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Friday Medley 1.15.21
A History of College, Squad Wealth, and Millionaire YouTubers
🎓 The World of Higher Education
This week, my writing focused on some of the meta trends shaping higher education right now. A brief (900+ year) historical overview of the university helped explain how a group of subject specialists (aka masters) evolved into the behemoth billion-dollar institutions we know of today.
That, in turn, led us to dissect why, for the first time in recent history, the number of colleges worldwide is shrinking, even as more people are seeking higher education than ever. Hint: it’s because only a few are actually innovating on the model.
That led us to investigate the blurring of lines between for-profit and nonprofit universities. It turns out that my earlier theory of modularization (a fancy term for strategic outsourcing) was already more integrated into the modern college than I had imagined. Only, for the most part, colleges are doing it wrong. They’re giving away too much power and paying too much money for too little. But then again, students are the real ones paying for these misjudgments.
Finally, we closed the week with an introduction to an idea I think will define the next generation of colleges: creation is the new credential. What happens…
