Big Tech companies have got universities in their sights

In any normal summer, millions of teenagers would be preparing to leave home for the first time, move to a cramped hall of residence on-campus and shuffle into cavernous lecture halls as university students. But come the autumn, they will be stuck taking those classes on Zoom – if they start their studies at all. While some universities are taking cautious steps towards opening up their classrooms, most are also offering to take teaching online.

In the same way that coronavirus has reignited interest in working from home, online learning – another idea that has been unsuccessfully tried before – could become a long-term consequence of the pandemic.

“Before, I thought in 10 years I may be teaching half of my classes online,” says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “That’s now going to happen in the next six months.” And as with any established but lucrative industry, the world’s cash-rich tech giants, hungry for growth, are now likely to spy an opening. Galloway, a former tech entrepreneur and investor, says higher education, after health, is likely to be the biggest target for Silicon Valley in the next few years.

“You have to go big-game hunting. If you’re Apple, and you’re charged with adding $200m (£160m) to top line revenue in five years, there’s really only a handful of sectors or industries you can go into. Four hundred kids will enrol in my class in the fall and pay $7,000 each for what I believe will probably end up being 12 Zoom classes. [Tech’s] greed glands are just gonna get going around that.”

Technology companies have spent years on the fringes of the classroom, funding software, cloud computing, and tech and maths programmes in schools, and are even more embedded in research departments.

Last week, Amazon, Google and IBM offered to put their resources towards a US cloud computing project that would give academic researchers unprecedented processing power.

The research departments of top US universities and the artificial intelligence laboratories of Facebook and Google have revolving doors between them.

And Silicon Valley firms have become among the biggest recruiters of talent from Ivy League and red brick universities in recent years.

But building campuses, dormitories and classrooms, as well as competing with some of the world’s most well-established names, was always going to prove tricky. Classes moving online might change that: tech companies’ infrastructure could mean thousands tuning into a single world-class lecturer. Not everyone is thrilled.

“I recognise that we’re in a situation globally right now where there aren’t a lot of great choices. But I am concerned that the pandemic is going to be used as an opportunity to go more tech-based when the research isn’t there to support that it’s better,” says Emily Cherkin, an education consultant focusing on screen time.

A cynic might say that the impulse to reform education comes in part from the natural proclivity of the technology entrepreneur to believe they have the answer even in sectors where they have little or no experience. Famously, many of tech’s most high-profile entrepreneurs, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, are university drop-outs, suggesting they place little value in degrees themselves.

Some senior figures in the technology industry are strong believers in the charter school system, which is similar to England’s free schools. Such schools are often started by groups with a strong idea about what education should look like, and the desire to have more control over schooling.

Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder, is on the board of the California Charter Schools Association, and in 2010 Zuckerberg gave a $100m donation to the schools in Newark, New Jersey, which involved an expansion of charter institutions.

The impulse also comes from a well-documented failure of the country’s schools and colleges to produce enough graduates with the technical skills required to support the huge technology industry.

Last year, a global survey of 3,600 chief information officers by consultancies Harvey Nash and KPMG found that 67pc were struggling to find good people to hire, particularly in big data and analytics, cyber security and artificial intelligence.

The suspension last month of a visa commonly used to import skilled workers caused consternation across Silicon Valley, an industry which relies heavily on them, leading to potentially more focus on domestic education.

“Part of our education system is doing what they need – our Caltechs and MITs and so on are doing what they need – but that’s not what most of our education system is doing,” says Richard Scott, emeritus professor of sociology at Stanford University, who co-authored a book about Silicon Valley’s relationship with the school system.

Technology has tried to intervene in education before, without the desired results. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) were heralded as the future of teaching back at the start of the last decade. But high dropout rates and low engagement put paid to that idea.

Online education is not straightforward. Any parent who has spent the last three months standing over bored and restless children spending hours each day staring at their teacher and classmates on Zoom will tell you that it’s a tough ask.

In Kansas, Summit Learning, which is funded and supported by Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation, was embroiled in controversy after some parents pulled their children out of the public school system because they were unhappy with the levels of screen time involved in the programme.

And any further expansion of tech companies’ empires is likely to be viewed with suspicion, particularly over their use of data.

In 2015, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed that Google had been mining students’ data and sharing it with the company’s other services, forcing the business to change some of its practices.

Tech companies have also been accused of seeing the education market as a way to begin embedding themselves in students’ lives.

“It’s that early brand loyalty – if you donate iPads to an elementary school, you’ve got early Apple users, and then all subsequent use of tech has to be Apple-friendly,” says Cherkin.

Galloway says many industry figures believe the value of a degree from elite universities is often simply an expensive signal of someone’s aptitude, rather than the knowledge gained over three or four years, and that tech may be able to improve that.

“When you really think about what is the value of these elite brands, it’s certification. The value comes out of the admissions department. Tech companies could bring in outstanding testing, they could measure student outcomes and probably do a better job.” He says a qualification with Google’s stamp on it could hold as much value as one from a traditional university, and potentially at a fraction of the cost.

Does that make it a good idea? “Quite frankly, in academia, we deserve it. If it’s anything like what’s happened with tech and other industries, our ability to regulate won’t keep up with the pace of change.

“I don’t know if it’ll be good or bad. But what I’m more certain is, it’s going to happen.”