The Accelerant
The global pandemic was not the cause of the crisis in higher education. It was the accelerant.
In a blunt assessment before the crisis, Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell told The Atlantic that the challenges schools were facing were the exact same ones they had identified pre-pandemic, only now they were “on steroids.”
NYU Professor Scott Galloway was even more direct. Assessing the value of a fall semester delivered remotely at full price, he declared, “It’s a terrible deal.”
The numbers from the summer of 2020 told a brutal story. The University of Arizona projected losses of $250 million. The University of Michigan braced for a hit between $400 million and $1 billion. The University of Wisconsin, another $100 million. Syracuse University reported an immediate $35 million loss.
These figures are not just about tuition. They represent the collapse of a business model built on a captive audience. As The Futur’s Chris Do explains, the financial fallout extends far beyond enrollment. It encompasses parking, student services, dining, housing, on-campus activities, and for many schools, the massive revenue engine of athletics. Fundraising, grants, and licensing all took a hit.
In a live discussion with a panel of educators and entrepreneurs, Do framed the situation not as a new problem, but as the violent exposure of a system that has been failing for years. The pandemic simply poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
For decades, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed past every other metric. “At the end of the day it is a business to make money,” Do states, “and we haven't been looking at it like that. But now we're here.”
The central question became one of survival. Is this moment a disaster or an opportunity?
Disaster and Opportunity
For Petrula Vrontikis, a longtime professor at ArtCenter College of Design, the answer is both. “I think it's been a disaster because it happened so fast,” she says. The sheer speed of the change made it difficult for large, bureaucratic institutions to adapt.
But Vrontikis sees a silver lining in the collapse of physical boundaries. “The opportunity lies in that there are no borders anymore,” she explains. This opens the door for unprecedented collaborations, where a student at ArtCenter could work with someone from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and an MBA from Stanford. “Can we create new things that are so valuable that our borders have minimized?”
Jim Schofield, an educator and producer, is more cautious. As a parent with a daughter in her second year of university, he sees society still stuck in a “cope mechanism.” The immense social and political turmoil of the time left students distracted and disillusioned. “I don't know if my daughter's head is in the game educationally right now,” he admits.
For Schofield, the path to opportunity has a clear prerequisite: student involvement. “If they don't involve the students as part of the problem solving, then I think we are completely set up for disaster,” he warns. The key is to make solving the future of education part of the curriculum itself.
Douglas Davis, Chair of the BFA in Communication Design at CUNY’s City Tech, offers a stark analogy. “COVID-19 is asking us are we caterpillars or are we canaries?” The trends were already visible. Years prior, giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft dropped the college degree requirement for many roles, signaling a shift back to a skills-first economy.
Davis identifies the core conflict paralyzing most institutions: Safety vs. Solvency.
The entire university profit formula, from housing to alumni donations, is built for the in-person experience. The need to maintain that revenue stream creates a powerful incentive to bring students back to campus, even when it’s unsafe. This creates a crisis of trust. “What you're seeing is the dominoes falling concerning all the different schools who said, yes, we're obviously going to be in person, and then screech,” Davis says. “It erodes trust in the people who are making decisions.”
Joey Korenman, founder of the online School of Motion, views the moment as a necessary, if painful, reckoning. He calls it creative destruction. “The biggest effect of COVID-19 is that it's basically caused everybody and all of these systems in the world that had all this inertia of decades and in some cases centuries of ‘this is how it's done’...all of that had to stop.”
The fundamental assumptions, that college is four years in a building and costs a certain amount, were suddenly up for debate. For Korenman’s business, the result was dramatic. After an initial hit, his online school had its biggest quarter ever. “There's clearly something in the air changing around what the average person thinks education is supposed to be,” he notes.
The Broken Business Model
For years, a thought experiment was a staple of Do’s classes at ArtCenter. He would ask students to list everything they were getting for their tuition, assign a dollar value to each item, and see if it added up.
“This is no longer a thought experiment,” Do says. The pandemic forced a real-time bifurcation of the product. The educational component was separated from the campus experience, and everyone was forced to ask what each part was truly worth.
When students are sitting on their childhood beds, eating food from their parents' fridge, and using their family's electricity to attend Zoom classes, the value proposition crumbles. “When you're down to the choice between air and food, it's a bad situation,” remarks Davis.
The financial model of higher education was never just about teaching. As Do points out, a Forbes article by Andrew DePietro had already highlighted several troubling, cost-cutting trends pre-pandemic:
- A decade-long reduction in tenured professorships.
- A growing reliance on low-paid adjunct professors to reduce payroll and benefits costs.
- A heavy dependence on high-tuition international and out-of-state students.
The pandemic blew this fragile structure apart. The lucrative international student market vanished. Domestic students balked at paying full price for a diminished experience. And the non-educational revenue streams, the true profit centers for many universities, dried up overnight.
Davis argues that the very brand of elite institutions is being tested. “A lot of times when people talk about brand value, it's very difficult to quantify,” he says. “Well, we're seeing it.”
When parents of students at Harvard and Columbia push back, demanding discounts for a remote experience, they are actively devaluing the brand in real time. The brand was never just the diploma; it was the entire package. Davis explains that even alumni donations are tied to this. “The way we make money once you've graduated, it's based on the nostalgia of the experience that you had when you were there.”
Without the ivy-covered walls, the late-night study sessions in the library, and the roar of the football stadium, what remains? Just the education. And many are finding the price tag for that alone is indefensibly high.
The Great Unbundling
The crisis is forcing a great unbundling of educational services. The monolithic, four-year package deal is being broken down into its component parts, and consumers are now free to pick and choose.
This creates both peril and promise. For some, it’s a terrifying loss of a competitive moat. For others, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. The idea that you must go to a specific, expensive school to learn from a master instructor is evaporating. “If I want to go in and be taught by Petrula, I have to go to ArtCenter,” Korenman says, posing a hypothetical. “Except what if she decided one day to make a class for The Futur?”
The scarcity model is broken. Korenman points to the platform Teachable, where in one quarter, 12 instructors each earned over a million dollars. The economics of teaching have been flipped on their head. A top-tier instructor can often earn more by building their own platform or partnering with an online school than they can through a traditional university salary. This is a path many creatives are exploring as they learn how to build a personal brand alongside their professional practice.
“The financial incentives are there to now sort of enable companies like MasterClass,” Korenman explains. “We are able to get literally some of the best artists in the entire industry to take months to craft these amazing learning experiences with us because they will make more just passively in one year than most instructors make on staff.”
This unbundling doesn’t just apply to instructors; it applies to students. As Vrontikis argues, smart students must now be more discerning. “They really have to evaluate, what's the potential of my talent and how can I find a place to make the most of it?” she says.
Certain experiences, particularly those involving deep collaboration with a high-caliber cohort, may still justify a premium price. “When you're in school and the people around you also learning are generating more because they're pushing each other... that's something golden,” Vrontikis maintains. For elite schools, curating that cohort and providing access to masters remains their key differentiator.
However, the crisis also exposes a deeper, more systemic problem. Jim Schofield pivots the conversation to the K-12 public education system. “That's where the cluster actually exists,” he says. The digital divide and socioeconomic disparities at the primary and secondary levels create a pipeline of inequality that feeds directly into higher education. “If our public education system doesn't get fixed,” he warns, “then as a country… this is not the place that people are going to want to come.”
Old Guard vs. New Guard
The panel represents a cross-section of the educational landscape, each with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses in this new environment.
Joey Korenman’s School of Motion represents the new guard of online-first education. Its advantages are clear:
- Strength: Cost & Access. “We can compete on cost in a way that I think it would be very hard for say ArtCenter to compete,” Korenman says. His school teaches students in over 100 countries, including places like Syria where top-tier art schools don't exist.
- Strength: Talent Acquisition. By offering a better financial model, they can attract the best working professionals in the industry to create courses. It's a key part of how to attract new customers: lead with undeniable expertise.
- Weakness: The In-Person Gap. Korenman is honest about the limitations. “There are things that you cannot replicate… You can only get in person in a room with other people.” However, he notes that for the moment, this is everyone's weakness.
Douglas Davis operates within the traditional system but at a unique institution, City Tech, a public CUNY college.
- Strength: Diversity & Affordability. With tuition around $7,000 per year and a student body speaking 150 different languages, City Tech’s diversity is its superpower. “The thing that every single company or school is asking for... we have every type of person,” Davis states.
- Strength: Agility. Despite being a large public institution, Davis’s department was nimble. He made the decision to go fully virtual in March 2020, long before many private schools.
- Weakness: Funding & Population. The school is dependent on state and city politicians for funding. Its student body, with average household incomes below $20,000, was hit hardest by the economic crisis.
Petrula Vrontikis and Jim Schofield represent the hybrid professional: experts who teach both within and outside traditional institutions. Vrontikis splits her time between ArtCenter and authoring courses for platforms like LinkedIn Learning and The Futur.
- Strength: Flipping the Classroom. Vrontikis uses online tools to her advantage. She prerecords lectures, freeing up class time for more valuable one-on-one interaction and collaboration. This is not about replacing teaching but enhancing it.
- Weakness: The Job Market. A significant part of her value proposition at an elite school like ArtCenter was her ability to connect students with top-tier jobs. “I could really guarantee that many of our students would get really great jobs,” she says. “There are just less jobs.” The economic downturn directly inhibits her ability to deliver on that promise.
This dynamic highlights a core tension. While online platforms excel at democratizing access to information, premier institutions argue their value lies in curating talent and providing career access, a model that depends heavily on a healthy economy and strong industry relationships.
The Path Forward
There is no returning to the way things were. The pandemic has, as Do puts it, created a form of educational Darwinism. “The ones that do figure it out... you'll be the new gold standard and the thing that everybody wants to model themselves after,” he says, pointing to Davis’s efforts at City Tech.
So, what does it take to survive and thrive in this new landscape?
First, it requires a new skill set. Davis argues that the essential skills for creative leaders have shifted. Pre-pandemic, he would have championed strategy and business acumen. Now, the list is different. He believes every creative leader must master:
- Operations: The logistics of how work gets done.
- Forecasting: The ability to anticipate challenges in a variable environment.
- New Systems Design: Creating new workflows for remote and hybrid teams.
- Decentralized Decision-Making: Empowering individuals to make choices without bureaucratic bottlenecks.
Second, it requires a fundamental shift in perspective. The focus is moving away from credentials and back to skills. “You do realize that back in 1999, it was about what you knew, it wasn't about where you went to school,” Davis reminds the audience. “We're back at that point. It's a big opportunity.” This is a core tenet for anyone aiming to build a successful personal brand; it’s about what you can do, not where you went.
Third, it demands a new level of student agency. Vrontikis emphasizes that students can no longer be passive recipients of information. “I don't want us to underestimate students,” she insists. “If you're a young person who's smart, innovative, creative, you'll take that time to find everything online you can. You'll learn completely new things.”
Finally, as Schofield passionately argues, the system must involve students in its own reinvention. Their ability to solve complex problems should be honed by tackling the most immediate one they face: how their own education is designed and delivered.
The ivory tower is crumbling. Hope, as Davis says, is not a strategy. The institutions that cling to an outdated, bundled model built on nostalgia and overpriced services are canaries in a coal mine. The future belongs to the agile, the decentralized, and the individual. It belongs to the instructors who can package their expertise and the students who are proactive enough to seek it out, wherever it may be.
The thought experiment is over. The question is no longer abstract. For every parent, every student, and every educator, the bill is on the table. What are you really paying for?
TRANSCRIPT
next do hello beautiful people what is up happy thursday to you today's episode is going to be all about the future of education i can't think of people i'd rather talk to right now about what's going on i'm going to jump right into it and i hope you guys are going to be
participating in the live part of this on youtube and so just drop your comments we'll do our best to address them but this is a jam-packed thing so i'm going to get right into i want you guys to meet our esteemed panelists first up is petrula franticas petrula is a graphic designer full-time
professor at arts center college of design in pasadena she's authored a number of online professional practice courses including freelancing and presentation skills as an educator her goal is to prepare young designers for what will be expected of them both creatively and professionally jim schofield is a producer director dp and educator his company
the c47 focuses on creating a wide variety of content for its clients but now largely specializes in creating educational content for companies to help them reach their customers by selling through education i love that part by the way he also designs products for the video production of filmmaking industries and consults for companies
looking to expand their capabilities in this world of small to no cruise and remote production next up is brooklyn based douglas davis enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept as principal the davis group douglas offers strategic solutions to client branding design and communication problems
as author of creative strategy and the business of design highly recommend everybody douglas regularly contributes to design discourse douglas is chair of the emmy award-winning bfa in communication design program at cu ny new york city college of technology and serves on the advisory board of the university of oregon's masters in advertising and
brand responsibility and city college's masters in branding and integrated communications woo that's a lot last but not least friend of mine joey's the founder and ceo of school of motion an online school that teaches the art and techniques of motion design to students in over 100 countries prior to teaching online he co-founded
and acted as creative director for toil a studio in boston massachusetts and he also taught in the motion design department at the ringling college of art and designing sarasota florida he and i go to the same barber ball is beautiful and hair is overrated there you go there's a couple of us that
go to that school by the way anyways what we really want to talk about today is the impact of cove at 19 as the school semester has already started for many young people universities are having to address this i'm really focused today's content is really about upper education higher education okay so we're
going to get right into it so i've done a little research to kind of set the stage set some context for what's going on here so here's the first one simon barker everything that the schools are facing in covit were the exact same set of things that they've identified pre-covet except they're on
steroids this is from michael sorrell from the atlantic the fear of the fiscal damage associated with empty campuses in the fall is the primary reason that schools are exploring every option to avoid that possibility that's a scary thought scott galloway speaks on this on the topic of education quite often universities will face
a financial crisis as parents and students recalibrate the value of the fall semester spoiler alert it's a terrible deal okay you guys can tell where this is going so here are some quotes pulled from andrew de petro for forbes universities have reduced the number of tenured professors professorships for the last decade low
paid adjunct professors have been a major trend in university staffing to reduce the cost of payroll benefits definitely going to want to get douglas petrula to weigh in on this universities are certain to see dramatic declines in the in their international student population and likely to see declines in their out-of-state student population
moving forward schools were that students will not be willing to pay the same amount for tuition and will want certain fees waived if the full campus experience is not able to happen okay so here are some of the finances i was able to dig up what they're projecting to lose already or have
already lost university of arizona 250 million dollars university of michigan estimated between 400 million and 1 billion dollars this is the impact of covet and how it's affecting the finances of universities university of wisconsin another 100 million dollars syracuse university says they've already lost 35 million dollars as of right now so the
challenges that higher edge higher education has to face is they have to quickly move to online remote classes because obviously because of the way that the virus spreads we can't and should not be in classrooms i think that's my opinion there's a cost to restructure the operations that they weren't anticipating on and
this is the big one this is one i didn't really think about until i started doing all this research is the loss in revenue isn't just from enrollment but from parking student services dining housing on campus activities athletics for a lot of schools really depends on athletic programs to run to make money
that also obviously impacts fundraising grants and licensing so what they're dealing with right now is cash flow debt and endowment and student mental health there's a lot that's going on in the world and can we focus on learning right now are schools still the safe place to be it's a big question mark
and the problem that's always been there diversity inclusion in students faculty and staff so i'm going to open up with a really easy question for each one of you there's no specific order but maybe we'll just to have some kind of not to descend into chaos we'll start with petrula go to right
we'll start with patchouli is that okay with your life and i'm going to ask every i'm going to ask every panelist right now covet is this a disaster is this an opportunity i think it's both i think it's been a disaster because it happened so fast and so it's especially difficult for institutions
like universities to to have the agility to make the changes that are needed in that period of time so i do think some of the private colleges or the smaller colleges are generally more agile and they generally have the ability to move and change more so i think that puts some of the
private colleges at an advantage i think the opportunity lies in that there are no borders anymore and you know actually and and what that can mean is opportunities are possible for for schools to actually collaborate with one another to help students in all the schools get a better experience because maybe let's say
art center and is working with usc's school of annenberg school of communication and then we've got a collaboration with some uh mbas at stanford like can we create new things that are so valuable that our borders have minimized in the past so i think ingenuity and creativity can really make this an incredible
opportunity and possibly better than we ever could imagine pre-covet very well said patrolling that's the reason why we started with you okay i'm going to give jem an opportunity to weigh in here jim yeah so i'm going to answer that question as both a parent of somebody who's in university right now going
into her second year and also as somebody who is an educator but not somebody who's involved in higher education so where i educate is in a different space um i think that as a as a society we're still in a cope mechanism right now so we're kind of sitting still in the disaster
and compounding that are all of the other social issues that are happening inside of this country so we have covet 19 and then everything else happening and then we have a young um you know population obviously the people who are going to university who have very specific ideas about that and i don't
know if my daughter's head is in the game educationally right now and i don't know if the educators are really understanding that part of the equation we have huge opportunity to change the way education can be delivered but it's going to require a lot of education and it's going to require educators to
work together to come up with solutions but if they don't involve the students as part of the problem solving then i think we are completely set up for disaster if the students become part of the problem solvers and part of their education is to solve how education is going to be delivered going
forward regardless of a pandemic or not then we have a lot of opportunity so it's going to be a disaster unless we get them involved is my that's my opinion personally well i want to follow up with you jim is it your belief that schools and large universities can can be agile like
petrula was saying that the smaller universities can do this but or private colleges can do this can they move fast enough i i don't think most of them can at the moment i think that we're in for a really bad year i think that this is going to be a continuation of the
cope and it doesn't help when you know one week you are given information about how the school year as as either somebody whose faculty or staff is going to run and then the next week it completely changes so everybody is just pivoting but pivoting constantly so i don't know um yeah smaller can
be better because it's a little easier to wrangle there's less cooks in the kitchen but i still think that this is just a gigantic problem that is omnipresent within education and maybe outside of this country they're dealing with it in a better way in individual countries i don't know but i know that
collectively inside of this country i think most people who are either going into college or already in the system or in a university they don't know as both faculty and staff and as students where this goes so having unknowns makes it very hard and unless we yeah that's how i feel i don't
know if that's a good answer to your question i don't think size is necessarily the problem solver but if we don't get the student body involved in some way then because they're also interested in solving all of the problems whether they're going to or not you know i mean i have a daughter
who feels that our political system is completely broken and if it continues the way it's going it can't be fixed um you know we can't fix any of these problems so and i think we have a lot of young minds who think that way and um and you know they're not thinking about
what they're going to learn this year they're thinking about how are they going to survive in the social environment how are they going to you know get a job later on they're thinking about a lot of things but it doesn't have a lot to do i think with the classes the individual classes
that they're going to be taking right and they're under tremendous stress i feel that you know yeah as a father of two boys and one that's going to boarding score or supposed to be going aboard supporting school i definitely feel that okay douglas over to you sir disaster opportunity disaster and opportunity i
think um first of all i want to give a shout out to uh city tech all my people in brooklyn you know how we do uh you know it ain't brooklyn if it ain't shout outs but uh you know i i feel like the biggest challenge is that cover 19 is asking us
are we caterpillars or are we canaries and i think as a category as education itself if you think about these trends that are happening right now a couple years ago google apple microsoft they all said that you actually don't have don't have to have a college degree in order to enter their ranks
right so that's one trend we're sort of moving back to where things were in 1999 when there was this emerging internet but no one there who was working in this new um you know channel had a degree with web design on it because you couldn't actually go and study it so the skills
and the mindset attracted people who are willing to learn a new language and therefore the opportunities were there for them um i think you know as a whole the profit formula and the way that universities have charged i mean you showed it on your slides that all of the different line items in
terms of revenue like everything is built for the in-person experience and a lot of items in our larger culture are built to serve a lot of people at one time so disaster in terms of that because um what you're seeing is the dominoes falling concerning all the different schools who said yes we're
obviously going to be in person and then screech right this sort of you know actually no everybody please go home or we're going to shut it down and i think the challenge with that is that it erodes trust it erodes trust in the people who are making decisions um and i think that
that's what the opportunity for us is us being creative people we're used to having the client change the scope after you've been going in this direction for a good you know two months and now we need to go this way right after you flip over the table and curse you're like alright let's
figure it out um we're used to making decentralized decisions because every single thing about what we do in terms of creativity is choices it's your judgment so i believe the opportunity for us is that the new skills the essential skills to actually do what we do as creative people corona has changed all
of those i would have told you back maybe what you know pre corona i would have told you that strategy and learning business was the way for um you know creative people in order to navigate and to continue postcode today right now it's not post but obviously during covit today i'll tell you
that operations forecasting new systems design and decentralized decision making are all essential skills for creative people and i say those things because as someone who's the chair of a program i have 650 students i have maybe about 100 faculty members i have staff let's really look at this jim was talking earlier just
you know about being a person and having uh you know someone in college and being a parent as well as being someone in education every one of those people including myself we all have a different risk tolerance every one of those people including myself has a different uh composition do you have um
you know elderly family members in your home do you have a pre-existing condition like you can't get into the details about all that number one because of privacy but number two everyone's individual risk tolerance and what they're willing to accept how far they're willing to go in this sort of safety versus solvency
situation that we're in which again that's the disaster part um they're all making these decisions individually so as someone who is deciding who does or doesn't go to work or deciding or if we're going to put mixed signals out there and ask our students to come back you've seen our facility it's beautiful
but we don't have any windows that open right so i think it's really important for us to actually as designers look at the constants in a variable environment this is where the forecasting comes in this is where the new systems design comes in this is where the operations come comes in and it
says well all of our classes are above the recommended interaction limit every single one of them so therefore if all of our tools to deal with this and again we're talking business we're talking the implications of the larger environment shifting and therefore like what that's going to mean on your ability to do
what you do if all of our tools to deal with this are behavioral choices choices mind you in a very polarized you know country where people see wearing a mask as a you know political right or something that we should be doing to to protect everyone if wearing the mask washing your hands
socially distancing and doing all those things are choices and those choices are our only tools and some people see those choices as things that infringe on their freedoms disaster right so i think until we get a solution that is based in science i think it's very easy to make decisions about the fact
that you know what those 650 students those 100 faculty members of various age groups and and comorbidities and all that sort of thing i'm going to decide that we're going to be virtual and i made that decision in march it baffles me that certain colleges are just now either making the decision or
just now reversing the decision because it was a bad one but everything that you set up in the very beginning are the reasons why again solvency or safety that's where we're at so disaster and opportunity yes okay before i get to joey i want to just respond to a couple of things that
you brought up douglas a lot of deep points obviously you are kind of on the front line as a chair as a person who's responsible for the health and welfare of not only teachers and students this is kind of what you're looking at there is some empathy just a little bit for me
for these schools because i they don't want to lay off everybody they they want to keep something going on and for some people school is kind of where they need to be right now but a lot of it seems to be driven by the motive for solvency or profit it's a big industrial
machine that they just need to make money so it's kind of been interesting that you made the decision early on and you committed to it because i guess people are hopeful and there there there's uh muddled interests and motivations in terms of making a profit that now it seems like it's just as
a parent just like jem is like we have no idea what's going on it's it's gonna start it's gonna stop and we're seeing various stages of that from all levels from lower head to higher ed okay joey just okay good hope is not a strategy like that's true you know i'm hopeful but
you know at the same time i'm looking at like what i can see in front of me and i think that we're in this situation where again if if you're trying to deal with making money and yet your decisions undermine people's trust in your judgment those two things are at odds with each
other just like safety and solvency so i think we got to really think think this thing through and i really think that it will be a bloodbath i do agree with oh little john just made a shout out you're going to hear him uh he has strong opinions but i i agree with
scott galloway in that respect as well as um clayton christensen when he talked about um you know just the education sector being disrupted and yet i am talking sort of straight past that and that group to everyone who you teach or everyone who jim teaches and saying hey you do realize that back
in 1999 it was about what you knew it wasn't about where you went to school so we're back at that point it's a big opportunity right okay last but not least joey where do you weigh in on this is this a disaster opportunity relative to where you are yeah great question um i
was nodding my head like up and down when douglas was talking i agree so much what he said like really resonated um so it's clearly a disaster uh you know like from a health perspective and it's you know trashed our economy and the world's economies and it's done a lot of bad things
um and i it's definitely an opportunity and and i think it's kind of actually weird to be running an online school right now and i'm sure you're probably experiencing some of the same weird things where similar to amazon or you know walmart uh or teachable there's these counter cyclical things happening where certain
sectors are actually benefiting from this and at first um just to add some context in march you know in basically the first quarter of the year we were hit very hard and then as soon as summer came around there was a little more optimism in the air and all of this stuff with
college just started to happen we had the biggest quarter we've ever had so there's clearly something in the air uh changing around what the average person thinks education is supposed to be so i think the the biggest effect of cova 19 is that it's basically caused everybody and and and all of these
systems in the world that had all this inertia of decades and in some cases centuries of this is how it's done college is four years in a building it cost this much there has to be you know desks and stuff like all of the all of the things that you sort of think
in your head when you hear education all of that had to stop and then piece by piece it's sort of like well what piece can we add back in okay we have zoom so we can have conversation now okay now we've got google classroom so we can actually make quizzes and things like
that my my sister and brother-in-law are both uh high school teachers um in texas and so they're figuring this out too and so to me i think it's an opportunity that it gives basically all of society um especially in the u.s where our education system is especially kind of broken um and unfair
i think um it gives us an opportunity to redefine what education is supposed to be is it supposed to be you know 40 i actually looked up the numbers 45 776 dollars per year tuition not counting room and board or you know to to learn design but also to basically grow up over
four years or is education supposed to be something else and maybe and a lot of people that i talk to are seeing this now i've been you and i chris have been banging the drum on this for years but um i think a lot of people now are saying you know what it
doesn't actually make sense i mean thank you i think it was colombia for the 10 discount uh but now all of my classes are going to be done through zoom i don't think many people are okay with that and and so i think that there's it's it's sad on a personal level because
there are lots of uh administrators and faculty that will be laid off i think smaller colleges even though they might be more nimble they don't have the the cash reserves of some of these larger universities and i think we're going to see a lot of closures but that's there's a term for it
and it's kind of a euphemism but it's creative destruction and this is sort of how progress happens and it's and it's ugly and in some cases violent and we're seeing lots of examples of that right now in the end i'm an optimist and i think that this will result in more choice lower
costs better results especially for international students who you know flock to the us for our colleges especially our art schools and now might not have to and this is what i see at school of motion that's one of the the main benefits of being online is anybody anywhere can learn this stuff we
have students who live in syria um there's not really like a top-tier art school there so you know um to me i see a lot of opportunity i'm also aware and i and i want a second what you said chris i have a ton of sympathy for colleges they're in an impossible position
right now and i normally don't say that um but really i i don't see i really don't see how a lot of them can make it work and i think douglas that's my guess that's why you're seeing this weird behavior where it's like i think we can have classes no we can't never
mind but we're keeping your money i don't know how else they survive it might just be sort of you know like like trying to not drown basically well you know i don't have the sympathy that you have and i'm glad that there is sympathy in the air but i think the challenge is
that you know when you're really looking at this in terms of business um you know i might not want to lay and again i don't have the power to lay anybody off but i'm just sort of saying i might not want to lay anyone off right i may not want to um you
know reduce the services but obviously right again solvency or safety that's where we're at and you know when you're down to the choice between air and food it's a bad situation and therefore i think you know what we're really talking about is that and and this is back to what you're saying joey
about like hey you know this is how much we cost that's the strength of the brand you know a lot of times when people talk about you know it's very difficult to to quantify what a brand uh value is right well we're seeing it and all of these you know colleges like columbia
or uh harvard who now parents are pushing back and saying wait a minute so you're gonna take the full price but my kid is gonna sit on my couch and eat food from my fridge and sleep in the room and use my electricity wait a minute you know this this doesn't make sense
but again the profit formula everything about the in-person experience and mind you the way we make money once you've graduated it's based on the nostalgia of the experience that you had when you were there and so all of that i think we're gonna start to see a complete and total uh shakeout and
the reason why i say i don't have sympathy is because you know of one of the points that you brought up joey the fact that like you have students who are in siberia you have students wherever right the challenge with that is that what we're really seeing is the competitive advantage of the
united states we're looking at that and we're saying okay come here here's an experience that's you know the best in the world you can't get this anywhere else so therefore if you don't come here you can't have that right or you might be able to take online classes but you can't have what
we're really selling um the the full experience that we're really selling and i think that if that becomes something where you don't have to physically come to the united states you don't have to go to that brand that nyu or that columbia or that you know whatever i think we're in a bad
situation in the ivory tower but again that gives uh your students that gives chris the students that gives so many opportunities um online and i think that that's what i'm really hopeful about but this has to change and so that's why i don't have sympathy it should change right okay i want to
add something real quick it's just it's not also the students that have an opportunity though i know like that that's where um all of the attention is focused right now rightfully so because they're the ones that are suffering the most from this um but of course the faculty are also uh really like
kind of squeezed right now and one of the things that i've noticed and this has been going on for a while but i it's been accelerated i mean actually there's data now to support this that um what what a really good top tier teacher can do if they leave the system that is
now sort of crumbling and maybe start teaching on their own um you know teachable just put out that uh in the last quarter 12 people on their platform made a million dollars in one quarter that you know the whole economics of teaching has been flipped on its head by the internet and i
think that's been accelerated by this so actually faculty stand to benefit from this if they are the you know the top 10 percent at colleges that really push students in a really good um you know i so i think like the opportunity isn't just for everybody to learn it's also for educators to
make really good living right can we acknowledge the the elephant in the room which is downstream which is elementary middle school and high school education because that's where the cluster actually exists that's where the big mess is in my opinion um i think it's great that we're talking about college and university it's
incredibly important it's a big focus but what the reality is that when we look at education in this country that's where the system is going to be the most broken and unfortunately it has a large has largely to do with your social status and where you are and how much access you have
to technology we're talking about changing potentially the way our children are educated if this lasts for a long time even if at minimum it's another year and you know i am as you can see you know somebody who probably has better opportunity my kids have better opportunity to have access to things but
there's plenty of people in this country who don't have that and there's there's a complete imbalance in terms of public education in this country and that is the the system that feeds largely into colleges and universities so i think that the big disaster is for my other two children potentially but not really
them as much so as some other people who are in different parts of the country who are in different social status that don't get you know ipads deployed to their school district that don't get access to chromebooks in in that way that have you know families that can't can't put that even on
a credit card to make that available and um to me that's the that's the thing that we're dealing with that is the the thing that i'm most afraid of and and also does have tremendous opportunity but i'm i'm not as hopeful i think the college system has to work itself out it will
from a survival standpoint and that may mean there's a lot of blood that may mean there's a lot of faculty and staff that leave it may mean that that model changes just the same way business will change and we don't have open concept you know spaces as much anymore and all of those
things it's it's going to change but if our public education system doesn't get fixed then as a country douglas is talking about this is the place where people want to come this is not the place that people are going to want to come so we have a bigger problem when it comes to
you know the that tier of education i think for each you're 100 right there jim and i'm i'm right there with you i i've been on this trip for a while to talk about education in general but for the sake of the hour and a half we have together it's trying to focus
it on higher ed but you're absolutely right i'm right there with you a couple things i want to weigh in and i want to get petrula back into the conversation which is this is that i think what's going on right now if anything has been very revealing and it's it's kind of like
this accelerant that's been poured over the education system that needed to be redone rethought reimagined reinvented for a really long time and now there's no choice whatever roadmap schools we're thinking about in terms of decades long has been crushed down to months long now to sort this out and i think what's happening
is some form of educational darwinism that the ones that do figure it out like if city attack is able to figure it out you'll be the new gold standard and the thing that everybody wants to model themselves after now i used to do this exercise with my art center students it was a
thought experiment and i asked them what is it that you're paying for for education what are you getting from it and so they would go and make all this long list and then we would separate it and we would assign literally a dollar value to each one of these things to see it
was more or less than what they were paying in tuition this is no longer a thought experiment what's happening right now is we are separating the educational component teachers and students and we're putting to the side theoretically what you're paying for for your education and then we're all having to ask ourselves if
we're just going to have zoom classes which can be great if it's done well people have figured out how to teach online virtually what's the value of that relative to what you're paying for and then if you make a list of everything else that you're getting from school like like what joey's like
is it a place to grow up and find yourself and meet friends and develop social skills yes yes and yes and is it to network then you look at the difference between the educational costs and if you bifurcate this what is that other college experience really worth and this is where i think
some some truth and some very long and hard conversations happening in homes with parents and and friends and teachers this is the discussion that needs to be happening because for far too long the cost of education has skyrocketed past every other metric because at the end of the day it is a business
to make money and we haven't been looking at it like that but now we're here but truly i want to rope you back in to the conversation please good um i guess from a student perspective they they really have to evaluate like what's the potential of my talent and how can i find
a place to make the most of it okay so knowing that there will be reasons that they should value um select schools over others when the school is giving a particular kind of focused opportunity with uh them a master of some kind of design skill this opportunity is not going to be readily
available so you can't go everywhere for it if there are particular classes that one takes that it doesn't matter whether they're taking it at a community college or paying a higher price at a private college then those classes are not as valuable at that particular institution so this gives an opportunity for students
to really evaluate why why one school may be more valuable than another and some of those experiences have to do with your cohort who you're in school with when you're in school and the people around you also learning are are generating more because they're pushing each other and they're able to learn in
those experiences and they're able to bring that learning into how they deal with teams and how they make progress that's something golden and so if schools can continue expensive sort of i hate to use the word but elite schools can continue to keep good cohorts students will still be getting the thing that
they came for and that is this experience that is more more than just what's in front of them in a screen it's about creating spaces interactions relationships contacts that really enable them to bring more of the potential they have for their creative talents not just to what they can be in that college
environment but when we push them out because they'll probably still be virtually collaborating can you give them amazing collaboration tools and show them how to use them um and and and really master those kinds of things that are going to be different in the way we practice design okay perfect petrula what i
want to do right now is i want to talk about something i want to talk about the strengths uh do the swot analysis with everybody here because all of you represent some form of traditional or online non-traditional education and i would love for you to weigh in relative to where you are in
that space and joey and i both teach online gem teaches online uh petrula you and douglas teach uh maybe a combination of both so what i would love to to have you guys do and we're going to go in reverse order this time to talk about the strengths and weaknesses relative to the
platform or the ways that you teach and then the opportunities and threats so we'll start with joey and we'll go in reverse order right joey douglas gem and then petrula joey what are the strengths and weaknesses of what you're doing teaching on your platform as a school of motion strengthen weaknesses please sure
um well there are no weaknesses so i'll just start there no okay so um the strengths are um first of all we can compete on cost in a way that i think it would be i don't want to say impossible but very hard for say art center to compete on cost um and
you know the weakness i guess that's sort of tied to that is um exactly what petrula was saying there are things that you cannot replicate short of vr becoming really amazing and you know tactile suits and stuff there's things that you can only get in person in room with other people um you
know the the scarcity that she was talking about i think that used to be a weakness um however you know like if i want to go in and and be taught by petrula i have to go to art center right except what if she decided one day to make a class for the
future or something like that right well no it's not now it's not as scarce right um and here's the thing because i mentioned this already the financial incentives for really good instructors and i know petrula is because i've seen her on your on your channel um the financial incentives are there to now
sort of you know sort of enable companies like masterclass which isn't necessarily a school but i think it's a good it's a good example of what happens when you can pay gordon ramsay enough to make a cooking class online that sort of thing and that's another one of our strengths is we are
able to get literally some of the best artists in the entire industry to take months to craft these amazing learning experiences with us because they will make more just passively in one year than most instructors make on staff you know in years so um so that's those are two huge strengths uh also
there's the fact that we can teach anybody from anywhere i've actually written a long article about the advantages of online learning and um the the founder of khan academy uh gave a ted talk about them so there's a lot of strengths the we the main weakness that we have is it's not in
person and we have no plans to be in person for the teaching part there's ways around that we we do have a very active alumni group there's meetups and i can envision a future where there is some sort of hybrid thing chris you and i have talked about what that might look like
our friend michael jones has taken a swing at that um so i think that you know i like to be honest about the weaknesses but the truth is um i think that right now it's really interesting because those are everybody's weaknesses uh no one can really be in a room with your classmates
like you used to um so at least for the short term the playing field's been leveled a little bit so you weren't kidding there are no weaknesses well i wanted to make you say it yeah all right i said it you win yeah thank you okay shifting gears over to douglas douglas based
on you being the chair and having to switch over to online what do you see the strengths and weaknesses of a more traditional school well first of all i want to say i see you this is market research and i love it i love it so i see you fam i see you
well you know what what i what i love about the fact that and joey brought it up that you know um the normal sort of competitive set i mean we're at the foot of the brooklyn bridge and so pratt parsons sva f.i.t the brands that everyone knows for creativity these story brands that
are i i'm an alum of you know pratt for my masters but the competitive advantage has been flattened right so there would have been no way for a public university as four to five times larger than pratt institute with a fraction of the resources to compete with pratt it was it was never
going to happen i could hire the same people to teach for us but we have more people to teach right i can do all these different things but we're invisible competitive you know uh in in relation to them and so i i personally don't um i don't think a swot analysis is is
really uh something that is useful unless you're looking at well what are my strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats relative to other people or my competitors so our strengths relative to the other schools that i just mentioned in that competitive set are that we have about 150 different languages spoken in our student body
our strength is our diversity the thing that every single uh company or school is asking for or people are you know suing as a result of it not being there so we have every type of person um and what i love about that strength is that um because we are uh the cheap
version i think it's like seven grand uh for a year because we're public and so as a result you know we get the immigrants we get people who are first generation college students or people who are the only people in their whole family to speak english and what i love about that strength
is that because we have social economic um we're at the bottom in terms of how much we cost um we can literally attract everyone so that's something that will be the case whether we're online or whether we are in person because relative to those private schools that are really expensive they're not going
to bring their prices down to what we charge in person and i think i'll add one more piece to that in terms of a strength um we're we've been pretty agile and though we can't set what we charge um per credit we can't really change the profit formula we can't do any of
that because as a as a public uh you know a state a city um institution we have you know politicians determining that stuff which i think is leading into the weakness um the fact that we are not losing money as a result of people not paying tuition so i mean you can see
that as a strength or you can see the fact that the way the place that we do get our money from is that our governor has to actually allocate funds for us that's half and then our mayor has to allocate funds you know the new york city mayor has to allocate half the
other half students do have to pay what's called a gap so if you think about our school as the doctor's office and you think about our students as the patients you go to the doctor's office and you have insurance and then that gives the you know i can now take the bill and
bill the insurance company for reimbursement so our students are paying the co-pay which is the gap between what they get from federal and state it's a weakness obviously because there is a divestment in uh public education and i think um you know jim talked about the the i think the impact on just
you know uh k-12 but also just the fact that we're talking about public and what the greater what greater society determines is worth uh spending uh their tax dollars on um and there are too many people who get to make decisions on whether it's a good idea to fund us or to not
fund us so that's a big big weakness um one of the other weaknesses which i can't really say it's a weakness because of the fact that it's it's we are we serve our population and our population comes to us and we meet them where they're at but most of our student body um
because new york city is its own market and has always been a market right so in some ways we're not um we're not afraid of what other places are doing whether you're online or not because of the fact that new york's brand itself we stand on that um and yet the challenge becomes
that most of the households of our students um 20 000 and below so the big challenge there is that they're also bearing the brunt of being the first responders in the place that was hit the hardest and first we're also um you know the fact that they're new york city kids as well
as you know maybe first-generation immigrants we're in a situation where a lot of those people may be living with their elderly relatives so whether it is something that you're taking online or whether you're taking the gamble and getting on the train or not there are all these different situations as to whether you
want to spend your money on that at a time when so many people losing their their household income right uh so it's a really big challenge and i'll say it's a weakness because even at the lower end because price is not a consideration for most students we're at this point where the neediest
students and that diversity that's the strength may not necessarily continue to be as strong because people who can actually afford to go to the other brands that i named are probably going to reassess paying all that tuition and we're going to inherit them but we're going to inherit them with their private school
expectations so i think some part of our student body's ability to pay in this changing dynamic is going to be a challenge as well as can we meet the expectations of people who can afford to be somewhere else but who are bringing with them their expectations from those other places i think the
opportunities are that we can learn from you all and then i think douglas before you do opportunities i don't want to talk about it i love where you're going i did read your paper i just want to focus on strengths and weaknesses before we get into oh my bad my bad no very
good very good i want to bring gem on jem uh i don't know if you know this but the first time i ever saw you was that actually at nab in the post-production world where you're doing lighting demos and classes and teaching us about that kind of thing and then i looked you
up and then you you have your own youtube channels content creator i believe you also author courses on linkedin learning formerly lynda.com right so you're educated six i've done six courses for them i'm about to do three more okay yeah so what are the strengths and weaknesses for relative to to where you're
at and in whatever context you want to set up for us uh well first of all i'm on a hill in the middle of the country surrounded by farms and and they're they're doing something out there so if you hear something it's a tractor just just putting that out there okay okay um
so you know i'm a little a little bit unique i think in terms of this panel uh number one i didn't go to college or university um i'm self-taught when i got out of school if i had known when i was 15 or 16 that i wanted to be in this industry i
probably would have gone for for the film school thing but even then the opportunity is very small how many people get into tish how many people get into us you know ucla you know and then you have some people who wind up going down to full sail and doing the things that they're
gonna do um so i've been you know i've been chugging away since the mid 90s on on sort of all of this stuff and talking about websites creating killer websites was like the first book that i got related to you know to websites that's how old i am um but for me i
think you know it's a strength in the weakness that i kind of live on an island as as who i am i i didn't ever want me to be the brand and i'm not saying i have a big brand i wish i was the the gordon ramsay or the you know the the
other person in masterclass that's you know you know giving that wisdom um but i think i guess my biggest strength is that i'm confident in what it is that i can teach people and i largely teach people who are out of the university level they're working professionals and whether they were educated in
video production in filmmaking or not i'm i'm constantly learning as a person and the reason i picked this industry is because it's never-ending it can always be i have an idea and i can learn and i was very fortunate that when i went to school i learned how to learn so i just
constantly learn and then i go into the classroom with enthusiasm or on-site and then i can teach people those skills so for me my strength is being able to understand technology and craft and then figuring out how to create educational content around that you know i've said selling through education so i've been
fortunate enough to combine what i do 80 of the time which is production and start to do over the last 10 years especially a lot of content where i'm helping companies like canon and other companies in this industry but also some other companies that are outside of this industry sell through the concept
of you educate you don't you're not a used car salesperson you're teaching people about what your industry is then you become an opinion leader in that area that could be in finance that could be in science that could be in health that could be in fitness whatever the area is so my strength
is i think helping people do that in production and as an educator my weakness is that i'm on that island and i always get in my own way from a branding standpoint because i always make education the the paramount thing a when i'm on a project i can't do social media i don't
do behind the scenes and i can't post i'm doing a job for a client so i can't get through that mental barrier but the biggest mental barrier i have is a i didn't start my youtube channel with content 10 years ago i was doing daily video podcasts on my own website that worked
against me and it's sort of this you know this viewpoint of i'm an educator and i've never been able to break through the barrier and i'm not the type of person who can say if you follow these five steps you're gonna make a hundred thousand dollars in your video production company because i
can't promise that to anybody but what i can do is i can teach you how to do something i can teach you how to fish and that's what i'm good at and i'm good at helping other people figure out how they can take what they're doing and teach people how to fish the
financial return has never been great because of that and so i get in in my way and uh you know that's i think the problem is is not bringing other people into the mix and not focusing enough to to build that brand um and and i think that that hurts because i have
less reach and even though i've done courses for linkedin learning and i just did a course for mz pro and i've produced and directed a course for mz pro and i'm in that educational space i'm always getting in my own way and i really do want to help a lot of people learn
this tech and craft but i'm held back by my by myself i'm the one that's okay i guess that's you know that's the deal yeah that's a very uh honest and kind of high level self-awareness in terms of your evaluation there okay now i want to bring petrula back on petrulia is a
true hybrid here because she's a long time professor at art center and a well-respected instructor there and she also has authored several courses on linkedin learning and is doing one with us literally right now that's why she's in the studio so patrula i think you can you can choose whichever angle you want
to speak to and it's the floor or the mic is yours well i suppose if we're talking about strengths um i'm trying to leverage what's going on to make what i can give students whether it's in art center or through online learning the best value okay so what happens now is my strength
is i can take things that i used to have to do in the classroom like give a lecture and i can put it online so then the time i actually have with students one-on-one is more valuable because we can talk more about their goals we can collaborate more we can create a different
experience as opposed to me standing in front of a group of people talking so there's a potential there to make this together to make this really something significantly valuable i can also set up virtual classroom space during the week where students can get input from each other and that that they're learning from
each other is not limited to in class time so just just letting all the pieces be put together properly is what you know a good teacher will do so the strength is that if you've got smart innovative creative teachers and really smart innovative creative students they'll figure out ways to compensate for this
that are much more interesting than we would have had the pressure to imagine before now the the weakness that i would say you know the kind of thing that that keeps me awake at night is that my role at art center was to really interface with industry and i could really guarantee that
many of our students would get really great jobs getting out like really high level jobs in amazing companies and i i just knew that we could do that because that's how it always had been there are just less jobs so i'm having to work harder to make sure that we know how to
prepare students for the jobs that are out there and the jobs that are out there are like much few many many many fewer and we're still getting those but they're just a lot fewer of them so one of the values that i was able to bring um is is really being inhibited because
the economy is just um is is the way it is now now i'm hoping as everyone that that will be more of a of a temporary state and we'll see growth and then our students will be the people that will be best for those good jobs it just that delay in that period
of time really really creates difficulty uncertainty but that difficulty and uncertainty if you're smart if you're a young person who's smart innovative creative you'll take that time to find everything online you can you'll learn completely new things that maybe weren't part of the program that you're in at all and then you'll able
be able to bring that back in to the classroom so really i'm i don't want us to underestimate students i really don't because they're really really good and they're much better at coping with this agility than i think some of the people of my generation thank you petrula i now want to talk
about the opportunities forget the threats let's just talk about the opportunities and excuse me i was just looking up something on the internet one of my favorite podcasts ever is called the story and it's it used to be host by dick gordon until he retired he told the story about how new orleans
when there was the floods and the the levees broke the story of an immigrant woman and she's inside of her house and the water's flooding in and she's kind of panicking and she's telling the story and you know what she does a fish swam into her house and instead of panicking she got
the fish she's like i'll have that for dinner and it feels like we're kind of in that moment right now so i'd love to hear about what you guys see as opportunities look into your crystal ball and relative to where you are in your situation what's opening up doors that might have not
been opened before so we're going to go jem douglas and then i don't know i don't know the order we'll just go with jim first jeff okay what are the opportunities for you a person in your situation huge opportunity i mean it's both from a production and education standpoint i mean i'm now
being asked to do remote direction i've spent the last five months figuring out how to do all of this stuff you know up on a hill in in the rural area so those skill sets um are going to allow me to help a company do that and have an educator oddly enough it's
an education based company they're teaching k through 12. this is more sort of k through fourth grade and help them go into a studio with a single crew member in los angeles and i'm up here in oregon and i'm going to for two days every week remote direct that content so that's a
huge opportunity but it means that i have to build out and then as an educator for what i do it's taking this space and handling the sound issues so you don't hear dogs barking and things like that happening but i'm really excited about it because we have technology that's coming to market like
the a10 mini a10 mini pro which allow me to feed multiple cameras into a switcher that i can control and i can set up a hero camera on something that i'm teaching people about related to production but then i can have behind the scenes cameras that i'm switching to and i can do
all of that from up here if i build the studio the right way and i can provide educational experiences for people that they're not necessarily getting even if they come to nab and it's a more personal educational experience and then expanding that going into some of the things that like for instance matt
workman is doing out of boston with sydney tracer and things like that in virtual production i was talking about this yesterday what if i can have students come into a virtual street with me and it's the middle of new york or london and i'll say we have 10 city blocks here that we're
going to shoot a scene in and i can teach people how to place lights and light that scene you know there's there's going to be opportunity in terms of what we're going to be able to do if we if we look at the the technology that is coming to market and we think
about how to use it as educators but of course somebody can take that same technology and teach people about skill sets related to fixing a car there's nothing like having an engine in front of you but if you can get practical experience that is hands-on and then still be able to get in
front of a real car that's a lot better than being inside of a classroom and seeing a powerpoint you know of different parts of the engine so i think we've got tremendous i have tremendous opportunity other educators have tremendous opportunity if we embrace the technology and we have to work fast to learn
some of these skill sets because we know that kids are uh they're ready you know to them we have an antiquated educational model i mean there's a lot what's in k through 12 and in in university which we can access information on our own if we learn how to learn and we could
replace some of that traditional education with some of the skills that people are going to need a lot of the skills that people are going to need to do what douglas is talking about you know it's not necessarily about the degree it's it's about it's about can you can you do it you
know i you i can't teach in the university because i don't have a degree i could help a lot of people that's that's a weakness but that's also maybe part of the the broken part of the system is i can't actually do that because i don't have a degree but i could go
in and i could help that university you know do what they're doing educationally in a much more effective way so lots of opportunity it's just me not getting in my way because i'm also trying to run a production client comes to me and says i need help and now i'm down for two
months working on that production and i don't really get to aspire and really push so i gotta grow a pair and just do it that's all okay we'll leave it to your imagination what pair he's talking about okay joey let's switch over to you some opportunities for you and where you're at um
so i just want to call it something gems has said i think now twice uh that it seems to i think you would agree it's one of the keys to your success is you learned how to learn um and just like i just want to kind of put a pin in that for
everybody because i think that is actually uh that's gonna be very important moving forward in the way we look at education because that is kind of the secret sauce now when you look at successful people maybe elon musk is sort of like the uber example of this like just knowing how to learn
anything you want to really quickly is a super power now um and and i i bet gem you and i would agree that that's not the way um k through 12 public school kind of works right now so opportunities um so for students right now um the opportunity is really you can live
anywhere you can learn from anywhere and you can actually work from anywhere because most companies are remote now um and even ones that traditionally fought that are now basically fully on board and it's kind of proven that there's of course downsides to it but there's a ton of upsides uh so i think
that there's gonna be a lot more opportunities for students that don't live or don't have the means to maybe go live in new york you know maybe they're not from there they love to go live in such an incredible city um but they don't have the means to do that but you know
there's like you know maybe they want to take one of douglas's classes or something and so now with the technology and just sort of like the cultural acceptance of all this maybe they can so i think that's a big opportunity i also think that for students and especially parents so my my children
are are younger so my oldest is 10 so i have to worry about college yet but i know that when she's that age i'm not gonna shove her the way i was shoved go to college like every kid in my generation was was told to do um i think we're gonna see a
lot of new interesting opportunities for for 18 19 year olds to take gap years and do some of that growing up getting seasoned living outside your comfort zone learning to do your own laundry in ways that aren't going to tie a giant albatross around their neck to the tune of a quarter of
a million dollars at the end of it and then on on the business side i think you know as educators there's a ton of opportunity and it can kind of feel gross at times like this to think that way but i think the opportunity aligns with helping the students um you know petrula
doing an online class now her reach can be you know infinitely bigger than just in person at art center the same way you know jem teaches at linkedin learning and probably like tens of thousands of people have learned from him and you know douglas if i don't know if you do online classes
too but i mean you should you're amazing speaker um so you know i i think that this is a really great opportunity for educators and um and for people who are already teaching online it's an opportunity to help traditional schools and traditional teachers learn to do it because the problem i always see
uh and i saw this like in in march and april when there was literally the rug was just pulled out from underneath every teacher in this country and they were told teach online start right now and they would try desperately to recreate the in-person classroom online which doesn't work and i have a
whole bunch of ideas about that but we're now working um you know like i'm talking to lots of educators we're looking into ways that we can use our platform and sort of let other people work on it so that they can they can teach classes the way we do which has been pretty
successful so i think you know aside from all the carnage that is clearly like happening there's a ton of opportunity actually great i'm slowing the unmute button there douglas let's go to you opportunities opportunities are some of the things that uh my distinguished panelists talked about i really think that the ivory tower
is going to become more like the online schools and i think that you know online schools are probably going to uh develop some sort of credentialing so that they can become more like the ivory tower in some ways and so i think that i see this happening um i think that the opportunity
in the ivory tower is that you know someone who has come through the process to get to where i'm at and now as the chair running the school and then the rug is pulled out from under everyone all of the competitive sets are changed right the deck is shuffled um i think that
there's a big opportunity to learn again if we understand that competition for students has been flattened reputations have been um you know completely flattened in that way as well and so everybody's starting with the same resource which is time i think that with that we can all choose to reinvent ourselves myself included
my book creative strategy in the business of design started out as an online class i then saw the response to it and i was like wait a minute like i'm not the only person going through this let me expand this and so in pitching it i was able to you know expand it
into a book but the point there is that now i think i can take something that originated as an online class turned into a book i'm now going to look at it um and sort of turn it back into something that can go online with the experiences that i have now i think
it's a huge opportunity to remake ourselves whether we're talking about individually in terms of skill sets or whether we're talking about institutions themselves um a lot of people are going to choose not to do this people who may be close to retirement or people who may just not want to sign up for
the fact that we're now all in the content delivery business and the people who have um production value who can present um and who understand that now you're in the same space as like the um notifications for the new show on netflix or your ig right so if the traditional educator can understand
that everything is changed and we're competing for our students attention then there's a huge opportunity to uh as joey said sort of reap the financial benefits that are exponential um i think the challenge and i just want to bring this into the conversation as the last thing um we haven't really talked about
the impact of diversity and the fact that you know everyone's individual infrastructure at home will determine whether they can actually have an opportunity in this space or not so i think the biggest opportunity for our students hopefully will be the partnerships that we as institutions start to make with uh the industry and
we give the industry opportunities to reach farther into the pipeline all the way down to k-12 as jim talked about so that we can have a private sort of influence on the way we learn and therefore maybe the credentialing doesn't become a prerequisite and therefore we can open up who we learn from
that's a huge opportunity and i think that if we can deal with the infrastructure issues or the digital divide or all the variables that you can't control then there's a huge opportunity not only for traditional educators to remake themselves institutions to remake themselves as well as our students to reach beyond some of
the barriers that they have because of diverse issues um so yeah there's a lot of opportunity there awesome i forgot to mention this if you're watching this and you've made it this far first of all thank you very much this is a super heady conversation and i love the the fact that we're
bringing so many different points of views and opinion and experiences that hopefully you you're going to be able to relate to one of the people that are on this panel today and i want to let you guys know that if you need information and i highly encourage you to reach out and explore
a little bit more each and every one of our panelists today their information will be in the links below so go check that out before i get to patrol and talk about opportunities where she sees them i just think and i wanted to respond to something that jem had said that he can't
teach at a university because he doesn't have a college degree i think that's lame i think that's dumb and that's a huge wasted opportunity there because they're holding that one thing as the thing that keeps you out of the gate i i think i truly can correct me if i'm wrong on this
but i think art center just cares that you know what you're doing right i don't understand what you mean can you can you rephrase that question yes yes like our center will will let you teach if you if you can demonstrate that you have expertise or proficiency in what it is that you
do that is true but at some point uh because we are regulated by um associations for accreditation sometimes they're now requiring a lot more degrees and in many cases not just a bachelor's degree but a master's degree and that gets it it somewhat homogenizes the the the faculty and way in the past
art center really could bring people that were working four days a week and bring them in one day and and and so they would bring with them all of their energy and expertise of working in the field and i think you know that's just it's just how education has has been influenced that
way i can segue that in to the opportunities if you want to go there now chris please yes so there's an there's an opportunity at every level because we're being forced to radically rethink everything so the thing we just mentioned has it will that serve our students in the past to to not
be able to bring really great professionals in if they didn't even have a bachelor's degree um let's go even higher and say okay if you're supporting a school like with fundraising you know could you put your ego aside that you don't want to put your name on a building now because buildings just
aren't as relevant can that money go to scholarships and people and you know right into making the student experience big like let's really shake this up if if colleges and universities aren't in this big growth mode then maybe the fundraising can be shifted in a way that really serves serves students in this
difficult time the opportunities are great for faculty to figure out how they can best do what they do and not have the boundaries of just particular times you do it in particular spaces you do it in and certainly any boundaries i'm so enjoying teaching students in india and in china and in korea
everybody comes together and we you know we see these experiences that they're having and it's really really fun so the opportunities are are really positive if people can radically rethink how stuff wasn't working that well so f before and now we can really have a reason to push and change it and make
it something much more interesting and valuable and from a student perspective the opportunity is is great for them we just need to make sure that we can keep them healthy um emotionally mentally um and motivated so they they can know they can keep that ingenuity about them to get ideas that that maybe
we had we hadn't imagined we needed to give them or they hadn't imagined they'd even get but now they can figure out paths that can expand their thinking and their learning okay thank you very much i'm i'm mindful of the time area we see like we have about 17 more minutes before we
have to wrap this up but i'm gonna just open this up to anybody that wants us to respond to this but i want us to get really prescriptive right now so that we can work towards solutions so if you have an opinion and you're made king of the world what would you do
to get higher institutions like higher educational institutions to meet the challenges that are facing them or you could go the other way and speak about like what do people who teach online have to do to fill that gap that's that void that's not being met right now but keep it in the context
of the what's happening in our times so i'll open it up to anybody anybody can speak to that what would you tell people to do yeah good i mean you know i i i think about this as a parent all the time and you know i can't be a hypocrite because i do
for a living something that i'm passionate about so passion drives what i do every day um sometimes i make more money doing it sometimes to make absolutely no money doing it but i love what i do every single day and every day is different so i see the trap that you can fall
into when you're looking at higher education and that is i need to do this so i can get a job to do this and that and everything else and and my my kids are falling into it i have you know 19 year old and i have a 16 year old so it's it's
happening inside of my house um i'm interested in looking at all of this and taking the time factor out of it and what i mean by that is instead of an education that's based on you have to take x number of classes and you know it has to happen within a certain amount
of time and then you get a degree at a certain point because you had a certain number of credits i'm not saying you take the credit system out of there but i'm far more interested in results-based education and to me that's a potential you know solution it's not a solution to all the
problems but if we're we're we're allowing students to drive their education based on passion and and getting results the doing this the practicality of what they're learning then we're going to have a society of people who are going to be better problem solvers because they're not learning to pass tests they're not learning
because they have to take a certain required number of classes they're learning because they have an interest in a particular area or areas and they want to actually learn how to do and and to me that's you know what i'm interested in as an educator and and i want my kids to have
that opportunity and i want anybody to have that opportunity when they're being educated i want the people who are there as faculty staff teachers to have the idea that they're not teaching on a curve they're not teaching because they have to they're not phoning it in they're teaching because they want people to
be able to do things to actually get things done and that's the future of what we're doing we're we're a smaller world we're collaborating more um we're separated more because of this technology but we're closer together because of this technology and we have huge opportunity just this panel alone is opening up you
know my my eyes to things i'm learning things in this hour and a half from from each of you that this is you know the way we we solve problems because we communicate it's always to me a glass half full grain of salt right it's a grain of salt because until i see
a result that's it but i'm always going to look like the glass is half full because that's just the way i think we should you know have our outlook so results-based not time-based education for me is i hope where we're going with all this kind of stuff i i want to thank you
i wanted to mention that especially jim i really appreciate what you're saying because the more we can figure out to bring the humanity back into this interaction the better we're going to be because students aren't getting the the human interaction in a way that i think is going to help them mature in
ways that they need to um we're kind of inhibiting communication skills like these these virtual ways of doing things just you know it's it's really hard as humans to feel satisfied in these experiences so how can how can we bring humanity back in how can we compensate as much as possible for the
filter of that that this the virtual world gives i i don't have answers for that but i think that radical rethinking um is part of where some of that value is going to have to be brought back in yeah i mean i think one of the things i've been talking to schools about
for the last 10 years is most people don't want to learn video production in filmmaking that's not their interest but most people when they're in school at some point or another they learn reading they learn writing at a certain point they learn public speaking to a greater or lesser degree right now as
a society we need to learn video communication skills and that means that this is this is our business suit you know this is our our initial impression um we don't all have to aspire to learning how to use all of this equipment but if we don't teach video communication school skills starting k
through 12 and then keep pushing that in to the university level we're going to continue to cope now kids will be able to do it quite well it'll become relatively natural but i think part of what's happening in upper education and k through 12 is that teachers are coping right now they don't
know how to to use these tools and have good video communication skills so we need to teach this as part of our curriculum if we teach video communication as part of the curriculum and we make it available to everybody not just on a closed wall subscription-based service but we are teaching video communication
to everybody as a necessary life skill like swimming you know writing you know reading then there there's going to be a greater opportunity and this is what helps a country become stronger to a certain degree because we're able to communicate effectively so we take a barrier away when we all know how to
effectively use video as a communication thing then we start to open up we become more relaxed we're not we're not hindered by the fact that we we're always worried about if the technology's working and if everything's happening it's just it's just in us and then we just go you know and and then
we start to collaborate and i hope that we can you know get together and be in spaces together more in the future but if we can't for the time being let's get everybody up to these skill sets where they don't have to be filmmakers but they are able to do this effectively with
each other and then conversations no longer have to do with technology and whether something's going to break it's just becoming something that you know is just the way we we communicate right jim i want to make sure that both joey and douglas get in here before we run out of time but i
do want to just talk about that briefly and we're going to move on to to joey is this is that i think when we talk about the quality of an image in video that was mostly an aesthetic thing but now that we're in this virtual space the ability and the fidelity of who
what you look like and how you sound allow me to more or less connect with you if you've ever been on a on a poor quality skype call before you know how frustrating that is to actually just try to understand people so there's a lot of merit to what you're saying so joey
a couple of minutes with you and then a couple minutes with douglas please sure okay so um i want to um talk really quickly about uh this amazing thing that i've been diving more into and it's this um it's a school called lambda school i don't know if you've all heard of it
but the model when i heard about it i was super skeptical and i did not think it could possibly work but they just raised a 74 million dollars uh series c um and it's it's been working really well and the model is it's a nine to 18 month program um and i think
they only offer a couple of tracks right now but they're expanding and you pay zero to take the entire curriculum if you get a job afterwards then you basically sign an income agreement with them to pay them a certain percentage until you've paid back thirty thousand dollars or until you reach a certain
time limit in which case you might pay like 17 000 or something like that that is a thing that did not exist uh you know until pretty recently and i think that is the level of innovation that it's going to take to recalibrate our higher education system i think you know the the
four-year um you know cadillac escalade uh level you know that's not even like that's not even really high enough it's a lamborghini now to you know go to scad for four years you know i mean it's it's that level of cost and everything um and i think that's always gonna be there and
unfortunately i do think that that's gonna primarily just change and and be really driven by international students who have to typically pay full price um and families that can you know afford to pay the tuition and the small number of super exceptional students that that can get scholarships and stuff like that um
but i think the the rest of us mortals are gonna be finding new ways to learn the skills we need i think online's gonna be a huge part of it i'm obviously biased i run an online school um but i i think um you know kind of like getting back to what some
of the stuff petrula was talking about humans need to be in the room with other humans there's no way around that and i think that the solution and i don't know exactly what it looks like but i hope i'm hoping lots of people are working on this is decoupling the skill transfer part
of school from the being around other people who challenge you and encourage you and motivate you part that can be separate and that can be handled in a million other ways besides shipping an 18 year old off to you know off to la for four years or something like that um so i
think there's a lot of opportunities also you know um andrew yang has a bunch of awesome stuff to say about this too i think for higher education to survive and i'm not talking about the luxury brands the harvards and the columbias and and maybe even the art centers but i think for the
average college to survive they will have to lower their price tag they have to figure it out the cost of college i believe is has gone up three times as fast as inflation um that and healthcare i think are the two highest um you know like just most outrageously inflated things in our
country anyway um and if that doesn't get figured out i think the whole thing collapses uh in a bloody mess probably within the next decade fantastic douglas davis you have the final word on this so final word um i'll pick up where i left off in terms of the ivory tower becoming more
agile and more like what you guys are doing i really believe the opportunity and where we're going to go is a blend it has to to happen i think the board room and the classroom have to blend and we have to figure out more ways to develop talent that don't include um the
four years going for a credential and then you know after that time going into the industry because of the fact that um obviously like people's household income is under pressure this is you know i don't know whether there has ever been a time where the ceo and the family basically have the same
decision about how they're going to allocate their resources because the environment has shifted to become so volatile um there is no certainty out there so i think um if companies see the opportunity in the ivory tower basically fighting for its own solvency as the model breaks i think that companies themselves like google
google announced that they were um you know having that credential i i think it's some sort of like school thing that they're doing i don't have it in front of me so sorry i'm being a little vague but you know i see that they see the opportunity to develop talent and i think
that's really what we're talking about the university of oregon absolutely understands this but looking at like what education actually looks like looking at who can be a teacher looking at what the format looks like um you know what the classroom looks like really reimagining everything about how you learn how to do something
i remember david brooks having this new york new york times article way back i think in 2013 the practical university where he talked about the pressure that universities were going to have because of moocs or because of online experts like yourselves those universities were going to have to figure out how to make
sure that they could really reproduce the same experience like standing next to your grandma in the kitchen watching her make something versus reading a recipe right so the practical knowledge separated from the technical knowledge and knowing that that's that's the name of the game we're now all in the content delivery business our
content happens to be educational and we are competing for our students attention and so i think the model itself has to blend we have to make the boardroom and the classroom and every other room blend together so that we can produce what students are going to need and what the country is going
to need in order to keep its competitive advantage so that's what i think thank you very much douglas i i want to just weigh in to myself i want to give you guys most of the time to talk but i do have an opinion on this that if we get over our disbelief
that this is happening and don't treat what covett has done as an anomaly in terms of impacting schools and the rest of our society if we just embrace that learning for in the future is going to be some portion online and some in real spaces then we would change the way we look
at this and i think right now as far as i can tell a lot of the universities are looking at this as a temporary thing that will pass and they're gonna slap a bandage over it and they're gonna pretend like it'll be okay and how do i know this is because if you
look at how quickly some schools are responding present company excluded it's like they're they're just saying to teachers who have never taught online before zoom is your answer just go and teach they don't understand that there's technical stuff there's aesthetic things and there's things you have to put together and teaching online communicating
this way is very different than standing in front of people where you can feed off the energy and you can you can see the little micro expressions when when a student is confused or when their their eyes are popping open because you've said something has finally connected in their brain why aren't the
schools themselves taking this responsibility on instead of shoving it to the instructors to figure out because i don't see people posting like oh my god this is what harvard's doing this is what art center is doing this is what cal arts is doing look at the investment they just made and they brought
in the smartest people who at least in the short time that we've had it the experience and how to teach online there i just did this uh i just looked this up on google there are over 5 300 higher ed institutions in the united states 5 300. and i'm sitting here thinking i'm
not saying it's for myself but like why hasn't a single one of them called me up and said hey we just want to pick your brain for two minutes because i'm here to help they can't afford you i i do for free joey i do for free why aren't they i i just
don't know i just why aren't they calling up the linda people why aren't they calling up gem or why aren't other schools calling up douglas to say like wait you've been planning this since march what are you guys doing we need to learn from you we need to collaborate i think if we
sit here in this kind of siloed thing and say you know what we can weather the storm and our endowment or whatever we have will protect us from this i think that's exactly the wrong approach okay now before we get out of here there's a slide here i did my research so some
solutions to talk about and i think we've all talked about this already in one fashion or the other but we're just going to button it up here and before we get out okay this is from something i read from deloitte because they obviously have been looking at this and consulting lots of companies
and institutions but here's what they're saying to do this is my summary become more data driven and let the data inform what decisions you're going to make enhance the digital operations so that you can serve more diverse student populations especially with online offerings we can solve a lot of the diversity issues if
we make it affordable and accessible and in in some countries where they have free internet that will solve a lot of the problems and then this is the last one we've talked about this is kind of unbundling the bifurcation of the delivery of academic education the transfer of knowledge as joey had said
and the overall college experience so that we can truly see things for what they are okay before i say goodbye i want to thank my distinguished panel petrula joey jem and douglas thank you very much for doing this thanks for for engaging this conversation and thank you all of you who are sticking
around for a really boring conversation about education this matters to us that's it for me joe uh jonah we're out of here thank you very much everybody i hope you have a wonderful day and see you guys on the next live stream thank you chris thank you chris peace thank you thank you
thanks chris thanks everyone watch out for eardrums because i think jonah's going to drop some music playing right now but i don't want to bless yours so hopefully all yeah thank you much very much joe you never got your focus uh worked out i didn't i thought i was i was like
Enjoyed this? There’s more where it came from.
Get insights on running and growing a creative business.
You can unsubscribe anytime. By submitting, you agree to receive communications and to our Privacy Policy.