447 - Who’s Disrupting Education?
Episode: 447
Episode Title: Who’s Disrupting Education?
How is disruption playing out in the world of education? Let’s talk about it, coming up next on The Perna Syndicate.
Ep 447 show:
Hello and welcome to The Perna Syndicate! Yesterday we talked about disruption and what it means in the world of business. Basically, it’s when a smaller company is able to successfully challenge a more established, incumbent business. The small company disrupts business as usual by creating a new competitive advantage.
In education, going directly to a four-year college after high school is pretty much the status quo. Many high schools are partly funded by how many students they can send off to college. This creates a huge incentive for them to promote a “college for all” standard. It’s their status quo.
So who’s disrupting it? Career-focused education and workforce development providers, for one. Think about it: they frequently have fewer resources than the established four-year colleges and universities, which can be seen as the incumbents in the postsecondary educational market.
These alternative training options also serve an often-overlooked customer segment—individuals who choose to bypass the traditional university route.
Because of the extremely high cost of college education, it could be fair to say that colleges are chasing higher profitability, while the disruptive, smaller, alternative training organizations are targeting their segment with less expensive, but still high-demand technical skill training.
Compared to the established colleges and universities, career-focused pathways are smaller, newer—and more agile. They’re not entrenched in a single, rigid way of doing things.
So it sounds like the advantage is all on the side of the disruptors, but there’s actually benefits all around when they change the status quo. On tomorrow’s episode of The Perna Syndicate, we’ll talk about why. See you then!