Uber for Education

General Assembly is an interesting business.

It’s the start of the disintermediation of universities.

Offering courses in a limited number of disciplines it allows students to pick and choose courses that suit their needs and timetables.

It’s a boon for continuous education.

Courses can be given by anyone qualified to give them under any circumstances.

In an expanded model imagine your under-paid scientist on a shitty short-term contact at UNSW earning more by running courses at night, all managed by the app.

Eventually whole qualifications in a discipline could be earned this way.

All that the purveyors of these ‘degrees’ have to do is demonstrate the value of their ‘graduates’ in terms of pay scales.

Employers usually only care that their new hires can do the job, not where they got their degree or whether they even have one.

A degree is just a form of assurance that someone has been trained to a certain level of capability. The internet offers so many simpler and cheaper ways to create such assurances.

More importantly, many people also want to start their own business, and that might be a startup or running courses through some online app.

The whole concept of discreet employment is going into the dustbin, I’m telling you.

And along with it so will all the old-school old schools.