What's Next for Education Startups

hi YouTube you are here with another a 16 SZ hallway conversation and this morning I'm here with Legion again and also Darcy cool again and we're gonna talk about one of my favorite topics which is education and I had a milestone in my own personal life which is I took my oldest son and I'm bundled him off to UC Santa Cruz where he's starting his four-year education as an undergrad go banana slugs and so it got us thinking about how long before that's not the normal thing to do we're seeing so many different ways to get educated we're seeing alternatives to colleges and so I thought we'd have a fun conversation about the future of education so why don't we start with the big question what is education right so I think that's actually that's one of the core questions as we think about kind of technology and innovation and education is actually defining education itself I think historically it's been this big bundle it's been you know I am learning skills that are you know some are kind of core fundamental skills like numeracy and literacy some are you know more less kind of more fungible skills like how to learn critical reasoning some are like domain-specific skills like coding and accounting but that's kind of one piece of the bundle then you've had signaling so you know I go to school to get a degree and then that degree signals to employers that I am intelligent and conscientious and have a strong work ethic and that's like a second part of the bundle you know it's everything you know to a professional network I go to school to meet people you know I didn't learn anything in school but the relationship I developed were really the valuable part you know you hear that a lot you know you can even think about it as like socialization for younger children you think about it as like international students education is like a pathway into a country so you've got this really big broad bundle and traditionally education in the kind of analog world has been that it's been everything bundled into one you know every person that had a part of that value proposition that was really compelling to them had to take the whole bundle and now you're seeing this trend where it's kind of unbundling and you're seeing companies that are going after one part of that education stack whether it's you know specific skills and kind of you know a code bootcamp a code bootcamp teaching you just some of those domain-specific skills you know whether it's some of these you know systems that let you test for aptitude and test for certain skill sets and that's kind of a signalling method to employers but I think you're seeing kind of this trend around the broader definition of Education is really changing yeah and I think that's I think that's resulting from a lot of the consumer demands and needs that have arisen in the past few decades so it used to be the case that higher education was not so closely coupled with the idea of job training and being equipped with professional skills such that you could actually be employable and get a high paying job I think that's a new thing that sort of emerged in the last few decades and especially after the recession is students are now more and more thinking of Education as a way for me to get a job I think UCLA ran a survey a few years ago surveying their students as to like what is the purpose of college for you and 80% of them said to get a job and I think that same question was posed to university presidents by Pew Research and I think only 50 percent of them said that the purpose the main purpose was to get a job and you're seeing drops in the percentage of undergraduates who choose sort of liberal arts or sort of the well-rounded majors right so the English is in the histories right so is the percentage of total of the total undergraduate class that's been declining because sort of like gee I better get a job and then maybe I'll do like my fancy well-rounded things elsewhere right it's becoming much more ROI oriented as opposed to the sort of Airy place where you go to become self actualized so as we think about sort of the four-year college or undergraduate experience how is that changing what startups are you seeing that are here to replace the university well I think I think one part of that question is kind of which parts of that bundle are they pulling across so I think that's one part of it is that people are seeing that trend towards more kind of ROI driven education and they're focusing much more on you know what can we give you that's ROI driven so to code and we teach you marketing can we teach you some of these card domain-specific skills that are very kind of ROI positive and less away from that kind of four-year degree I think another trend that you're kind of seeing in terms of what's happening in education is that the kind of the vision of what education is is broadening that it used to be you know you started as a four year old you went to elementary school and someone's a secondary and some went to college and some went to vocational schools and you kind of had this you know learning period of your life and then you had a like application period of your life working I'm working yeah now I've done exactly and so I think you know another trend that you're seeing and again I think this a lot of kind of boot camps and code Academy and lambda school and things like that you're seeing a trend towards on the on the later end around lifelong learning and kind of training and skills development I think on the the earlier end you know you're seeing kind of before school you're seeing a lot more innovation there so you're seeing things like Wonder School with Chris Bennett who's kind of you know developing a different model for what kind of preschool or early childhood care could look like you know and I think you're seeing a lot of innovation on that end of the spectrum as well sort of around traditional schooling right sort of it's just that before you get to school and then after you get out of school there's continuous learning with companies like Udacity so we see a lot in that space what about the ones that are going after write the super aggressive I'm just going after a cult do you never need to go to college because you're gonna come so talk to me about some of these companies yeah so I think what I've seen in this space is that companies are going after basically looking at like all of the professions in the US and comparing how many people are actually trained and qualified for those roles today versus what is the actual need in those professional areas and one of the clear examples or verticals to go after is computer science education there's a huge shortage of software engineers in the US and so a lot of startups are going after this space and trying to train software engineers to become workers in that industry so we're seeing both models in that are trying to deliver this kind of education both on such as lambda school you have companies like launch school thankful block also doing pure online coding education and then there's also companies that are sort of pushing forward what offline education can look like for just software engineering so in our portfolio we are investors and make school which actually has a physical campus in San Francisco but rather than being a four-year long sort of bundle of every subject liberal arts plus software engineering it's just pure software engineering education for two years there's forty two which is a French company that has campuses in both Paris and I think Fremont and then there's also all of the offline coding boot camps which are have physical presences and students actually move to that city spend a few months learning very deeply how to code and then graduating and getting a job and in general these schools are a lot shorter than a traditional four-year undergrad program right like how long do these last yeah I would say anywhere from a few months to a couple of years I think what we've really seen influenced the structure of these programs has been the changing business model so in the past few years the nature that these programs are monetizing has really shifted from upfront tuition payment which has been the traditional higher ed business model to now more and more programs are offering income share agreements or ISAs and under an income share agreement you don't have to pay upfront it's when you graduate and get a job you then pay a share of your income back to the program for a fixed period of time so if you get a high paying job as expected and you pay a share of your income for let's say a couple of years that can actually be a pretty high lifetime value for that particular student and the result of that business model is that the program's themselves then are changing to sort of drive that positive outcome for everyone so the programs are getting shorter because they're incentivized to get that payback sooner they're incentivized to actually teach these students something so that they can be employable in the job market they're incentivized to be super focused and structured such that there's no frivolous education that it's really oriented towards getting a job and being professionally successful and I think one just thing to think of it as we're talking about kind of like going after the education stack I think the kind of first wave of companies really went after that kind of like skills value problem the data science data Strama scripts are hard and if sorry ol damn thing exactly with with kind of like domain-specific application you know very much focused on that like high ROI because you know quite frankly maybe that's where the value you know that's where the arbitrage opportunity was between what was getting offered and and you know what students actually wanted I think you know if we think about that kind of bundle that that's happening as well you've got this other part to it which is the kind of networking piece and you've seen other companies and other projects kind of evolved there you're seeing things like you know YC which is incredibly valuable as a networking place and people talk about YC is kind of like startup graduate school right and you know you're seeing places like that have added an incredible amount of value providing that kind of networking professional development value proposition that was traditionally the domain of higher education you're also seeing that in like co-working spaces like the wing you're seeing you know you're seeing it in a million different iterations and different different types of form factor but that value proposition that was once higher education is now being translated into other types of new interesting companies right so sort of network development like who are my peeps right right can actually be not a function of your school right let a function of I found them on LinkedIn right I met them at the wing right I went through the same cohort and Brasi and I winners all of these other places where you can sort of upon I found a meet-up right and it's way more granular you know and it's way less of a one-size-fits-all than kind of it was in traditional education I think the hardest one is that that brand signalling piece I think that will be the the last kind of the last domino to fall I'm just good I think there's a there's a ton of strength in kind of traditional education around that signalling piece but you know I think as we look at innovation you're seeing kind of the the stack slowly gets crept into from the outside yeah so you would argue look the last universities or sort of schools to get threatened would be the sort of high brand the Harvard's the Stanford's the Waterloo's the that type of school what about schools that aren't as prominent as that what happens to the tier two tier three universities yeah yeah so we've we've thought a lot about this question through the lens of disruptive innovation so Clayton Christensen has you know coined the term disruptive innovation and he made the really bold prediction about ten years ago that half of all colleges in the US would be bankrupt by now and that hasn't quite happened although you know that trend is starting and we've seen some school closures at the higher level so we often think about like is higher edge even disruptive all and what would that look like I think brand is a huge piece of what's protecting traditional institutions from being disrupted and I think brand is very closely coupled with exclusivity so at the lower levels where the brand is less strong I think that is a prime target for disruption along that angle I think another piece of what keeps higher edge is the network effects of the actual alumni networks so for instance the Harvard alumni network is super valuable it's something that a ton of people want to tap into these are people who graduate and go on to become the CEOs or the hiring managers that all of the companies that people want to work at so it's very difficult for a new entrant to have that kind of powerful network from the get-go so that's another piece of what really maintains the defense ability for traditional higher ed I think you know and I don't know if this is always true but I think probably you will see the innovation come from the bottom up and you will see the innovation come where right now there the alternative is like non-consumption right so it won't necessarily be the person going to Harvard or Stanford or Waterloo or one of those schools you know and at the start it might not even be the person going to a kind of tier 2 tier 3 or vocational school or something like that it'll be the person who's literally not getting an education right now and that may mean that it starts out international and then moves domestic you know there may be different ways that that plays out but I think probably you will see a lot of the innovation come in places where right now people are just not not getting anything or not doing anything and that's where they'll start to do they'll start to consume they'll start to gain value from it then you'll slowly see it creep up the stack and you had brought up international which I want to sort of dig into which is there sort of broad trends all right so let me sort of tee up the International question this way which is traditionally the United States and Canada has been among the most prestigious higher education sort of education opportunities right the product is the best right here we're starting to see immigration headwinds we're starting to see this sort of decline of the tier 2 and tier 3 schools so how long does this last we're sort of the big motion you see in the world is somebody growing up in India or China or the Philippines or Mexico wanting to come to a u.s. or Canadian university that lasts forever are we brassy the beginnings of the era of that so I that's a great question I actually think what what that turns on is what is the value proposition of that student coming here right so I think historically for a lot of people the value of coming to school in Canada or the United States was it was a pathway into a job market into a country where you know there was more opportunity I think you know whatever happens in kind of international politics and you know all that will then play a role there and that could lead to a decrease you know but I think secondarily it was the product right it was you know the United States has either the best skills development or the United States and Canada have the best kind of brand and so whether you were staying or whether you're returning that product was seen as more valuable I think as we're talking about I think the skills part will probably start to fall off as it becomes easier and easier to kind of develop these skills elsewhere the brand thing will probably be more longer-lasting but you know again I think there's probably a probably a time limit on that as well I think another really interesting use case that might be a window into the future is to look at what's happening in MBAs and business schools so I think for the past four years there's been a precipitous decline in the number of applications it's exactly the number of applications is shrinking across the board and the institutions that historically were thought of as immune to this so Harvard Stanford GSB Wharton the top top business schools they're now experiencing this to where they're seeing year-over-year deep declines in the number of applications and I think that goes back to what we mentioned about like education being unbundled there's now other options for that kind of professional networking there's other options to learn accounting finance marketing and all of the things that Business School taught you and the ROI is just not clear anymore and students are becoming increasingly ROI oriented mm-hmm yeah the the tuition on the top schools is still quite quite high right and so if you actually just do the math of you know I'm paying fifty seventy five $100,000 a year for two years right it's got to be a pretty big salary boost on the other side to make that make sense as opposed to I'm getting the Udacity nano degree in marketing and that lasts three months and after the nanodegree look this is it won't be the last man or degree I get this will be one and then I go back and you know I've turbo-boosted my career a little I'm gonna go back and get another right and that feels like it's going to be much more common in the future which is it's not like oh I'm done with education it's sort of an ongoing thing and I think it's - one of the points that Lee was making before is the business models are evolving to reflect that right the kind of what people need the education system brought more broadly is changing and you're seeing business models that that you know reflect that so whether it's the income share agreements you know whether it's more kind of apprenticeship programs that there's different ways that people are building really interesting business models around this kind of evolving value proposition that that was traditionally just education so we've talked a lot about sort of the Career Development writing the things right before you go launch your career or you turbocharged your career let's let's go to the other end what are you seeing at the very early education mm-hmm maybe talk a little bit about wonder school yeah yeah so so wonder school is a is a portfolio company that lets people set up preschools in their home and I think what you're seeing there is it was this really underserved part of the market you know both daycare / preschool teachers were under compensated there was not enough schools the schools that were there were too expensive and so it was basically trying to think about how can you build a business model that lets preschool education which we know is super important for the long-term development of children how can you build a business model that makes that more practical and anything that's what Chris and Wonder School have really done they've taken the kind of real estate line-item you know and softened that because it is in home they've made it so that it's closer to the the children and the families that they're actually serving because it is in-home so they've kind of restructured the business model around this kind of you know Airbnb esque model which has allowed a lot more inventory to come online a lot more wonder schools to be opened up and that's driving innovation in kind of preschool the other the other thing that's interesting there is every wonder school is slightly different right so the wonder school that exists in the mission in San Francisco can be very different from the wonder school that exists in LA that can be very different from the wonder school that exists in you know Fort Greene and Brooklyn and you know you have a lot of more like a much more granular value proposition to parents around this idea of what they need in early childhood education yeah I remember talking with you about this idea when you'd sort of first met them before we had invested when I was sort of walking one-on-one loops around the campus here and I was so excited about this idea because there's so many places where you have a teacher who just loves teaching and she loves kids or he loves kids but everything else about running a preschool is hard which is the marketing the finding the kids the you know what systems do I use to check them in and check them out how do I take payments all right and so one of the things that's exciting about wonder school is they take care of all of the business part right I've one during school and they let these people who are fantastic with kids focus on right what they're great at yeah and it it's really figuring out how you kind of empower them to run that small business and that's really what they're doing and that's letting a bunch more inventory come on the market because they don't need to worry about can I find a job at one of the you know 15 franchised preschools in this city can I find a job at you know a school that's run by the local government that maybe is not really growing at this point there's not enough budget there so you know I think that's the exciting thing about what they were doing on that item spectrum yeah I love these sort of businesses that are the I think Marc Andreessen is the one who calls these sort of push button make money right hype business is right lyft and Airbnb are classic examples of that but wonder school also right which is like if you have some magical skill like you're great with kids then there's a button that you can push that sort of turns that magical skill into income I mean there's another interesting company called out school as well that is kind of more focused on the at-home learning like the homeschooling part of the demographic and again they're doing really interesting things about how they're kind of facilitating online education for that early childhood piece and creating much more kind of granular personalized experiences basically that you could never have in an analog world in that part of the spectrum yeah yeah what I love about that one is that they're really d localizing instruction so it used to be the case that you were basically if you were student you were constrained to whatever teachers were available in your geographic area that's all you had access to but without school they're matching teachers to students in diff geographies so if a teacher is located on the East Coast but the student is here and there are really great match in terms of how that student learns and what they're interested in they can really bridge that geography and still get paired together tell me more what are what are kids learning in out school where you could actually be learning it from somebody far away yeah so I think there's just really interesting subjects on out school and classes that are sort of new spins on existing traditional subjects so I think there's like learning math through Rockets or things like that like there's even art classes on out school where you learn art by coloring in a book or by like for instance taking a character that you love like maybe SpongeBob SquarePants and learning how to do art that way I think it's yeah it's like maybe I learned statistics better through the analogy of baseball and somebody else learned statistics that are through the analogy of chess yeah and the you know you can each find the course that most resonates with you to learn and what is just a very standard skill set this has been one of the Holy Grails of Education which is you sort of understand what makes an individual student tick what are they really interested in are they a visual learner or are they a muscle memory learner right and you can sort of combine these things right which is we can turn algebra into sort of a muscle memory thing and instead of taking the top-down approach of they decide what the class should be and what the curriculum is it's instead of a bottoms-up motion where they actually collect the requests from parents and from students and send that along to the teachers who have signed up for the platform and say here's the list of classes that have been most requested by students can you teach them which i think is cool it's it's like a feedback loop on education that wasn't necessarily always there I think one of the one of the interesting things about this kind of more broadly as we think about kind of you know the the the way that education could potentially evolve is this idea that you know you you know this is what the internet is great at is taking what feels like a very niche community taking it from around the world and making it big enough so that it's actually big enough to go business around right so it's you know I want a certain part of this bundle that used to be called education and I want it delivered in a certain way and I want it financed in a certain way you know I wanted at this time of my life and you know if I'm just a kid in Canada growing up like there may not be enough people for a critical mass of that to be delivered to me but because we're on the Internet you know that works you can imagine that sort of like if this got to scale you could basically design your own elementary middle high school experiences right around gee I wanna learn chemistry but I want to learn it in the way that's sort of most interesting me and interesting to me so you could imagine that one of the last things to get sort of unbundled sort of core education like this could be could be on global yeah yeah through a model like this I mean I think the most interesting businesses are the ones that are gonna find you know what are the big populations and how do they stack up a bunch on a few of these key dimensions and build the products that kind of link all those ones together I mean I think lambda school is one that's seems to be doing great on that and you know it's taking the is a the code the skills you know and then lining them up with a job at the end and it's you know found this really great niche in a market by delivering a very specific piece pieces of that value proposition in very specific ways and it's resonating with a huge number of people yeah how do you think accreditation will work right so if you think one of the functions of a school is they're accredited by an agency and all of the things downstream of that school basically recognize the awesomeness of that certification right so if you are a university and you want to say like what high school students do I offer admission to you look for a credit issue if you're a hiring manager you look for like what are the universities that I trust right and are they accredited right so there's sort of a downstream consumer so if we go to this sort of radical model where you're building your own elementary education you're building your own middle school education you're building your own high school what happens to grad accreditation yeah I think accreditation is one of the factors that really serves as a protective layer on top of the existing education system definitely a moat exactly and I think in a world pre like quantitative metrics about the students performance in their competency accreditation served as a really great signal of like this person went through a program that actually met these requirements and is held to a certain standard bar but I think what the internet and now with all these programs and like the availability of reviews and the availability of like various assessments and other measurements of a student's competency and mastery of a subject I think the era of accreditation is now going to start eroding where it's going to matter less and less from a signaling perspective as a signal of quality so I think in the higher ed space it used to be accreditation used to be really important for an employer who is hiring someone but now you can imagine with programs like lambda school and other online or offline programs that are unaccredited that are still producing really great graduates that that becomes less important as a signal yeah you already see this at our startups that are looking for software engineers and designers and that type of thing and the school has become less less important than well show me your github repos or show me your portfolio and dribble or show me sort of the body of work all right what have you publish where's your blog right shoot me your last six podcasts right and I'll listen to them as opposed to what university you go to so I I think the signaling is really important and I think accreditation is is one piece of that but I do think the other thing that the platforms that will succeed will need to do is be very cognizant of that trust and safety and reputation and I think that will be the ones that win and the ones that do great are gonna be the ones that have that kind of those feedback loops built into the product right where it's you know I don't you know I can go to a lambda school and I can know that I'm getting somebody that's qualified right and that's somehow built into the product whether it's with testing whether it's with feedback you know whatever it is like I think those are the that piece of it is going to need to be really well thought out by the founders entrepreneurs that are going after that space yeah so the Udacity nano degree is still a thing right because implied in the nano degree is a certain level of skill mastery the other important piece of accreditation is that right now only accredited schools are eligible those students are eligible for federal age in terms of scholarships and loans and that's a huge important aspect of why students choose to go to accredited schools so I think in the future entrepreneurs will have to think about what are the evolutions in the business model such that their programs are still accessible to the students who would have otherwise gotten those loans right as a parent who's just going through this how where can I spend my 529 program money right like the credit Asian is still the Gateway to the okay you can use your federally set aside tax dollars to spend on tuition for these goals but not these goals right and so yeah I mean I think that's one of the reasons both the business models will evolve is because they will have to evolve because you know regulation moves really really slowly I think it's also one of the reasons you know that I personally believe that the kind of innovation will happen from the like outside in you know it will happen kind of outside the US first where these kind of regulatory moats are not as strong you know potentially with US institutions and US companies but you know you won't need to have somebody saying well I can have my you know 5:29 money here that I can go to this school or I can you know not use it to go to this school that just won't enter into the calculus of how people think about it yeah all right well we thought we'd finish this segment up with a lightning round which is I'm just gonna tee up a set of topics and have Lee and Darcy react to them so first up coding boot camps I think they're a really great option for consumers and for students they're a more targeted option for education oftentimes lower cost than going to traditional institution as investors though I think we've seen challenges in terms of defense ability of the model where someone else can possibly replicate the curriculum and the entire experience and so it's not clear to date there haven't been large outcomes in this space so we're keeping tabs on it but wondering if there can be a large exit or a large outcome here I think they're great for the consumer I think the challenge is around building a coding bootcamp are kind of the same as the challenges of building any type of business you know thinking about customer acquisition cost thinking about what your funnel looks like thinking about the LTV of the customer and kind of the value proposition of the customer and I think the best ones will be really successful but I think that will probably be a lot that never figure out how to make that model work great all right topic number two income share agreements I love them so personally I think they're great I mean personally I think they you know do they allow innovation in education because you're not now you're now not bound by this kind of existing financing model that kind of created a whole bunch of distorted outcomes and distorted incentives you know I think incentives are properly aligned between the financier and the school and the student you know I just think overall I think they make an enormous amount of sense and you know I think I think we're gonna see more and more of them as we go forward so I think they have pros and cons I think they're not all pro as a lot of the entrepreneurs or the financing companies would have us believe I think sometimes they can actually put the incentives of the student against the institution that's actually educating them so an example of this is when I spoke to Adam Braun the CEO of mission U which was like a combo of online and offline data analytics program he told me that because they had a lot of holistic education around helping students think about what they actually wanted out their lives and what they wanted to do professionally a lot of those students actually realized that they didn't want to go into data analytics or perhaps didn't want to take the highest paying job they wanted to take the job where it was a company whose mission that they were really aligned with and in those instances obviously the institution has the incentive to want the student to take the highest paying job with a you know highest paying employer whereas the student doesn't want the same thing so I think is a is it's it's great if everyone is on board with the shared aim of maximizing profit and maximizing the financial outcome but for a lot of students I don't think they view education that way and I think in those circumstances students need options maybe income share is great for some students maybe upfront payment makes sense for others so I think it's it's nuanced I think that's awesome because I think that actually demonstrates the point of how education has become this bundle you know it's like is education about figuring out what we want to do with our lives or is education about you know teaching us a set of data analytic skills and I think even now you know you're seeing that tension kind of play out in in schools like that and I think that is that is part of what I think the future will will help us figure out is like what should be in education and what shouldn't be in education as we have to define it more broadly or what pieces should and should not and then that will help us figure out like how should we finance this so maybe a school that has both what do I want to do with my life and here's some skills will need a different financing model from a kind of pure bootcamp where it's just really about skills to get a job yeah people always joke about majors like underwater basket-weaving as being like completely useless but I'm a huge defendant of liberal arts education and things that perhaps aren't as practically useful but I think they are somewhat luxury goods like they're very expensive products that some people want to pay a premium for and maybe they're not completely useful but like there's consumers who are willing to pay for them perfect segue to the next topic what is the most interesting business model you've seen outside of the income share agreement so I think something that I've found super interesting is you've seen some of the intersection of business models like gaming and how they've kind of intersected with education so there is a company which is still in stealth so I can't actually mention the name of it but what they've been able to do is take kind of think about like the fortnight model of selling in in-game skins you know things exactly dances like all of that stuff that's within a game but the game is very educational right and it's a super high value from the educational standpoint it's super compelling from a game standpoint and then the way they monetize it is through these kind of in-game purchases so school districts don't have to pay for it parents don't have to pay for it directly obviously parent paying for this games directly but you know and it just reduces a friction point of how do I actually get my kid to start learning this and once the kid is starting what starts learning like the parents are more than happy to kind of pay you know $5 $6 for these for these digital goods I think that's one that I've found really fascinating to see how that will play out over time I'd love to see more companies iterating on the donation model so this is inspired by where I went to college Harvard which monetizes superficially through the tuition payments but obviously a lot of it comes from donations from alumni I think of that business model as like income share on steroids where instead of just monetizing for this fixed window for the students life when they first get out of school you're actually potentially capturing the upside as they grow their income throughout the course of their entire professional careers so maybe like a pay what you want model could be interesting or like somehow capitalizing on the fact that the LTV actually increases throughout someone's life yeah taking the super long view if you think about Stanford and what it does through the office of technology licensing they don't extract a pound of flesh when you're leaving the university on the assumption that if the company that you're building does well you'll come back and buy a building for me right yeah I think that I the that and like you can actually think of it as this typing right it's like you know that is like it's a similar business model and it gives you this massive hundred-year perspective on your value proposition a lot of the boot camps we've seen our stem boot camps they're data science they're programming what are the other categories that are amenable to boot camp treatment to piggyback up some off something I said earlier I think if you go down the list of all the professions for which there's a huge worker shortage in the US that sort of points you in the right direction of what could be really interesting programs to establish that could capture a lot of demand and actually generate a lot of income for you as a business so I think beyond software engineering which is the obvious one there's nursing there's financial advisers there's actually a shortage of physical therapists in the US which I didn't realize I've heard entrepreneurs referencing wanting to Train like sales development reps apparently there's a shortage of those so I think going down the list of like what are the professions for which there is a huge need in the u.s. those could all be interesting programs to to be established I think a different and so I think that's a really interesting lens I actually think of different lenses like what industries change most quickly or what are changing most quickly because those are the ones where you're going to need those kind of continuing education lifelong learning you know and you know I I don't know what exactly that is maybe it's like marketing right now like maybe my yeah maybe it's something like that but it's those industries where the the the pace of change is really really high and it's becoming you're still the constant and it's actually true of coding right it's like that's why I think coding has found this product market fit around the coding boot camp you know it's got both of those it's got both your skills are rode really really quickly or like the domain skills that can be rode really really quickly plus there's a huge shortage in in the supply and demand of it I think that's one reason why that segment of it has really taken off if you guys are right about all of this innovation in education a profession that will change a lot is being a teacher or being a school administrator right so maybe we need boot camps for those yeah I mean I think one there's a really interesting company based in Detroit which actually thinks of creating these kind of like they call them gyms and the teachers are more like trainers and everybody goes to this physical space and they're kind of more self-directed learning but there's teachers that are there that can kind of step in and if you need help with something that help you but it's very self-directed and then it's you know I call them in when I'm having challenges with something which I think is a really interesting model going forward awesome well my last question to both of you is what do you believe about education deeply that's not a widely held belief in the real world so all right well I will caveat this with I don't know how deeply I believe this ha ha ha but but I do I do believe that the at least in the United States and Canada the value of education beyond signaling is overvalued and overstated I think the value of education as signaling is probably understated you know I think as we think through as people think through kind of what bundle they're looking for in education I think you know the signalling versus non signaling value propositions you know that that right now we are very valuable for one piece but very unvalued for everything else well I think liberal arts education unfairly gets a bad rap in Silicon Valley which I don't agree with I think the value of a liberal arts education is great and I encourage students who can afford to just tiny liberal arts aside from that I think in order to really change educational outcomes in the u.s. I think a lot needs to change around the social value of becoming a teacher so I think that's where a lot of the problems stem in the u.s. when I compare my cousin who is a grade school teacher in China versus the state of teaching K through 12 in the US I see a vast disparity in China it's like an extremely competitive career path very few students are accepted to teaching schools very few of those graduates get accepted to actual teaching jobs and so like extremely high quality extremely qualified students go on to become teachers and so I think in the u.s. it's very much the opposite and having the best instruction starts with having the best teachers so I think that needs to change well that's a great note to end on Lee we definitely need to value our teachers more salary and otherwise if we're gonna get great outcomes for our kids so that's a wrap for today's hallway conversation Thank You Lee and Darcy for joining us and thanks for our YouTube audience if you liked what you saw subscribe to our Channel tell your friends and leave us a comment below to let us know what other hallway conversations you'd like to see until next time bye bye

Channel: a16z

Views: 21,815

Rating: 4.9563317 out of 5

Keywords: startups, marketplaces, education, MOOC, universities, a16z, what's next for education startups, edtech, andreessen horowitz

Id: Ylr7A1Gk0Bg

Length: 42min 20sec (2540 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019