One of the most enraging things about people doing drive-by takes on higher education is their insistence on focussing on the “implications of technology” rather than looking at consumer demand.  This month’s example comes to us from the Research Department of the Royal Bank of Canada and their piece entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and In Demand.

The piece is a little uneven, in the sense that it mixes grand pronouncements about the future of higher education in Canada with short-term “how-do-we-get-through-the-next-few months” stuff.  In so doing, it gets caught up in the idea that whatever we’re doing now to get us through the next few months is in fact key to the future of the entire sector, because technology flexibility choices something something.

Here’s the gist of it:

The higher-education system is about to become more competitive. Nearly every post-secondary institution on the planet has just made significant investments in online tools and methods. For Canada to remain a global education leader that continues to attract the world’s brightest, our institutions will need to differentiate themselves. This starts with cultivating the scale needed to make online leaning profitable; collaborations across the sector could give students more choices and specializations. The next step requires an inclusive approach to alternative learning – either experiential learning or micro-credentials – that gives students flexibility in how and where they obtain academic credits. At the same time, educators will need to integrate the tools of augmented reality and machine learning to personalize education.

The idea that “the world’s brightest” will naturally gravitate to those institutions which have made the biggest investments in online tools and methods is – and I do not use this word lightly – unhinged.  Uncoupled from reality.  Several fries short of a Happy Meal.  I mean if this were true, Athabasca would be the country’s leading university, and while they are very good at what they do, no one is mistaking them for Toronto or UBC as a powerhouse university.  The world’s best and brightest go to where they can be in close contact with a) the rest of the world’s brightest and b) the best professors in their fields.  You could spend a billion dollars on online education at the University of East Podunk, but with no change in the quality of the underlying academics – and, perhaps more crucially, no change in the underlying prestige of a UEP degree, it’s still going to be the University of East Podunk.

There are many, many markets within higher education.  The everyday one, the one that pays the bills, is about educating local kids up to a certain acceptable standard and letting them loose on the world.  There is limited competition in this market, really.  University of Winnipeg is not going to crush University of Manitoba by going big on tech, for instance.  Then there’s another one for international undergraduates.  There is more competition here, but no one is going to win it online, because online is still not equated to quality in the public mind (also: international students are often here for the immigration opportunities so online education is completely beside the point).  Then there are research-based graduate studies which are not really a market at all; in fact, institutions compete to lose money accessing this market.

Not only is there not much competition in these markets, students in these sectors LOVE being on campus.  Look at any survey, or any media story, over the past few months and they all tell you the same thing: students’ dearest wish is to be (safely) back on campus with other students.  If you believe universities should be demand-driven, then surely to God you want them, in their bread-and-butter products, to give the people what they want.  And what students want is in-person instruction and interaction, not the online stuff.

The “markets” where better online education can compete is amongst people who find getting to/being on campuses either difficult or tedious.  That’s not an inconsequential market by any means: primarily it’s adult students in college/undergraduate/continuing education programs with many other responsibilities plus students in non-research graduate programs and professional programs.  And for these students, better online offerings at institutions equates to more and better choices.  It might raise participation overall, and institutions skilled enough to create niche programs to targeted groups of professionals can do very well (e.g. Queen’s Law’s expansion into a whole bunch of certificate programs was reasonably lucrative, I understand).  And where there is lucre, there will be competition (though generally it’s for dollars, not for the “best students”).

So yes, a small part of universities will face growing competition based in part on online offerings.  But that’s a long way from the kind of ALL WILL CHANGE mantra you see in the RBC piece.  Universities are not “at an inflection point” in their business models, because COVID is in most respects a substantial but temporary interruption in normal service to an underlying business model which all evidence indicates is very popular among most of the university’s core constituencies.   It is therefore very doubtful that it is going to lead to – as RBC suggests it might – more institutional alliances or changes to the institutional calendar (rolling starts are not a terrible idea in theory, but the economics are not always great because “new” demand for non-standard starts is often just cannibalized demand from “old” demand for the same program so you’re just teaching a similar number of students in a less efficient way).

Bankers, overall, are pretty good about helping their clients make plans based on actual demand.  Somehow, though, when it comes to education and technology, the power of the market just goes out the window and analysts blithely assume that just because tech-maxed educational futures can be the future that they will be the future. 

Yes, there is a market for online.  But for most people, most of the time, the future is going to look a lot like the status quo ante only more expensive (because now every in-person course will need more beefed up online resources to accompany it).  It’s unfortunate that RBC – which did such great work with it’s “Humans Wanted” project – can’t quite see that.