The Future of EdTech

Scott Galloway wrote a great piece on the future of education in NY Mag, and instead of just naming startups building personalized education tech, he says:

The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.

…the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply.

I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points.

There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it.

He then predicts that elite universities will partner with tech companies to expand enrollment, and this will result in a lot of problems for second- and third-tier schools, which will be significantly less desirable.

Thoughts? I love the point on brand value, but if virtual classrooms could allow universities to double or triple enrollment without impacting the value of their brands, feels like they would have done that already.

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