The Future of Education After the COVID-19 Pandemic

The future of education is online. I’ve voiced this expectation in the past, and it’s one that I have professionally embraced and continue to hold.

In my 2017 book Jobs for Robots, I discussed how online education has a chance to significantly better society — and how education is the greatest tool humans have to stay relevant in a world of increased automation.

The Trend is Your Friend

The rising trend in online education has been gathering steam for some time, and now we are seeing that COVID-19 has forced essentially all learners out of classrooms and online.

This is happening at all levels of education — primary, secondary, post-secondary, professional, certificate, and informal.

Of course, there’s also been significant growth in online courses on platforms like LinkedIn learning. And the general trends in massive online open courses (MOOCs) and simultaneous massive online courses (SMOCs) have been growing for a long time. But, of course, this hasn’t just been a growth in informal education.

In truth, all of these courses are likely to grow.

Trends tend to build slowly and then accelerate at certain threshold moments. This may be that moment for online education. And the current experience alone may be enough to change the future of higher education as well as all forms of education permanently.

I’ve shared the story in other books about how I completed my third full master’s degree entirely online without ever going to a campus. This included defending my master’s project remotely, as well as doing teamwork and group projects online.

And I was doing that back from 2014 to 2016.

Of course, the technology is even better now.

The tools people have are better now. Computers are faster now; smartphones are better now. Essentially, everything people need to be their most successful with online learning has all improved drastically in the years since I completed an entire master’s degree online.

And as I look to the future of education, I see the potential for three main dynamics to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic experience.

These are the same three dynamics that have affected other industries where technology helps to break a guild system and education is — especially at the collegiate and post-collegiate levels — a guild system.

That’s what the entire model of doing a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. is based on; it’s based on the medieval structure of apprentice, journeyman, master.

Those three levels roughly are equivalent to what one would have seen in either knighthood or in medieval formal degrees. The Ph.D., the doctoral degree, is the pinnacle of these, and a dissertation was designed to roughly mirror the Meisterstück or chef d’oeuvre — the masterpiece — which would make one a Meister — a master of their field. Although the words we use in education are different, the structure of higher education is still medieval in nature.

Historically, that guild structure has often been a barrier to entry for many careers and disciplines. But online education has tremendous potential to disrupt traditional studies and the guild of the academy by drastically expanding the reach of course materials and education content. I expect this is what we’re going to see at an accelerated pace in the years to come. More people will be educated than ever before online — and in total, because of online education.

Three Trends in Education

The three trends that we’ve seen in FinTech — cost disintermediation, democratization, and improved user experience — are the same three drivers I expect will impact the future of education.

First, is the ability to disintermediate education costs by breaking the education guild system. Second, is the ability to democratize access with an online platform and educate more people. And third, there is the chance to improve the learning experience.

Even though most people might think of college or grad school as a time to be in an archetypical suburban or even rural campus environment where lots of the learning process is organically supported by the life experience of being in a certain kind of conducive environment, that’s about to change in a big way.

In recent years, smaller colleges have come under financial pressure. Now, with both an economic slowdown and increased move to online education, I expect that we are going to see some small colleges come under enough financial pressures in the near term to shutter their doors.

And while some small liberal arts colleges — or colleges that resist an expansion online — may cease to exist, large universities are likely to see this as a tremendous opportunity to help fulfill and expand their mandate. After all, they will be able to serve many, many more people by increasing access to online education. And they may be able to do so at a price point that more people could afford.

It’s important to remember that most people get into education because they want to help people learn. This is true in primary, secondary, postsecondary, and professional education.

The ability to help more people is something that educators would likely see as a greater calling than serving fewer people, provided that the learning actually happens. There is this really critical concern that if you expand the number of learners, that you may actually decrease the quality of the education.

However, the online education experience of the COVID-19 pandemic response is likely to demonstrate that it is possible to provide effective, quality education even while drastically increasing the numbers of students. If this proves true, which I expect it generally will, the biggest and most well-known universities could push to drastically increase the number of students they serve online, which could disintermediate cost.

Education Inflation Outstrips Total Inflation

Education costs have greatly outstripped other costs. You can see this dynamic when examining the education subindex of the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) inflation data when compared to the total CPI.1

In Figure 1, you’ll note that the education costs have almost always outstripped average year-on-year growth rate in total inflation. Needless to say, uninterrupted, this trend is likely to prove unsustainable for the future of education affordability and access. And it’s one of the main reasons why online education is likely to explode in terms of adoption.

The ability to serve more people at a low price point and create competition could break the higher education guild and disintermediate cost, providing a massive societal benefit where more people would be able to get more significant education on demand. In Jobs for Robots, I wrote about online education as the in-hand classroom, and indeed this is something that has been a potential for some time. Now, we appear likely to see a leap above the previous threshold.

It’s also the reason I founded The Futurist Institute back in 2016. And it’s why our courses have always been online. We wanted to be able to serve the maximum number of learners possible at a low price point.

This is how business works, and even though universities are often not-for-profit institutions, they, too, are still businesses of sorts. After all, university budgets must balance and they also have a mission. But rather than focusing on profits, the mission is to effectively educate as many people as possible.

This is a critical piece, especially when we think about the future of work and we look at the education threshold as being a critical precondition for success as a telecommuter or as a remote worker. In other words, you must be a knowledge worker, and you really need to have a high level of skills or education in order to effectively work online in many cases.

After the COVID-19 pandemic these two dynamics will fold together, where the desire for education will greatly increase because those are the jobs that are pandemic proof. And those will be the jobs that people will want in ever increasing numbers, which means that demand for education will rise since both aspiring knowledge workers and universities will have been forced to cross the Rubicon of online education.

They will likely be able to find ways to continue to serve more people and to more effectively fulfill a broadened scope of their mission to educate people while also increasing the efficacy with which a larger number of people could be educated, at least at a greater way than ever before.

Beyond the disintermediation of cost and this democratization of access, there is also the improved user experience. And this is where we see the technology being a lever.

Paying Elite Tuition Without In-Person Benefits

One of the reasons we may also see a disintermediation of cost in education is because parents who are paying college tuition — or students who are paying their own tuition — to universities to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per semester, may realize that they can get the same amount of education remotely, just by watching it online.

This realization may push some students and their parents to seek out alternatives in order to get through their courses more quickly, or they may decide that the education value isn’t really why they’re at the most elite universities.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of elite education is that it introduces you to a network. But that network is a lot more distant when it’s remote. And really elite institutions of higher education have been offering online courses for some time.

Harvard has offered courses through its extension school since 1910. And it has been offering online courses and degrees for a number of years at a fraction of the cost of the traditional courses at Harvard University. Of course, there is a distinction between being at Harvard University versus the extension school. But it’s probably not that big to most people. After all, it’s still Harvard.

And Harvard isn’t the only school that offers online courses, remote courses, online certificates, and other programs. Many universities do this. I’ve personally done certificates online with MIT and Carnegie Mellon. If the content is your priority, then for some learners, the online experience may be most effective.

Of course, online courses force you to miss out on some of the biggest potential of going to an elite institution: networking.

Whether we are talking about online courses, remote courses, or hybrid courses, I expect that the future of education following the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to lead to two critical outcomes.

In addition to expecting an increase in total education attainment at the population level following the COVID-19 pandemic, I also expect an acceleration in the number of explicitly designed online courses. And I believe there could be pushback against some advanced education with very high costs.

After all, people have been more willing to accept the high cost of education in the past, because it came with a guaranteed network. But it’s very tough to build long-term relationships with influential professors, thought leaders, Noble laureates, and your academic peers, who may someday be future leaders, if you are only taking a course online that was envisioned, designed, and sold as an in-person value add. The truth is that if the networking is the real value-add (which seems to be the case) and the education is secondary, then the cost of elite university education as well as elite liberal arts college education might suffer some pushback on price, and there could be a preference for networking experience outside of the academy as a substitution effect for the lost networking value.

This isn’t a guarantee, of course, but this is just one potential side effect we could see from people watching their children take $20,000 or $30,000 worth of courses online like they’re just watching YouTube videos.

The Value Add of Technology

Technological aids are likely to decrease the cost of education and increase the potential for competition. And we also see a significant potential for technology to support democratized access to education and improve the learner experience.

Furthermore, the use of technological aids will only likely improve over time. And if we see universities remain closed for the spring semester of 2020, technological aids that improve the online education user experience could become more critical. At the time this book was published, there was a not small potential for some universities to remain closed through the end of the entire calendar year of 2020, thus canceling any summer or fall semesters for in-person courses.

To support this endeavor, I expect that we are likely to see increased investment in EdTech (education technology) as well as significant investments across tools, training materials, and remote materials that allow for a more cohesive learning process. Once we see students and teachers become accustomed to the online education delivery model using these technologies, we are likely to find people will be more accepting of them.

There’s an old German saying, “Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht.” It translates roughly as “What the farmer doesn’t recognize, he won’t feed on.” Because guild industries like healthcare and education are based on centuries of tradition, the actual process of getting into their guilds is not necessarily steeped in technology, even in those fields themselves that are immersed in technology and embrace technology.

I expect that we are likely to potentially see some changes stemming from technological disruption to these guilds in the decade ahead — and beyond. The unique situation of COVID-19 may even hasten the process, as it has revealed a shortage of healthcare workers, while also bringing to light the tremendous potential for online education and remote work.

There are also likely to be important regional opportunities, In the state of Texas, where, I live there is an initiative known as 60 by 30; the goal is to have 60 percent of Texans age 25 to 34 complete some level of post-secondary education, degree, or certificate by the year 2030. It is an ambitious goal, but it is critical because the jobs that are remote and less automatable are critical for the next economic phase of growth in Texas. And it is exactly this cohort of jobs that requires education and technological skills.

Trade skills, formal education, informal education, and perpetual learning are all likely to gain a boost from online education. And the rise in online education due to the U.S. COVID-19 response makes Texas much more likely to achieve the 60 by 30 goal.

This is not to say that the pandemic of COVID-19 is positive. It is most certainly not. It is horrific. It is a catastrophe.

Yet, if we were to consider the impacts for the economy and society at the population level, we might say (in an attempt to find kernels of hope in a desperate situation) that now maybe in the long run our populace will be more educated — and we will have a much better prepared workforce for the decades ahead.

From an economic standpoint, this is invaluable. From a population stability standpoint, this is invaluable. And from a public health perspective, where we see there is a massive deficit of people in healthcare fields — and a massive need going forward to fill healthcare jobs — we also expect that online education will help to facilitate filling those roles in the healthcare fields going forward. If that is a result, then public health outcomes in the long run could be greatly improved.

This is a topic for discussion in the chapters about “The Future of Healthcare” as well as “The Future of Work.”

But it’s really important as we think about the future of education to bridge that gap between the needs of the economy, the needs of the workforce, the needs of the people and public health needs, and the educational capabilities to have the workforce cross a divide that up until now seemed honestly almost insurmountable and quite daunting.

I am much more optimistic now that we will achieve improved levels of public health over time because we may be able to create not only a more educated workforce, but we are also likely to see the education enrollment in health sciences and life sciences increase in a way that may also result in a long-term positive net benefit for public health and the economy.

Again, this is not to say that COVID-19 is in any way a positive. But if we were to look at long-term ramifications, there is reason for hope that out of this pandemic tragedy and economic crisis, we might be able to derive something of value and something positive in the long run.

The Impact on Home Schooling

One dynamic that has yet to be determined is what the experience of involuntary at-home, in-hand learning will be on homeschooling.

In Figure 2, you can see the trend in home schooling since 1999. Both the absolute level and the percent of U.S. pupils aged 5 to 17 who are home-schooled appear to have peaked in 2012 before slowing in 2016.3

It seems quite likely that the COVID-induced widespread mandate for home schooling might result in an increase in home schooling in the United States. After all, the new experience for many may actually result in better outcomes for some learners.

Although it is not guaranteed that the number of home-schooled students will rise in the wake of COVID-19, it does seem quite likely. After all, some learners and parents may find the new experience to be preferable.

Plus, this kind of event highlights the risk to families that rely on a system outside of their control to provide for, assure of, and essentially guarantee education outcomes. Some people who planned their lives around school being an assured, undisruptable institution may demonstrate a preference for more control over such risks in the future.

Meanwhile, pupils who are home-schooled are unlikely to turn away from home schooling as a result of COVID-19. In essence, their educations and learning lives are likely to be much less disrupted than pupils in public, private, charter, religious, and other physical schools. I mean, why would they want to stop doing the only thing that works?

That seems like a less likely outcome than expecting that those now operating in a broken system of physical places of learning may cross the Rubicon of home schooling — never to return to physical buildings.

In sum, many changes are coming.

And more remote learning and at-home, in-hand education is likely to be seen across all learning levels, from home-schooled primary school pupils to undergraduate college students and doctoral candidates.

In the long run, increased access to all levels of education is likely to result in improved economic outcomes at the population level.

Historically speaking, education has been the great divider for jobs. In Figure 3, you can see statistics on unemployment and earnings from 2018 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Education is positively correlated with income, and education is also inversely correlated with unemployment. In other words, generally speaking, the more education you have, the more money you make and the lower the chance you are unemployed.

And a more educated population will be both wealthier and more employable.

The Future After COVID

This is an excerpt from Jason Schenker's recent book The Future After COVID, which was released on 1 April 2020. It is currently a #1 New Release for Macroeconomics on Amazon.

This book can be ordered at www.FutureAfterCovid.com

Jason Schenker is one of the world's leading futurists. He is the Chairman of The Futurist Institute and the President of Prestige Economics. Jason is also an instructor for LinkedIn Learning.

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