There’s always something to howl about.

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

Information can be a glow in the  darkness. Traditional higher education models are losing market share to cheaper education delivery systems.    Young people now have the opportunity to learn the very same principles for free that are taught to the people they may eventually hire to run their businesses.  I think this free market trend will eventually overtake the traditional post-secondary education models.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fully-funded college education available, competitive with some of the best traditional colleges, in the not-too-distant future.

I can see a future where the ultimate end-users of that education (private industry),  see the benefit to developing accredited curricula, and offering them to current and potential employees, at a greatly reduced cost (maybe for free).  I’m not just talking about an MBA from “Mutual of Omaha University“.  Think “University of the American Way“, delivering bachelor’s degrees to the masses- graduates might receive checks from the alumni association rather than sending checks to it.

Education via extension isn’t a new idea.  This ACC school has been granting degrees, to off-campus students, since the 1940s.  Online education is now a pop culture phenomenon. If this educational delivery system grows like I think it will, how can the real estate brokerage or mortgage lending communities profit?

The idea that education can get cheaper (moving towards free) and more readily available will be an irreversible trend.  No longer can we hide behind the phrase “proprietary information” or “specialized knowledge”.  Consumers may educate themselves about how to get a VA condo complex approved and find that my “specific knowledge”, while helpful, doesn’t permit me to charge a one point premium to my lesser educated competitors.  My specific expertise DOES drastically reduce my marketing costs, allowing me to retain more profit than my competitors.

Information can be exported inexpensively. Imagine holding a webinar online, explaining the benefits of owning a Costa Rican vacation property, to German pharmaceutical executives.  Then, imagine holding a different webinar, to a group of retired Americans in Costa Rica, about investing in mortgages so that those Germans could borrow their money and buy from those properties.  Would that add REAL value and be worthy of a fee greater than the fee for the traditional tract-home, owner-occupied purchase in Missouri?  I think so and I think it behooves future real estate professionals to think of ways to earn income outside of this the traditional “model”.

Avocations could become vocations. I believe one of the great exports the average American has is entrepreneurial skills.  Identifying and solving problems, in lesser-developed countries, could result in tremendous prosperity for those inhabitants while producing great wealth for the architect of the solution.  Watch Rocky Turner (wife of former contributor Jeff Turner) as she educates an orphanage in Africa.  Then, wonder if more African orphans could be educated by livecasting the third-grade curriculum from St. James Academy.  Do you think some sort of margin might be built-in for the entrepreneur who facilitates and hosts this exchange?

Let’s take it one step further.  Can we develop an education platform, while pursuing an avocation, for profit?  Think future customers.  Here are some suggestions for Unchained, Greg:

I think SplendorQuest, as an avocational pursuit, could supplant the NAR by leapfrogging its message to future customers.  Take the message of better shopping directly to the customers rather than trying to get the providers to  reform.

Does this sound crazy?  Perhaps but I think the collapse will affect the schools first (it already has).  If Dad is unemployed, he might consider a year of homeschooling as a way to educate his kids better while he learns a more useful trade.  A SplendorQuest curriculum might just appeal to Dad’s teenagers as supplement to Dad’s daily lessons.

The State might be divested of its monopoly on education: choice is weakening that monopoly but necessity will eventually do it in.  While an Ivy League education will always be prestigious, I see opportunity in low-cost, high quality education and training systems for the future.  If we’ve learned anything from the Progressives, it’s that education is influence.  I might like the opportunity to be in a position of influence to some future customers.  You might consider that idea, too.

This is the third part of The Dawn in America series.   I’m offering thoughts about opportunities in the future: