Michael Staton, an education entrepreneur, blames “institutional ossification” for colleges’ inability to meet the needs of the market.Courtesy of Michael Staton
Michael Staton is one of those ed-tech entrepreneurs trying to shake up higher education. He’s a millennial, steeped in technology, and he believes that when it comes to fixing big problems — especially in education — colleges need businesses to help.
When I talk to professors, though, I often hear skepticism of people like Michael Staton. There’s a general worry about the profit motive, of course, but the bigger feeling is, “Who are these outsiders, and what gives them the nerve?” As Mr. Staton sees it, he’s simply doing what he was taught by those same professors. He went to Clark University, a Massachusetts institution whose marketing slogan is “Challenge convention. Change our world.” It’s the kind of sentiment sold at many colleges these days.
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Michael Staton, an education entrepreneur, blames “institutional ossification” for colleges’ inability to meet the needs of the market.Courtesy of Michael Staton
Michael Staton is one of those ed-tech entrepreneurs trying to shake up higher education. He’s a millennial, steeped in technology, and he believes that when it comes to fixing big problems — especially in education — colleges need businesses to help.
When I talk to professors, though, I often hear skepticism of people like Michael Staton. There’s a general worry about the profit motive, of course, but the bigger feeling is, “Who are these outsiders, and what gives them the nerve?” As Mr. Staton sees it, he’s simply doing what he was taught by those same professors. He went to Clark University, a Massachusetts institution whose marketing slogan is “Challenge convention. Change our world.” It’s the kind of sentiment sold at many colleges these days.
“When I graduated, I gave the valedictory, and when I was introduced, they said I embodied this phrase, ‘challenging convention,’” he remembers. “I definitely challenged convention at our university, and it was not embraced. It was like, ‘No, we want you to challenge convention outside of the university.’”
Mr. Staton kept at it. He started one ed-tech company. That didn’t quite get off the ground. He launched another. That did well and was eventually bought by a larger company. He was part of founding teams of three other successful education start-ups. Now he’s at a venture firm called Learn Capital, helping budding ed-tech companies get started and making bets on what the future will look like. Like it or not, he has plenty of predictions, and he’s pushing his ideas on how the education landscape is changing.
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I talked recently with Mr. Staton about what he thinks college folks should understand about the minds of entrepreneurs, and his predictions about where education is heading. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Q. You’re actually a character in a recent book by Kevin Carey called The End of College. In that book, you’re basically his guide to the Silicon Valley mind-set. There’s a scene where you’re showing him some charts and graphs about the size of various market sectors, and one of the circles on these graphs is a surprisingly large one, and it’s education. I believe it was a $4.6-trillion market at the time. That probably has something to do with explaining the latest rush to invest in ed tech, right?
A. Sure, yes. It is a very big market, and it is a market that’s going to undergo a dramatic change. I think a lot of people in higher education don’t necessarily want to talk about it as if it’s a market. I think people that are in enrollment management or admissions are much more readily able to discuss it.
I don’t mean it as a market in the sense that a bunch of capitalists are chomping at the bit. I mean it as a market where individuals and groups of buyers have choices, and they can essentially vote with their dollars, and make their own choices about what kind of education and learning they want. Now, what we’re seeing is an explosion of options. If you want to learn, there are many, many, many different ways that you can do so. Anytime a local, dysfunctional market becomes a global, functioning market, you end up with an explosion of options and a kind of radical transformation in consumer choice.
When that happens, companies that figure out how to become key parts of that ecosystem development do create a lot of value for shareholders and investors. The market size is definitely still there, and as far as we can tell, it’s just going to keep growing because education has what I call a compound-demand effect. The more educated someone is, the more learning they demand, the more learning they consume, and the more they expect everyone around them to learn, and the more sophisticated their hopes and expectations are for their families, for their children, for their nieces and nephews.
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Q. So if it’s a big circle on the graph right now, and it’s actually poised to get even bigger, why don’t more colleges do this themselves?
A. To answer your question a little bit more specifically, Why haven’t institutions started to innovate to meet the surge in both the demand for learning, and then also the variety and the number of options for learning? The reason is basically institutional ossification. All of these colleges and universities were set up either by state governments or through a philanthropic endowment. They were set up with governing structures that essentially had checks and balances, and were designed to preserve the institution itself.
Whenever I’ve spent time with visionary administrators, they’re always whining about the president. Whenever I’ve spent time with a visionary president, they’re always whining about the administration and the faculty. Whenever I’ve spent time with the visionary faculty members, they’re always whining about the administration and the president. Whenever I find a couple of visionary people in the room who know what they’re talking about, then they put the blame over on the trustees. Whenever I’m hanging out with a visionary trustee, they say that they know they need to change, they just don’t know how to do it because the organization’s not set up to do it.
Essentially, everything about institutional governance is set up for preservation and incremental changes. There is no investment structure or organizational structure to take significant risk or to scale.
Q. Right now there is record investment in these ed-tech companies, especially in the higher-ed space. Is that a healthy thing, or do you see that slowing down at any point?
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A. The amount of entrepreneurship will continue to increase. If people are bewildered now, it’s going to be a lot more bewildering in the future.
Q. What do you wish colleges would understand better about the entrepreneur mind-set, or the way the market is moving?
A. The main issue that I see is that until universities are able to ask themselves very existential questions about what it is they don’t do, and don’t need to do, and are willing to cut, there aren’t going to be any systemic changes in the directional costs. There’s a trade-off between going to college and doing it yourself — an à la carte education — and people are just going to go to college less. Colleges won’t feel it quickly, but it will be a slow, painful withering away. I think all universities need to go through the exercise of “What are we not going to do?” Every university in the past 50 years has only added to what they do.
Q. Some colleges are doing that with MOOCs, right? They’re just adding that thing to the thing that they do.
A. That’s true. People are afraid of the automation of the instructor. We actually believe the administration will be automated, and the instructor will be empowered, paid more, and have a much easier life. We’re seeing this with alt school in Minerva, where they’re essentially able to create automated systems that make the need for a complex administration moot, or neutralize the need for a complex administration, so that it never exists in the first place.
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Q. Minerva is the start-up that is trying to become an elite university from scratch. You’re sort of arguing that maybe it’s not the online teaching or their teaching model that’s interesting. Most interesting, maybe, is their administrative approach?
A. The instructors actually find that they have more time to teach and build relationships because they don’t have to spend so much time lecturing. That being said, what we’re seeing in these new models of school is an organization that’s built around empowering the instructor and keeping the administration lean. I think that’s less dystopian than a lot of professional educators would think. I guess it’s dystopian if you’re an administrator. As a former teacher, I always think that the person doing the teaching is the hero in the story.
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
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Jeffrey R. Young was a senior editor and writer focused on the impact of technology on society, the future of education, and journalism innovation. He led a team at The Chronicle of Higher Education that explored new story formats. He is currently managing editor of EdSurge.