The Difficulty of Assigning Meaning to "Growth" in Elite Education

Flip through any media covering the latest startup world; it is not hard to assume what is considered "success" in this space. Firms that can achieve massive growth, general excitement from investors for further investment, and leverage additional resources for further development are the poster boys of the industry. Logically, such media coverage focuses on how growth enables scale, which in turn allows certain products and services offered by such successful firms to fulfill thus-far untapped needs of customers worldwide, introduce new conveniences, and improve lives.

For many products and services out there, such a growth-oriented mindset is broadly positive. A good product can often be utilized by many without widespread adoption harming other users. In fact, greater use of certain products by many would create positive externalities, with cheaper prices and greater knowledge spurring further innovation. The internet and the smartphone, for instance, are clear recent examples of such a network effect. The more people that use them, the more each individual user benefits from more information, more functionalities, and lower cost to access.

However, elite education is not a product that follows this logic of more scale leading to more benefits. Here, "elite" can be most crudely defined as access to limited spots in the world's best educational institutions, especially at the university level. As noted in a previous post, such an elite education, by design, strives for exclusivity and high quality by limiting access to the selected few. Harvard, for instance, would not simply increase its number of students by ten times if the number of applicants increase by a factor of ten. The school's reputation is too much at stake to pursue such simple math.

The limiting nature of elite education, then, poses a dilemma for a startup seeking to grow by selling a proposition that many more people can access elite education. On one hand, it is certainly a noble goal that more students from around the world see applying to and going to Harvard as a realistic goal with the support of knowledgeable experts who can prod them along the right path. On the other hand, the likes of Harvard should be justifiably skeptical that meteoric growth of educational service providers can be possible when the universities themselves have no plan to grow in tandem.

More fundamentally and philosophically, fast growth and the eliteness of education can be considered mutually exclusive concepts. After all, if any plebian with a handful of cash can access experts who can help them get into Harvard, then a Harvard degree may be so cheapened that it would not be worth it in the first place. An elite education is considered a valuable asset for future employment and beyond because only a few people can acquire it. Democratizing the process risk the very value, in professional development and personal prestige, that the likes of Harvard provide in the first place.

What is more, while fast growth erodes the exclusivity of an elite education, each individual student may gain little from the growth. After all, each student has limited time, attention span, and space to appeal to universities why s/he is more suited than others for a coveted place on the roster. An educational service provider that is ten times bigger may have more resources that a student can utilize. But both the students receiving help and the mentors assisting them certainly cannot be expected to do ten times the classes, activities, and preparation, in either quality or quantity, in that same amount of prep time.

If anything, fast growth can encourage a greater sense of disillusion that elite education is becoming ever more unreachable, requiring ever more investments in time, money, and effort, for diminishing returns. With ten times more students, every student will face a greater likelihood that s/he is similar to someone else who is applying, no matter how much effort is placed into creating a sense of unique values particular only to an individual. Sensing the mounting pressure for an increasingly elusive goal, many can lose motivation and abandon the goal even before embarking on the journey of acquiring an elite education.

It is easy to say that elite education ought to be provided just to those who are ready to strive, motivated to think bigger, and already have the intelligence to keep up. But as fast growth brings educational opportunities to the doorsteps of more and more students, just how many such "already ready" students are there? And if fast growth is pursued to acquire many more customers and provide them with top-level services, then it is also not possible to turn away potential clients just because they do not fit the elite education profile at first sight. The conundrum of elite education and fast growth needs more thorough thinking.