Will Unbundling Kill Higher Ed as We Know It?

The competency-based education marketplace eschews the bundled approach of traditional degrees, instead promising to produce workers adept in just the right skills employers want. Education expert Ryan Craig believes that unbundling could destroy all but a handful of colleges and universities.

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/06/16

If the unbundling of higher education were like the unbundling of a cable package, most TV viewers would relinquish the Golf Channel and QVC, and so might just as many students give up ample office hours, support from IT, the library, athletics and on-campus social activities in return for a big reduction in tuition and fees. In fact, that's exactly what UK's Coventry University has done, according to Ryan Craig, as noted in his 2015 book, College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education.

Craig is the founding managing director of University Ventures, a private equity fund that invests in post-secondary education companies through partnerships with traditional colleges and universities. Current investments include medical universities; University Now schools, which use a competency-based approach; ProSky and Galvanize, which provide "top-up" skills in technology, entrepreneurialism and marketing; and e-portfolio vendor Portfolium, among other organizations.

As Craig explained, "Bundling transfers consumer surplus to producers." Cable operators "inordinately" benefit from selling cable bundles to customers, whereas unbundling returns that surplus to the consumer — in the case of higher ed, the student. But the concept goes beyond basic economic considerations.

It's Craig's belief that students may one day find they don't need a bachelor's degree to become employable. When that day comes, the traditional four-year college experience could be considered as "old-fashioned and elitist" as a debutante ball. While Craig wouldn't be pinned down on a date by which this unbundling of higher ed will take place, he did offer clues to help us recognize its inevitable arrival.

Insurgent Activities Working Against Degrees

Currently, hiring managers continue using the bachelor's degree as a primary screening mechanism. It has become, said Craig, "the price of entry for a white collar career." But a lot of employers are "very frustrated" with that state of affairs, he added. Most institutions develop their degree programs — "product" in Craig vernacular — based not on what employers need or want but on what faculty want.

Now that more schools are adopting data-informed processes to help re-architect their programs, he asserted, colleges can use data to shift the emphasis from that faculty-centered model to "what competencies students actually need, what competencies employers actually want." As a result, "We're seeing all kinds of insurgent activity acting against the degree."

Craig offered these examples of "insurgency" as evidence:

• Just-in-time coding bootcamps that have the potential to train tens of thousands of people for "remunerative careers" in technology. Many bootcamp students already have degrees, often from elite universities. But not all. In March the White House announced a "TechHire" initiative that would put people (including the near-unemployable — those with criminal records) into "fast-track training" through coding boot camps.
• The use of "nanodegrees" at Udacity and "specializations" from Coursera that bundle specific groups of courses. These options received a boost when Google both teamed up with these MOOC companies and created custom assessments for its own hiring practices — which indicates, Craig pointed out, "that they're no longer taking the degree at face value."
• In its United Kingdom operations, consultancy EY is removing academic qualifications from its entry criteria. "They're keeping that hidden from the hiring manager because they believe it is absolutely not indicative of performance in the job," said Craig. Instead, the company is opting to put every candidate through a suite of custom-developed "strengths assessments and numerical tests," an approach it has been testing since 2008.