Abstract
Kevin Carey, author of The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, imagines a world in which the rigid four-year-degree model of post-secondary schooling and its associated student-debt burden fade into the past.
He foresees a time when higher education becomes an affordable, lifelong process of intellectual and practical enrichment shaped by an individual’s professional and personal aspirations.
Major international publications like Forbes magazine, The Washington Post and The Economist have deemed the $4.6 trillion-to-$6 trillion global education market ripe for technological disruption. Our analysis suggests higher education is vulnerable because of escalating tuition costs and student debt burdens, the unjustified amount of time required to earn a degree and a mismatch between college training and job skills demanded by employers.
After assessing higher learning’s weaknesses, our team concluded a solution lies in an On-Demand Education Marketplace, or what we call ODEM. The platform is a single, accessible, and distributed network that allows students to seamlessly interact with professors and their academic partners in-person, onsite, in both local and international settings to raise the quality of accessible education at reasonable cost.