Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
I&#x27;ve worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers.<p>Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I&#x27;ll address the knowledge signaling first.<p>It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor&#x27;s degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor&#x27;s degree, there&#x27;s a minimum amount of knowledge you <i>probably</i> have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won&#x27;t matter for this problem).<p>There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without &quot;climbing the ranks&quot; so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).