I feel like the only way entrepreneurs can do good is to provide services for students and not for teachers. Stuff like khanacademy.com and teamtreehouse.com
Give it time. With the direction healthcare costs are going it's just a matter of time before the hate enters the profession. Soon people will see doctors, nurses, and administrators for what they really are: rent-seekers gouging taxpayers for enormous amounts of money by erecting barriers to entry, keeping accountability to a minimum, and charging endless procedures to the bottomless pits that are medicare and medicaid.
From my experience a significant percentage of the population already feels this way. Maybe it's because I have mostly dealt with the military health care system(which also uses civilian specialists), but most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent.
'... most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent' - it's unfortunate if this is your take-home from meeting doctors, but I have to say that is a serious overstatement.
Unfortunately this is the reality of healthcare for a great many of us in the states.
My experience with one of the larger HMO organizations here was very disconcerting.
I was bedridden with spinal joint pain for several days. They were unable to see me in a reasonable timeframe (2 week wait minimum), which meant by the time I was able to come in for a blood test the acute inflammation I was experiencing had passed, preventing screening for the condition I was concerned about (my dad and brother both have ankylosing spondylitis, making it extremely likely I do as well).
Worse than that, I found I had to educate the RN that was responsible for interpreting my test results (specifically that ankylosing spondylitis shows negative rheumatoid factor).
In addition to this, I've watched what's happened to friends with serious but not readily diagnosed diseases. One was in advanced stages of liver failure. In the end she only got a diagnosis by going to a hospital, making herself a bother and refusing to leave until someone took responsibility for actually finding out what was going on. The result was she avoided an unnecessary liver transplant. Her diagnosis was an uncommon but easily treatable autoimmune condition.
There's roughly 50% odds the transplant would have killed her by now (this was some 10 years ago). Taking an adversarial approach and having the support of a friend's mom who worked for the business side of the HMO in doing this probably saved her life.
It shouldn't have to be this way.
It's abusive to doctors that things are set up this way as well.
In any case, I don't mean to rant, but I just wanted to provide some counter anecdotes to to your feeling that the callousness and incompetence of medicine in the states was being exaggerated.
Wow, contrasting this with the latest 2 experiences my family had:
My stepfather went for a routine visit to the doctor in Vienna, Austria. They found a suspicious object, and decided to treat him immediately, and he was operated on the very next day. It ended up being benign, but I was amazed at their speed of treatment.
My uncle went for a cardiologist evaluation here in Montevideo, Uruguay (where we have a form of socialist-style medicine in the style called Mutualism). They found a suspicious spike in his heartbeat, which they suspected to be a treatable syndrome (Wolff-Parkinson-White), and decided to do some special evaluations. He was treated (with full anaesthetics) one week later (at almost zero cost).
Both were quite good experiences, times are a little slower in Uruguay but everybody has access to basic medicine.
That said, I suspect that for difficult-to-catch diseases, you have to make yourself a bother, otherwise you might slip through the cracks like your friend almost did (doctors here in Uruguay are heavily penalized if they take too much time with one patient).
Don't forget about the true rent-seeking, taxpayer gouging insurance companies. I find that by the time I've paid my $950 a month in insurance, paying another $40 copay to the doctor just makes me angry. When the cost to have semi-decent insurance is the same cost as leasing a BMW it's no wonder that people don't go to the doctor's.
[Note: I realize it might just be that my insurance is ridiculous. I'm looking into alternatives.]
I've had a lot of success with the tutorials at thenewboston.com The instructor there explains everything in a very ELI5 (explain like im 5) manner and tone and it works very well for beginners like me.
The only reason the idea of dropping out is getting so much traction is because of the debt that's now required to get a degree. I haven't seen anyone defending college reconcile this fact.
The point is that a degree is now extremely expensive and is getting more so all the time. Id like to make the point that holding all that debt is a lot scarier than the successful people with decent jobs trying to persuade us to start or stay in school think it is.
It seems that they are serving the wrong customers. Most edu startups try to sell to parents, teachers, or administrators. Sell directly to the student. Thats one reason I think Khan Academy is having such success.
What I would like a startup to offer me is this: Buy my product/service, invest your time and energy as well as you can learning the subject, and in return we will make you as employable as humanly possible.
Unfortunately students have the same mentality and have no buying power on their own. Khan Academy has built a great brand but is free. The demographic analysis in the article supports the thesis -- in my unbiased opinion ;-)
This is an easy excuse but it's dead simple wrong. Students represent a huge amount in spending power, with a huge percentage of that being discretionary spending on non-essential items. Students spend money. Lots of money. Parents spend even more. A lack of a market isn't the reason ed-tech startups fail. It's lack of value.
That's the point of the post. There's lots of money out there. But it gets spent in ways that are different from what the typical entrepreneur and VC expect it to be spent on. The dynamics of how purchasing decisions are made are around cost, not quality.
Let's talk data. How many students spend money on educational services? 15% of students take SAT or ACT prep outside of school. By the time a student is 16 and has some discretionary spend and has some influence of a parent's spend. If students took their spending power/influence and prioritized educational spend you would have a lot more than 15% of students getting test prep outside of the school.
Consumer spending is huge. Consumer spending on education is large. Consumer spending on education where the primary driver is quality is much smaller.
Don't forget that the for-profit colleges get 99% of their income from government financial aid. They don't have to serve their customers well; they just have to do the minimum amount of work to get the financial aid money.
Why would it be in the interest of private schools to hoard their products from me? I only make $18000 (about half the median wage) and food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either. Given that nearly every human being is in demand of an affordable education it makes no sense for companies to not accept low income students. The only reason private schools are expensive now is because the government monopoly makes it imposible for them to compete on the low income section of the market.
your analogy is apt: in your opinion, a poor person will never be able to afford a Ferrari or a Porsche, so they shouldn't be able to afford top-class education either. Ferrari will never be interested in "competing for the low income section of the market"; they'll happily keep making exclusive and expensive cars, reserved to top dogs, popes and the like.
The "voucher" sort of scheme will inevitably result in the State giving everyone enough money to buy a Nissan Micra, with rich parents "topping-up" to get a Mercedes, Porsche or Ferrari. Which is not much different from what you get now, just a bit worse.
One major problem with vouchers is that they are susceptible to fraud. Current voucher and charter schools are not posting greater successes than public schools. Government services are at risk for innefficiency due to non-incentives, but government-funded private services are at similar risk due to perverse incentives.
For example, higher education IS currently on a loan-integrated voucher system, and it is common knowledge that private colleges are a money pit these days.
Because for at least some, a large part of what they sell is social exclusivity. Those dirty little brown (or Jewish, or Irish, or Catholic, or Italian, or German, or in Fremont, CA, white trash ...) children will be kept away from your precious little gems.
Since school, education, economic potential, etc., are so tightly tied to social status, this is hardly surprising. It's also present in other goods: I'm sure you can think of luxury cars, foods, clothes, clubs, etc., whose appeal and cache is largely their exclusivity and the fact that the great unwashed masses can't access them. No, this doesn't apply to all goods, but for a class of them, yes. (That this is also tied to price discrimination behavior on the part of producers also has something to do with this).
What is the term used for the highest ranked colleges in the US? Oh yeah: "highly selective".
>> Food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either.
Do you think that you get good nutritious food by paying bottom dollar? You think those nitrates and high fructose sugar and other junk are really good for your health? You think that a low cost diet that lacks "expensive" fruits and vegetables has no impact on your health?
The problem with a cheaper second tier education is that it perpetuates the affordability problem from generation to generation. The poor parents who could not afford to send their kid to the rich school will have a son or daughter with a second tier education who will only be qualified for low paying second tier jobs. This system creates a stratified society with low mobility and represents a waste of human potential -- the brilliant kid whose parents couldn't give him a first rate education cannot reach his full potential, while the lazy dumb kid with rich parents takes up a spot in a class in which he simply does not deserve to be (from an academic perspective).
Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays. There are places where the market does not produce good outcomes -- education is one of them. You cannot trade human intelligence and aptitude. You cannot have different high standards for different prices -- there are no low tier high standards and top tier high standards. People who are motivated by greed do not make good educators.
There is only so high in quality a product can get. How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. Sure one might be a little faster but in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base. One is for smart consumers and one is for rich people to show off.
Keeping the government monopoly in place only serves the interests of the employees and unions of the public schools and no one else. Certainly not the students.
"Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays."
Wow, the discussion here is really going down the tubes into the land of nonsense.
>> How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base
$1,000 gets me a beat up car from the 1980s that barely works, breaks down all the time and surrounds me in noxious fumes. $2,250,000 gets me a Bugatti Veyron that has a top speed of 250 mph and does 0-60 in under 3 seconds. No difference there at all -- they're quite comparable!
Sell to the learner not to the teacher.