On Education and Bundling

Currently, a traditional, four-year college serves a few different functions. These are primarily:

• Learning 

A college education is intended to give you two classes of skills. First, directly applicable ones like programming, writing, building financial models, etc. Although the specifics learned in class are unlikely to be precisely applicable to any given job, these tend to be broadly the same in the workforce with (comparatively) smaller tweaks. Second, general, portable skills like critical thinking, probabilistic reasoning, and data analysis. 

College classes also help students build out a general knowledge base. It’s a similar intuition to the multidisciplinary approach followed in most high schools – by giving you some basic proficiency in a wide variety of domains, colleges ensure a student base with flexible capabilities. The justifying intuition here is that there are diminishing marginal returns to knowledge – a superficial understanding of many different fields is sufficient to enable one to solve many different problems. 

• Socialization

Universities provide a safe, transitionary environment between college and adulthood. Students are forced to:

• Take care of others and learn to be taken care of

• Navigate interpersonal relationships (roomates, heartbreaks, annoying work mates)

• Manage time and indulgence in unstructured environments 

• Interact with authority figures (administrators, professors) in unprotected environments 

• Meet and develop relationships with other students/mentors to form the foundation for future interactions 

Providing a relatively benign, enjoyable, exploratory environment for adolescents to make the transition to adulthood is a key value proposition of college. When people talk about the “college experience”, this is the part they’re most often referring to. 

• Credentialing

Universities are signaling devices. Like all brands, they’re symbolic constructions whose use is intended to signify some other quality. In most selective universities, I think that most of the important work to build out the signal is done before students ever get to campus – admissions processes serve as a filter that selects for smart, hardworking, likeable students. Add to the mix the assurance of a certain level of faculty, a standardized curriculum, a likelihood for students to cross-pollinate with other students, and grade/extracurricular methods of stratification and you have a system that gives external observers an easy, probabilistic assurance of quality.  

Why, exactly, must these things be bundled? Students who spend two years at community college before transferring to another school are implicitly rejecting the bundle – they’re choosing to forgo two years of the socialization benefits of college, with the tacit assumptions that the learning benefits are reasonably similar over the first two years and that the credentialing mechanisms benefit is contingent upon graduation. 

The advent of the internet and easily scalable, easily distributed content means that there’s no reason for all classes to be in person. Many classes probably benefit disproportionately from in-person interaction, physical proximity, or small-group discussion, but most introductory classes have no need for physical presence. Realistically, a 200 person lecture with TAs grading assignments isn’t really any more educational than an online lecture with TAs grading assignments – except the latter can be delivered much more efficiently at scale. 

Dedicated socialization or credentialing mechanisms can accelerate the unbundling. If there’s value for in-person collaboration, why not create dedicated co-working, co-living spaces where people take classes online for a couple of years? WeCollege could be real, I guess. 

What about colleges that are dedicated finishing schools, tailored specifically for a two-year experience that’s heavy on credentialing? Can we create degrees that are more cross-functional and tailored in a world of diffuse educational material, combining classes from a wide variety of schools? What about outsourced guidance counsellors, who specialize in finding classes for and creating these type of bespoke degrees? An unbundled college is a liberated one, with a range of educational offerings tailored to students’ individual needs. 

Education has seen some of the smallest productivity gains of any sector – class sizes haven’t grown commensurately with demand, and teaching-per-educator hasn’t grown much either. Low historical productivity gains, high costs and public dissatisfaction make a sector ripe for disruption, and I think the unbundling process is the first place to start.