Unbundling School
By: Gilad Kahala
Tags: Schools, Higher Education, Careers, Education, Bootcamp

School is a massive product. Our human race has built it in the last two thousand years, yet it started to take off only in the last two hundred years or so.

People at times find this surprising, but school is a product. We can understand what subproducts schools provide us when our mental model perceives school as a product.

Content

The main subproduct of any school is the content it’s giving away to its consumers (students). Several domain experts on payroll — provide content by spending hundreds of hours each calendar year.

As most of us know, the content provided is not the best of its kind (to say the least). It hasn’t changed in the last hundred years, and keeps repeating year after year.

I remember my Spanish teacher teaching us about past verbs in the 7th grade. Then again in the 8th grade. The reason was that we had a summer in between, and students “probably forgot the material”. Stories such as this one exist all over the place.

It’s not all bad. All around the world, the school has been the primary content provider. We don’t question it as one. We know most of us won’t need that biology class, but we still like our loved ones to learn the things we did (and learn something).

The thing is — content has been democratized in the last decade. We have far more premium content on MOOCs (massive open online courses) such as Udemy, Coursera, Udacity, edX, and many more. And the market is growing, for example: Udemy has grown 4X in students over 2020.

These exciting changes from the decade that just passed made some of us think that now we have democratized content, we are finally “Done with schools. Huzzah!”. But that is not the case.

Networking

And that brings us to the next products schools are providing.

Networking and P2P (peer to peer) interactions play a huge role in any student’s life. Ivy League Universities rely on that. They have the best human capital and outstanding alumni communities that take care of you.

We are far better together than apart. Seeing someone else going through the same hardships as you give you a lot of strength. It also provides us with baselines of what we can accomplish and achieve. It can also be demoralizing but as a whole, being close to peers who are similar to us and are accessible makes us more robust and better.

Networking has not been thoroughly democratized. Linkedin and other platforms are just scratching the surface IMO, and there is a lot more to do.

Engaged platforms and micro-communities will give us far superior connections that will get us faster to our destinations.

Accountability and Discipline

One of the most important things that school is giving us is the fact that we all have to go there. No questions asked.

Yes, some people skip school, but they are an outlier.

Think about it this way: if you skip school, your caregiver will probably scream at you or set you up straight (when they’ll find out). However, should you stop watching a Udemy course and start playing World of Warcraft instead (or whatever young people are playing today), they may not have the same reaction.

We don’t question the system, and we go to school. Showing up is a significant factor in Education.

Think about a system that you don’t question, for instance: going to the gym. How will that look? It’s going to be an enormous waste of energy questioning whether should I or shouldn’t I go today. Some may even think that convincing yourself for the gym is more challenging than the actual training itself.

Homework, tests, planned activities, and many others are the cornerstone of each school throughout the world.

I haven’t found a real alternative product that provides this type of discipline. Yes, there are Bootcamps, certifications, and tests, but none is close to the kind of discipline instilled into us by our governments and our education system.

On the contrary the recent trend wave has new products that are all too inclusive and want you to be a part of them. They can’t have anyone drop because they’re not a good fit or playing by their rules. Think about a product that has taken on a couple of users and then telling them no. The CAC (customer acquisition cost) for active users on its platform will suffer significantly, and so will that startup or company. On the other hand, schools and universities don’t have that problem at all.

Mentoring and Coaching

Mentoring and coaching is probably not the best product that schools provide. Although domain experts serve as mentors and coaches too.

A mentor is that teacher you remember fondly. S/he “went above and beyond” and helped you achieve X or Y. Much to everyone’s intrigue, it’s not mainstream to see teachers serving as mentors, and it seems like teachers need to get out of their way to provide mentorship.

However, mentorship and coaching exist as essential features of Education. More often than not our mentors are our fellow peers; learning something very well — becoming domain experts in the process. Among them lucky enough to possess great people skills, can help us “see the bigger picture” and tell us what to focus on.

Mentorship products exist out there as marketplaces today, providing a variety of different people that can be “potential you”. Unfortunately, I can’t think of one that won the market so far.

Signaling

The holy grail of a school is the halo effect that the school is providing. Nothing beats having HBS on your resume or any other Ivy League University. We immediately associate such people with success, ergo we open doors for them. Because if they got in where only 1%-5% of the applicants got in, they probably have something that others don’t.

Signaling and Branding are mostly an outcome of having all the right ingredients. Meaning, if you play your cards right, you will end up having a tremendous signaling effect, which scales over time.

Lambda School is probably the most known Bootcamp, which gives content, mentoring, and networking to its students, and eventually won signaling.

However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t build products using the incumbent’s brand name. For example, Trilogy Education creates a signaling effect by working together with universities and preparing students for the job market. They are leveraging the university brand and providing their unique content.

Parting Thoughts

There are many great things schools give us that we take for granted. ‘Content is king’ remains the prevailing mindset — construing school as a content provider when it’s much more.

If we are serious about unbundling school and chipping away some of its central core products, we need to step away from that mindset and build alternative products to the one it’s providing.

The next decade is going to unbundle softer products from schools: Networking products using super-engaged micro-communities; Discipline and accountability products by creating a third party to assess skills, and provide a “skill score” like a credit score; Signaling effect by pairing up with incumbents and providing them with superior content and mentors. And many more.

We have a long way to go to get to a world where the school is just another product in the suite of tools that caregivers can send youngsters to, but we’re inching closer as a human race. Outcome-Driven Education is just around the corner, and mindsets are changing. More products are coming in, and they will unlock and unblock far more potential than ever.