The Stand Off:
There has been a lot of buzz around Harvard Business School starting their own version of MOOC, HBX, and the debates and arguments between two of the best minds in strategy in the world today – Clay Christensen & Michael Porter.
By creating HBX, Harvard finally decided to bet on Porter’s strategy, that the core business strategy of a firm should remain unchanged and every part of the business need to reinforce this core strategy.
There has been a lot of debate about who among the titans has got this right.
Both could be wrong
In my opinion, both of them could prove to have missed a beat here.
I believe so because, all the debate around the higher education challenge has been thought from the point-of-view of the university or the service provider and what is right for them.
In my opinion, we also should look at the entire challenge from the point-of-view of the customer (Student) and the end-consumer (businesses where these students will seek employment).
Student’s Point-of-View
If you look at the entire higher education challenge from the point-of-view of the students, you shall find that they core challenges are as below:
- Higher education as structured today is skewed towards scarcity model.
- This pushes the cost at some of these universities high, high enough to create a student debt of more than a trillion dollars worldwide.
- Despite all of this, higher education doesn’t guarantee a good job to every student.
Employers Point-of-View
Now, look at this same challenge from the perspective of the employers:
- In order to get the best employees, they need to go to the best universities (which again is operational under the scarcity mindset). If they want students from the best schools join them, they need to compete with a lot of other employers and hence end up paying a high salary to a fresher.
- Despite paying this high salary, they find that these students still need to be trained in order to get productive.
- With the ever-changing business environment, they need to continuously train their employees.
University’s perspective:
Now, if you look at this from a University’s perspective, they bring in a lot of benefits to the students and employers apart from the course material:
- Network of Alumni who can help current students get placed in businesses
- Ability for students to connect with each other and create their own network
- Good research opportunities
- A good pool of resources, which can be invested for the future.
My solution to the Higher Education Challenge:
In my opinion, if i were a university and would want to remain relevant to the students and the employers, I would consider the following:
- Adopt the Gym membership model for higher education.
- Instead of a very high upfront fee, opt for a smaller monthly fee model (10, 15, 20 year contracts with fee increasing every month by x%)
- After 1 year in school covering basics, allow them to go out and intern full time at businesses
- Offer a life-long membership for them to come back and do one course every year. This will allow their students to continue to pursue their passions of the moment and stay relevant. You could use MOOC’s to offer these courses, wherever it makes sense.
- Allow organizations to include the monthly membership fee to the university in the pay package of their employees or offer this as a benefit.
This model can address all the flaws that currently plague the higher education industry and in the mid to long term, will be financially much better returns for the university, as you are creating a stream of income that will grow exponentially every year.
Now the question is will the existing universities like Harvard be open to such an idea or will it take a lesser know University that faces extinction or bankruptcy try this out. My bet would be the university that faces bankruptcy would be more open to such a business model innovation.
I had written about this earlier in a blog post as well. You can find the older post here.
What’s Your Opinion
What do you think? If you or your son or daughter had an option to join a university like the one I am proposing, would you consider the offer? What else would need to be in place for you to be excited about the new kind of university?
Do share your thoughts and lets continue the discussion. This is a matter of significance for each and one of us as this will affect all of us when we or our children get to this situation.
I am looking forward to ideas, criticisms and thoughts on the idea proposed here.
