Future of business education is subscription to an alumni club
The rise of cohort-based courses and ed-tech subscriptions
2020 is a breakout year for education. The trajectory of years has been compressed into months. The forced digitization, job-market volatility and even kids being subjected to space-tech education at age six have sharpened the demand among all professionals for continuous learning and upskilling.
Business education as a bundle
Business education can be seen as a bundle of multiple components. One can split business education, for ease of understanding, through Peter Thiel and Bryan Caplan’s writings on education as an economic good.
Consumption
College experience is a series of intellectually stimulating events, along with the camaraderie of being with other ambitious adults. It’s a concentration of like-minded individuals participating in simulated business cases, reflective feedback and yes, fun.
Signalling
Admission to a top-tier university and successful graduation is a signal of analytical intelligence and competitive grit. For hiring managers, it is a signal of the conscientiousness to work in teams and chip in long hours.
Investment
It is a call option into the future. An investment into building a knowledge foundation, a structure onto which further expertise can be built upon as per career progression and specialization.
Insurance
The fear of career obsoleteness is partially offset by having access to a network which values the shared experience and its rituals.
Unbundling of business education
The traditional business school is structured as a service contract delivered over 1- 2 years. Pay upfront for a service contract and the service is delivered over the term duration. The fee premium of business schools hinges significantly on the access to immediate career advancement, the future option of signalling, access to the hidden job market etc. Once the term is over, the new-found direction and momentum are supposed to be a permanent career edge.
However, the internet is unbundling every single component of business education and has shortened the relevance of business education being delivered at one shot.
Edited for illustration — Original
Access to general and specific information is now available online to a diligent researcher. Informational and knowledge components of business education have moved been democratized through the internet, while networks and credentials are still to be disrupted entirely. Fundamentally, because they are not internet-scale but more human scale. While you can add your way to a million connections on Linkedin, for most the number of simultaneous working relationships can never exceed the Dunbar number of 150. And like any experience from school or work would help one remember, one often develops a working relationship with one or two individuals from a pool of 100s of individuals even if the group is self-selecting. Continuous interaction over-time is required to build a working relationship. A 5-day digital marketing boot-camp or global 4-week cohort is unlikely to build working relationships to share notes, secret hacks or insider job referrals.
Online courses from Ivy league universities while providing quality educational content does not help much in signalling competence of tacit knowledge/soft skills. More individuals with similar qualification lead to credential inflation. A scalable way is P2P credentials. P2P is when a colleague or an ex-boss vouches for you, but unbundling this part requires proof of work and conviction built over an extended interaction.
The rise of specialized business education
The first wave of open source MOOCs democratized lectures from top universities to anyone with an internet connection. They were free and one could self-pace the learning. However, except for the most motivated, it saw very poor (<5%) completion rates.
The next wave was SPOCs(small private online communities) or cohort-based learning classes. SPOCs have forum discussions, assignment groups and live sessions with a faculty.
Examples:-
- Seth Godin’s Alt-MBA course, a 4-week online workshop.
- Reforge a career accelerator in growth marketing.
- Emeritus collaborated with top Ivy league universities like MIT, INSEAD with their SPOCs etc while Coursera has tiered courses.
The other pioneers are from the Twitter-verse -
- On Deck has created an online fellowship program for would-be founders, and now has cohorts now running across writing, podcasting, no-code.
- In India Stoa School is a business school for operators, while Product school is a community for aspiring product managers.
Building a long term subscription layer to business education
An early predictor of this trend in long term education subscription is Masterclass. While Dan Brown and Margaret Atwood can’t teach you writing over video, there is certainly utility which users are paying for. The utility from Masterclass is not from the skill transfer but the ability to understand and develop cultural capital and can be a useful differentiator in the workplace. Masterclass helps build an informal credential by developing cultural capital of sorts.
Short-term cohorts while it delivers on intense focus and superior completion rates, it’s still in the early days of differentiating and developing a life-long network. In an information abundant environment, a learning group would also help curate and solve the problem of what to read and what one is missing.
But would it not be exciting to be part of a business Masterclass with a curated and organized slack group thrown in. Chat groups suffer from cold-start problems. But what if a virtual research assistant could organize monthly interaction over a case study and a research assistant would organize a weekly meetup and one-to-one with the students and professors over a 6 month period and at multiple intervals across one’s career. A research assistant who would enable a curated case study or reading list so that a group can go over it for an engaging discussion.
Subscription not a service contract
HBS professor John Gourville writes how a successful gym which genuinely cares for its patrons would not front-load its price. If a cohort is priced like a gym where people join like a new year resolution but don't return often, a lot of the value potential is untapped. An ideal gym would setup 1:1 training session, coach and move the customer to a life-time customer. A long term subscription would allow the educational platform to understand its users and deliver continuous value while allowing users to build interpersonal networks and credentials.
A combination of the domain specificity of cohort classes, group learning and being part of a long term participative alumni without the sticker shock is the best of all worlds. Business education continuously updated about newer companies and technologies and having access to new case studies, perspectives and a motivated community is a career edge.
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