Understanding the Education Customer

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality (a higher return on investment). For this group of people, quality is the primary driver of a purchasing decision, not cost.

The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. It’s something they have to do because it’s mandated and the lack of the highest quality education hasn’t negatively impacted their lives in a meaningful way. Step back for a second before you judge. Imagine it’s 2005, and you live in a small town in the middle of Ohio (where I grew up) and you don’t get a college degree. If you get a factory job and make $25k/year and your wife gets a factory job and makes $25k/year, you’re making $50k/year. But houses only cost $90,000 and food is affordable and you can get a loan for a car for $300/month. So you’re not doing terribly and the default state for your children is the same life. You can afford a house, food, have a car, and have weekends off.

So, what has the lack of an education done to the typical American’s life? It’s removed job security, screwed your retirement, and maybe set you up to go bankrupt if you get sick. There are no immediate consequences, there are no immediate consequences for your children, but there is an immediate cost. So the average person thinks of education as an expenditure. If you get sick when you’re 70, you’re screwed. Or if you don’t save in your 401k, you may have to work till you’re dead. Or maybe your children won’t be as competitive in a global workforce 30 years. Don’t believe me? Only 15% of kids taking the SAT pay for an out of school test prep course like Kaplan. Over 50% of Americans don’t have beyond a high school degree.

This fundamental investment vs. expenditure mindset changes everything. You think of education as fundamentally a quality problem. The average person thinks of education as fundamentally a cost problem.