Will Learning Academies replace College?

A decade ago, I was searching for the wherewithal to do another postgraduate degree while working. I was dismayed at the limited options available at that time. Most of the premium colleges and universities needed you to quit your job and join them full-time on campus. This involved me quitting my job and getting into student debt (which was not a good idea then, and certainly not now).

The only colleges that allowed you to pursue a degree while at work (though they were around) were run-of-the-mill, and their degrees were really not the types you could hold up at a family function. Other variants of this were called distance learning or even weekend classes. However the experience was still pretty much offline and occasionally involved trips to an exam centre.

This didn't catch my interest. I moved on, and of course, with time, I aged.

Today, not a day goes by when my inbox isn't flooded by the latest curriculum being offered by a global university completely online!! Spare my email inbox; cold calls have now become the norm too, thanks to data sharing that we all universally agree to whenever we check the acknowledge button on any site we visit.

Over the last few years, however, learning academies have filled this void, sensing the opportunity. Millennials, as well as a few Get X folks working in the industry today, have realized that to stay relevant, their skills need constant upgrading.

Clearly, a new plan was needed, and this is where Learning Academies stepped in.

Here is why things have changed.

The Generation Gap

The Gen-X generation (born between 1965 and 1980)?by-and-large glorified degrees, beginning from bachelors onward to masters and finally doctorates, in this specific order!! For this generation, job security and status in society drove everything. Notice how certain people stress that their qualification titles are called out before their names.

The Millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996) was the breakaway generation that clearly broke away from the pack. Of course, they pursued college degrees, but they looked at education from a very different lens when compared to the previous generation. Education was their road to doing whatever they wanted in life. It was this generation that saw the number of courses, fields, and specializations triple in colleges. Hitherto unheard of, degrees or specializations such as healthcare management, supply chain management, etc. began to show up.

However, regardless of generation, it is common today to find people who have spent nearly a decade or more in their job after graduating from college pursuing a half-year or 11-month job-related course in an academy or university to obtain a diploma.

The Platform

The other thing that is appealing about these learning academies is that they have spruced up the whole learning experience by creating engaging learning platforms and environments. 10 years ago, you would probably have been given online books to read, which were probably outdated by the time you received them. Interaction between learners for distance learning or weekend courses was as sparse as the number of people registered for the courses. Today, however, the platforms are not only up-to-date but also gamified.

A lot of these platforms have leaderboards, which encourage online collaboration and create an environment for banter amongst online participants.

In other words, these platforms brought the offline classroom experience to the online world, albeit with a modern twist.

Freshness

While this is still debatable as to how frequently syllabus content should change, let me prove a point here. Blockchain as a technology has been around for almost a decade. IBM has had its hyperledger technology going for it since the early 2010s. How many colleges or universities taught this, though? In the latter part of the last decade, blockchain began to appear in colleges as a semester subject.

If one were to delve into the entire ecosystem of blockchain—the DAO, crypto, the metaverse, and types of hyperledgers—it would probably warrant a few subjects in the syllabus, if not a semester unto itself. However, we still see it as a subject in a university course since it is still considered non-mainstream.

Certain universities are teaching fintech courses now, almost 5 years after the fintech revolution. The Academies, however, got their act together and were offering fintech much earlier in short-term courses.

Cost

Last but not least, I don't even need to explain how expensive good-quality university private education is today. The competition for seats at prestigious universities is daunting. A seat at a good university is the doorway to a powerful alumni network that will open doors for you once you graduate.

In the West, the high levels of student debt are a contentious hot potato election issue, with the American President writing off some amount of student debt last year. Globally, education is an evergreen space to be, regardless of economic downturns.

Learning academies, however, do not come with the financial overheads of an established university campus and are therefore more nimble and more affordable.

What has actually happened is that, driven by competition from these academies, universities (the kind I used to want to apply to 10 years ago) are now knocking on my inbox and offering me courses I was seeking 10 years ago from the comfort of my home. A lot of them have very low entry barriers and, in some cases, cost a fraction of what doing full-term at a college would cost.

.. and they say, it's never too late to learn ..