Opportunity: Accountability
In recent years, employers, legislators and the public have intensified their questioning about the value of, and return on, the costly investment in higher education. President Trump has emphatically echoed those concerns, painting the picture of an educational system that wastes money, burdens students with debt and does not prepare them for their careers.
During the campaign, in announcing a college affordability plan, he railed against the cost of college, and suggesting universities use their endowment funds to tackle rising tuition:
“[S]tudents are choking on those loans. They can’t pay them back. Before they start, they’re in trouble. [… But] these universities use [endowment] money to pay their administrators, to put donors’ names on their buildings, or just store the money, keep it and invest it…they should be using the money on students, for tuition, for student life and for student housing.
In his inaugural address, his rhetoric was even more pointed, decrying an “education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”
Given the President’s early executive actions to reduce regulation across the economy, it seems unlikely that this perception of a mismanaged and ineffective higher education system will result in further federal rulemaking and oversight. It does, however, open the door for the administration to pressure higher education institutions on student success and tuition costs.
Even without additional regulations, the administration can—as the Obama administration did in applying pressure to for-profit institutions—use financial aid and its influence with accreditors to demand accountability on specific outcomes.
For edtech and innovation, this presents opportunities for tools that allow higher education providers to demonstrate their value more clearly and directly. Technologies providing better ways to collect and use more comprehensive learning data, linking skills and content to employment and provisioning support services to students more quickly and effectively will be in demand.
The market will continue to grow for tools that allow for a richer understanding of student progress and learning, such as transcripting services that track granular data aligned with marketable professional skills, and platforms that capture peer-to-peer, experiential and project based learning in greater depth. Furthermore, such data-dependent technologies can play a role in helping institutions control costs by informing and directing spending choices.
The More Things Change
Ultimately, the Trump administration could do much to spur innovation in higher ed, generating opportunity and investment across edtech. If the administration backs its rhetoric on job creation with action to bring employers and educators together and help them engage more constructively, edtech will have an important role to play.
But it seems unlikely there will be radical departures or new directions in education policy. In fact, the administration might find its best opportunities to advance its priorities by supporting and extending earlier policy initiatives, such as last year’s Education Quality through Innovation Partnerships (EQUIP), that encourage industry-education collaboration and new approaches to institutional accreditation, objectives very much in line with its push to limit governmental regulation, spur innovation and accelerate economic growth.
Gerry DiGiusto has worked in higher education, both in the U.S. and in Europe, for more than 20 years as a teacher, researcher, strategist, and consultant. Prior to joining Motivis Learning as Vice President for Strategy, Gerry was Director of Consulting Services at Pearson Education, where he built and launched Pearson’s first strategic consulting team to focus on student experience, teaching and learning innovation, and revenue growth for colleges and universities.
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