This essay is authored by Darcy W.E. Allen, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Leon Gettler, Ethan Kane, Aaron M. Lane and Jason Potts. It was published originally on Substack
Part 1: Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic threatens the global university sector like the internet threatened journalism two decades ago. Both faced shocks disrupting long established and highly successful business models that defined the industrial landscape of the twentieth century. The internet tore down some of the largest, most historic, and most high-profile media businesses in the world. The media business model changed forever. So too will the university sector. And many universities will not emerge from this disruption intact.
The pandemic won’t simply shrink the size of the university sector for a few years, before a rebound when borders open again. The effect is much more deep, dramatic and frightening than that. It requires a re-think of the fundamental business model of the university. The pandemic undermines the complex, hidden, and mostly obscure cross-subsidies that keep universities functioning. Universities are phenomenally complicated platform organisations. They are platforms because their primary role is to match different stakeholder groups together so that they can trade with each other. The university is a platform that matches teachers with students, researchers with industry, graduates with employers, donors with social ventures, and on and on and on.
Many businesses are platforms. Platforms typically use one side of the market to cross-subsidize the other—the goal being to bring as many people onto the platform as they can. Platforms have network effects: the more readers a newspaper has, the more attractive that newspaper is for advertisers. More advertising money supports more journalism, bringing in more readers.
But as the media sector learned, these relationships are vulnerable to disruption. That disruption can pull down an entire sector. Old media platforms fell apart, disrupted by platforms with vastly different business models. For universities, that once-in-a-century disruption has just happened.
This eight-part essay offers a guide to how universities can survive in a post-pandemic world.
Continue reading “So, you run a university”