Whether or not college leaders realize it, last week’s announcement by LinkedIn that it would spend $1.5 billion to buy Lynda.com, a provider of consumer-focused online courses, carries notable consequences for higher education.
At the very least, it’s a sign of the growing interest in making academic and other educational credentials more visible and transparent to employers and others with reason to see them.
It could also be, in the words of one observer, a sharp reminder to colleges that if they don’t up their game in helping students and alumni with career transitions, there are many other organizations — giants like LinkedIn among them — that stand ready to fill that void.
“Institutions can and should own the arc of this, but they’ve got to sort of wake up,” says Adam Newman, a founder of Tyton Partners, a consulting and investment banking firm that focuses on education markets.
LinkedIn already offers college rankings, university pages, and tools to allow its 350 million members to crowdsource advice on where to attend college or take a course. A company spokeswoman calls those resources a way “to help future generations of workers.”
By dint of the data those members provide, it is also, at least according to the technology consultant and blogger Michael Feldstein, the only public or private organization “that has the data to study long-term career outcomes of education in a broad and meaningful way.”
When LinkedIn announced the Lynda.com deal, some observers were quick to declare it a further sign of the professional-networking giant’s growing ambition to dominate the education market. One of them, Ryan Craig, an education investor and author, even declared, “LinkedIn Eats the University” in an op-ed, warning that what Uber and Airbnb have done to disrupt the taxi and hotel businesses, LinkedIn could do to colleges.
Mr. Craig’s new book, College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan), argues that the most fundamental disruption facing colleges will come once a “digital marketplace for human capital” takes hold. In other words, he says in an interview, once an organization comes along that can communicate students’ competencies and skills to employers and others, and also communicate to those students what they need for a job or a career, it will have the upper hand over colleges with their “opaque degrees.”
Mr. Craig notes that a less-heralded 2014 acquisition by LinkedIn — of a company called Bright, which uses algorithms to match applicants with jobs based on their skills and experience — strengthened LinkedIn’s ability to act as a marketplace that can serve as an alternative to traditional degrees or credentials. Its acquisition of Lynda, he says, shows it now wants to be a direct provider of education as well.
Credentials 2.0
Even those with a more measured take on LinkedIn say its actions reflect how the higher-education system is evolving.
“A lot of people are starting to think about credentials in a different way,” says Diana Oblinger, chief executive and president of Educause, which promotes technology in higher education.
For example, there’s a move to upgrade academic transcripts to make them a more valuable record for employers, with fuller information about what students learned in their courses as well as data on their extracurricular pursuits.
The more such records are “machine readable” the better, says Matthew Pittinsky, a founder of both the learning-platform company Blackboard and the academic-credential-management company Parchment. Mr. Pittinsky, who is also an assistant research professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, has urged colleges to develop digitized “postsecondary achievement reports” for their students, just as universities in Britain have begun to do under an effort known as HEAR, for Higher Education Achievement Report.
Although he’s not a fan of LinkedIn (he doesn’t have a profile on the site, mostly, he says, for privacy reasons), Mr. Pittinsky says he sees the influence it could have on education. Such sites could cause people “to think differently about a particular institution” when it comes to deciding where to pursue education, he says.
Ms. Oblinger says it is too early to say how LinkedIn could affect higher education, but she notes that the company is well positioned to reflect students’ interactions with the changing educational landscape — one in which there are more and more opportunities, through MOOCs, coding academies, and ventures like Lynda, for people who “need education in different-sized chunks” than that of a traditional degree.
Louis Soares, vice president for policy research and strategy at the American Council on Education, sees the potential for LinkedIn to build bridges to employers for students. He says the company could even play a role in informing the content of college curricula if institutions choose to analyze the skills and expertise of LinkedIn members at the top of their professions, and build those traits into their own courses.
That’s a far cry from being a college killer. “It’s a market and maybe a new way of delivery,” says Mr. Soares. “But it remains to be seen if it becomes an authentic education-delivery platform.”
LinkedIn is also sitting on a gold mine of data about specific job skills needed for careers in specific cities. So colleges should engage with the company and others like it “because they’re trying to fill gaps, perceived or real,” in matters involving education. “It’s not going to kill the university,” says Mr. Newman, of Tyton Partners. But in a world where education and credentialing are becoming more and more unbundled, “it has a few more pieces than other groups.”
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
