oriented degrees that are extremely expensive. Instead, they could just identify the niches they want to compete for and only get the education they need. And since the standardized exams of niche-based degrees don’t care how students get their education, they would also be free to get their education from any source they want. This would drive innovation because students and educators would be rewarded for finding and delivering the most efficient and effective sources of education.
For many subjects, students could use free or low-cost online tools. For more difficult subjects they could add in tutoring services or classroom instruction. For subjects that require hands-on experience, they could participate in labs or even on-the-job training. Or they could even find retired professionals who want to mentor the next generation during their retirement years.
There would be no limit to the creativity that students and educators could employ in getting and delivering education as long as students can pass rigorous proctored exams. And if the results of these exams were published, it would also help other consumers identify which educators were good at delivering specific types of education. This feedback loop would discipline the education market just like it disciplines many other segments of the economy.
Niche-Based Education Can Be Extremely Profitable
The beauty of a niche-based education market is that the entrepreneurs that create LLUs and their accompanying SEs can charge students for taking their tests. The networks that host this information can also charge educators who want to teach these students advertising fees so students can learn about their services. They also have a potential revenue stream in charging employers for information about the students who may be good matches for the niches in their industries. Because this “marketplace” could end up playing such a critical role in balancing supply and demand in the labor market, it has the potential to become extremely profitable. And since it would be self-sustaining, it wouldn’t need any government funding to survive and thrive.
In fact, since entrepreneurs wouldn’t have any government strings attached to their revenue, they would have the freedom to innovate and create all kinds of competing standards for the education market that traditional accreditation agencies would never allow. And just like most other segments of the economy, the process of natural selection would sort out the good standards from the bad ones until only the healthy survive.
Free Students are Productive Students
One of the most important aspects of a niche-based education market is that students (and their parents) will have access to copious amounts of data regarding the niches in the human environment and the skills and knowledge that are needed to compete for them. This information will enable them to intelligently direct their own evolution as well as adapt to their changing environments.
Students who have the freedom to guide their own personal development will be personally invested in their progress in a way that students in state-regulated schools are not. This means they will also be far more productive since students in traditional schools instinctively resist the forced learning of government-regulated schools.
Students who want to learn are way easier and cheaper to teach than students who are forced to learn. This fact alone will give niche-based education providers a competitive advantage that traditionally accredited schools cannot match without major reforms.
The combination of:
1. Highly productive students
2. Optimized curricula for every student
3. Freedom to patronize any source of education
4. Copious amounts of data regarding niches and their educational requirements
. . . will create an education market that may even be several orders of magnitude more efficient than what we have today.
Market Adoption
If students were given the choice between an academic system that is designed to force them to learn government-mandated curricula or one that is optimized to help them achieve their own goals in life, most students would prefer the latter.
The main factor that would hold back the acceptance of niche-based degrees in the market are employers. As long as employers continue to exclusively require traditional degrees as the only acceptable proof of education, the market for niche-based degrees will be constrained. But if employers accepted niche-based degrees alongside traditional degrees, many segments of the labor market would quickly convert over to them. The only segments that would remain resistant to change would be government-regulated industries that currently mandate traditionally accredited degrees (medicine, law, etc.) as part of their licensure requirements.
Even traditional schools in the K-12 market would not be immune to a loss of market share. If students knew they could escape the misery of government-regulated schools and get a better, faster, and cheaper education by patronizing niche-based programs, many would abandon traditional K-12 schools despite its compulsory education laws. Essentially, these laws would become unenforceable if students had better alternatives.
Of course, it will take a while for niche-based degree programs to spin-up, and there will always be a market for elitist consumers who care more about cachet than quality, but most of America, and perhaps much of the world, would eventually be far better served by a niche-based education market.
Restoring the American Dream
If students were able to get an education that truly enabled them to live their own personalized American Dreams, they wouldn’t need to look towards the government as much to provide for their needs. Their dependency upon the welfare state would naturally drop and this could usher in a new era of global prosperity. Niche-based education can remove the raison d'être for Big Government everywhere. [end]