If that sounds familiar, it should. Lots of companies are looking to own the market in that way. Not too many actually do.
“We don’t serve our mission being a bank.”
Still, ACT has been making moves that seem logical.
Under Roorda, it has established an internal R&D organization of learning-science experts, called ACT Next, to explore and develop products based on data and analytics. Its decision to invest with New Markets reflects Roorda’s assessment that the organization’s own corporate-development team was too small to effectively scour the market for good investment deals. And its announcement just last week of its further expansion into the workplace market — an arena I’ve been researching as I prepare to produce a report for The Chronicle related to the “skills gap” — seems well timed to take advantage of the explosion of interest in tests and tools to better match people with employers.
The goal is to create a “continuum” of products and services. “The data,” Roorda told me, “is the thing that is the common denominator for all that.” Increasingly, that includes data from ACT assessments of students’ social and emotional states, as well as their academic acumen. ACT says its acquisitions and investments each fit under one or more broad categories: K-to-12, learning, work force, and postsecondary. But I’m still having a hard time seeing the synergy.
In the meantime, I’m still curious about how much ACT will ultimately spend carrying out this shift in direction. The organization hasn’t disclosed dollar figures for a lot of its deals, and Roorda was discreet. One thing he did say: He’s willing to deploy the organization’s assets to fuel the transformation. As he put it, “We don’t serve our mission being a bank.”
According to its latest publicly available tax filings, for the year ending August 31, 2016, ACT held net assets of $443 million. Meanwhile the Educational Testing Service, the organization that develops the SAT, has also been diversifying itself; it even made at least one move into the ed-tech world, providing financial support to a start-up incubator called LearnLaunch Accelerator.
Roorda isn’t a showy guy. ACT’s transformation has been similarly no-drama, although a year ago it eliminated about 100 positions as part of an “organizational realignment.”
I asked Roorda if he was trying to keep a little below the radar. He acknowledged that’s been a bit of a factor for two reasons. One was practical. Even with its resources, ACT is entering an ed-tech sector flooded with capital — from traditional venture-capital firms, from foundations like Gates and Lumina, and from organizations flush from their work guaranteeing student loans, like Strada Education Network and ECMC. “All the capital is going to a limited number of companies,” Roorda noted. That can drive up prices.
The other reason is reputational. “When you rebrand yourself a learning company, you have to be a learning company,” he said. “We’re not there yet completely.”
Happy 15th birthday, Facebook.
On Monday, the internet reminded us that this was the 15th anniversary of the creation of Facebook. I don’t have the time (or the stomach) to look back on all the ways Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm-room creation has changed society, politics, civil discourse, and our entire sense of privacy. (And yes, even so, I still typically check my feed once a day.)
But if you’re curious about its impact on higher education, I can assure you that our archive holds more than 3,000 articles mentioning it. And just as I remembered, that archive begins with a delightful feature, written by our then-reporter Brock Read (now one of our assistant managing editors), describing the fledgling service, at the time still called “Thefacebook,” as it had begun its expansion to 32 campuses. Enjoy the read, and a little time-travel back to innocence.
Our fifth annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition at SXSW EDU seeks contestants.
We’re still accepting applicants to be contestants in our Shark Tank on Wednesday, March 6, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., in Austin, Tex. You can read more about it (and another session on the skills gap that I’ll be moderating) here. Do you — or someone you know — have a new company, a new organization, or even just a good idea to improve higher education? Please send a short description of your idea to chronicleevents@chronicle.com.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com.
Correction
An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Strada Education Network. Strada no longer guarantees student loans, although much of its wealth was derived from that business, and a portion of its current income is based on revenues from a loan-guaranty portfolio that it sold in 2017.