Blockchain is the New University
Wednesday, August 9th, 2023
The smart money has been questioning and assaulting the value of the traditional university.
Most universities, my their desire, pass on "uncommon knowledge". The institutions have a standard curriculum that students ingest and enter the market undifferentiated. Those students who carve their own way (Wandering as Competitive Advantage) can potentially distinguish themselves, especially if they are able to connect their earned secrets to market value (Valuable Earned Secrets).
In the same way the lumbering legacy corporations lack nimbleness to adapt to market opportunities as start-ups can, new modalities of learning, teaching and credentialing can potentially unbundle much of the traditional university.
What was ever the value of college?
The primary value from conventional wisdom was that a college degree increasingly became necessary to get a job.
The reasons for that weren't often disclosed.
For the wannabe doctors, where admission to medical school depended on requirements taken in college, college served that purpose to provide supposedly quality foundational teaching along with signaling to the medical schools.
For hard-sciences, like engineering, college provided a rigorous academic environment to meet accredited expectations (set by a body, such as IEEE) as well as signalling.
For the liberal arts, the concepts of "critical thinking" and well-roundedness, were often touted as the benefits of a given school.
If one were to believe college brochures, the alumni network and the opportunity to form enriching bonds is also an important benefit.
The benefits are real.
Forming a network of alumni who are invested in younger graduates or peers can often be the key to one's success.
Building life-long bonds and friendships with people from different backgrounds and personalities, too, can be life-changing.
Signaling to employers, customers, or investors can also valuable to demonstrate the knowledge, skills, work-ethic.
Quality knowledge, especially knowledge that is differentiated or provides marketable skills, also is valuable.
The question is whether college is the only or, for that matter, the best construct to deliver these?
Preference Curves and Category Creation
In the same way that Amazon can perfectly match the demand and preference curves of individuals because of its vast selection, the emerging class of bespoke online and IRL instruction (along with, potentially, decomposable education at traditional, legacy universities), students and life-long learners can begin to build portfolio of customized learning.
However, a mishmash of "intro" courses likely does not make for a good education (some could argue otherwise, but I think a reasonable expectation of depth and concentration is still fair, regardless of the intended customization).
This is hard, but doable, by having courses composable, meaning a dynamic body of people, instructions, people in the marketplace agree on interfaces or basics of knowledge that can be provable and validated.
What differs may be modality of instruction or the areas of concentration.
For example, there's probably consensus of what constitutes valuable computer science, human biology, even history or English literature. Both actual knowledge and provable skills.
However, we know that there are a multitude of ways this same base information can be taught.
This is why one professor's course on John Milton is always packed to the rafters at one university while at another the same topics are pretty much empty.
What gets interesting is when we allow people with deep curiosity and wandering to stitch together both accredited bodies of knowledge across domains. The information is deep enough to be interesting, but the hybrid gives them an edge -- an opportunity for category creation.
If demand by the market can then be added to signals of certain types of courses, this makes things very interesting for employers, as well. We're seeing a huge uptick in professional education and training in demanding, fast-changing areas like tech, such as engineering and product management.
Product management is a good area to call out for the growth of this training because the discipline is newish, vague, specializing, and (at this time) highly valuable. Differentiation and quality skills are key, but what those are and how they are delivered matters.
Here is an illustration of how I believe the blockchain permits the decomposition, while preserving a unifying integration layer:
The blockchain provides these capabilities with any centralized body:
- verification
- composition
- accreditation
- signalling
- community
- selectivity
- value accrual
I'm going to focus on the last two, I think the rest are fairly straightforward (but I'm glad to dig deeper for those interested).
Selectivity and Value Accrual
I do believe that, because people will still have different ambitious, environments, personalities, native abilities, and goals, there must be differentiation, just as there is among schools.
Perhaps without being as crude as it is now with the "tiering" and "ranking" that currently makes high-schoolers miserable during their application process, there will inevitably be selective communities of highly-capable people.
They want to value the time-investment or the difficulty or specialization of their learning, and they should. Being around people who are willing to push the bounds in your industry is a value in and of itself.
These people want to recognize each other (signaling) but also come together in groups to foster their development and hopefully help each other (which leads in part to value accrual).
Alumni networks do a poor job of this for universities now.
I don't truly understand why not.
To me, it appears the primary value proposition to alumni for participation and donation is sentimentality (don't you remember the good ole times?)
That's honestly a pretty tough sell.
The "product" value proposition competes with so many other jobs-to-be-done that are getting fulfilled elsewhere and may have once been filled by alumni membership ages ago.
For example, some alumni associations granted access to a gym, low cost lodging, places to eat, valuable connections with others, insightful discussion.
But these have been disrupted or better packaged by competing offerings.
The blockchain can provide token-gated access to exclusive content, gathering spaces (both online and, I think an exciting turn will be in IRL) where they can meet each other.
The value accrual can even become more exciting as members grow in stature or access.
They can provide, without all the current administrative heartaches, "office hours" or if entrepreneurs in consumer goods, discounted or free access, maybe space for younger alumni to co-work. The value accrual back to the network becomes easier since identity and access can be run on the blockchain.
This builds the value of the network for alums that could become a powerful moat that legacy institutions like the Ivy Leagues used to have.
Those moats have been quickly crumbling, for plenty of reasons.
But that vacuum will be filled.
People still want some level of selectivity (call it an elitist impulse) but in this highly composable world, it doesn't matter because there will no longer be linear ladders of hierarchies but diversified maps and terrains where people just want to find their tribes or guilds.
The decentralization is already occurring, but right now it is highly fragmented and usually on the edges, such as professional development (paid) or doing life (fixing the house or decluttering, for free).
Even the real-world experience of universities can be unbundled into smaller, real-life cohorts that gather with experienced professors or researchers; long-term research is probably going to be exposed to the same decoupling as grants shift from public funding to corporate funding.
What does this mean for students?
It means getting clearer on one's product roadmap of learning, based on both curiosity (what is valuable and obsessive to you) and market insight (what is actually valuable to others), will be finding defensible niches and frontiers.
Those who expected the linear path will find themselves commoditized.