Half of all colleges will not exist in 10 years. There may be a new model which might provide
a better path to career success and if this sounds far-fetched the Harvard professor Clayton
Christensen's argument is based on a premise that is familiar to successful entrepreneurs.
So if we go into this article, I have a quote highlighted here because it really breaks down
why online education is going to change massively in the next 5 10 15 years and the way things are
happening right now are likely going to be flipped upside down. So let's get into it:
"A principle of Christensen's theory of disruption is that technology itself is not the disrupter.
For example, Netflix created a new business model streaming video made that business model possible.
As Christensen says, technology enables the new business model to coalesce.
Technology is the tool, not the end result." And then he then goes on to talking about higher
education and how the new online and hybrid learning continue to grow and that will be at
the cost of traditional education because many institutions will struggle to stay in business
under their current model and this is a reality that a lot of online educators are understanding
because all of this different content is now being able to be released to people and this is
where people can really start to take advantage of all of the resources they have they don't always
need to go into crippling debt and be paying off three four five six hundred dollar a month bills
for the next decade or more. That is not the right path for a lot of people and a lot of students
or people who thought they were going to be college students are waking up to this fact. Now
I'm not saying that everyone who goes to college is making a mistake, there are certain professions
and career paths that you definitely want to get a college degree for like being a lawyer, being in
medicine, a doctor, things like that. However, you need to ask yourself why you're going to college.
Now there's kind of two schools of thoughts. The first is where a lot of people fit into,
that is I want to get a job, I want to make money and they think that college degree just
automatically equals a job after college. Then you have the other boat of people who have their
parents pushing them into it, they might just not really know what they want to do but they
know they want to go, they want to have fun, they want to go to college and they go that route and
they said you know what I'll figure it out along the way. Now the problem with both of these is
that you don't have that ultimate clarity that you think you have, and I went through this as well.
I mean, I went to college, got a marketing degree and I thought that piece of paper was going to get
me hired right away but after I started going on interviews I realized there's so much more
to just getting hired especially in today's marketplace. You need to have some experience,
you need to have a specialized skill set, just having a general degree in marketing
or communications or whatever it is is not going to just get you hired. Do when you think about it,
ask yourself is the debt I'm going into worth it? Now this Harvard professor says an average
degree at Harvard costs over $400,000. Now of course that's not the case with all colleges
but it is a massive expense and when you are young and you're 17, 18, about to go to college, you
don't really have that mindset of what debt is, you don't understand that no matter what happens
after college even if you don't get a job right away those loans are going to start being due
and this is something that is a real kind of debilitator even when people get a job and
they're on their feet that money that they could be saving and investing whether it's two three
four hundred dollars a month in student loans that money can turn into so much more down the road
if they were able to invest that whether that's in themselves in the stock market whatever it is but
instead they have to pay off all the student loan debt the interest rates, all of that I mean it's
just a lot so with that being said that gets us into the video topic which is what is the future
of higher education? Where is a higher education going? And when we look at everything that's
going on in today's marketplace we have a lot of awesome free resources like for example Google,
I got my Google certification for Google Ads and a bunch of the different networks underneath there
for completely free. I know Microsoft has a lot of free certifications as well,
so what you want to do is start to think about if you're not going to go down the college route
how can you build the most credibility possible and that's aligning yourself with established
platforms and taking all of the learning resources they have. So Google and Microsoft
are great massive powerhouses of information, they want you to use their services they want you to
sell their services to other clients for example like what I do, digital marketing and Google Ads.
So it's a win-win, so think about it like that if you're not going to go the college route
the future of online education is finding out how you can get certifications how you can get
other sort of online degrees that would replace that college degree at a fraction of the cost now
there are a couple big online course marketplaces you can use one of the most popular ones is Udemy
which I also have a course on and you can see they just recently rebranded their whole site so if it
doesn't look familiar that's because they change their logo they change the color of everything
and they have this renewed purpose that they're learning for the better. And the whole point of
Udemy is to bring affordable courses to students and if you see here they have over 155,000 online
video courses that get updated and published every single month and this is where you can start to
see some of the prices on Udemy now a lot of them are listed at $100 or $200 but once you get
into one of these courses a lot of times there's going to be a massive promotion and there's also
a lot of coupon codes you can enter in and it'll really run you around $10 to $15 on average, now
that is not bad especially if you want to start to pick up a couple new skills, however, there is
something called analysis by paralysis and when you go back to what we just said how they have
over 150,000 courses not all of them are quality so that gets into kind of the problem with online
learning is that you need to have that credibility so even if you get some certifications from Google
Microsoft whatever it is you still need to build your skill set you still need to understand
and learn a skill from someone who is credible. So that is where the rise of more of these
curated marketplaces that have very high-end courses and instructors that have been vetted,
that is where those online marketplaces come in and one of those is called Zero
to Mastery. Now the Zero to Mastery Academy was created by one of Udemy's top rated instructors
who created all of these amazing courses on coding how to code how to be a zero and go to a master,
and he ended up starting his own platform and if you look at the academy page you can see that
there are a lot of different courses that are offered here and one of my favorite things
about the Zero to Mastery Academy and all the courses is that it's built to help you get hired
and that is the main goal with any online education is to be able to make money to get hired
and one of the awesome things about this if we go to just the home page here you can see that
over 500,000 people have used Zero to Mastery in some sort to get hired by some of the best
companies around the world from Google to Apple to Tesla to IBM to Amazon to Facebook. So this
is what I'm talking about, it's not just about getting that online education for a cheaper cost
it's about using all of the certifications the online platforms that build credibility
to build yourself up to build your reputation to build your portfolio up and to build your
expertise in certain skill sets. So if we look at this they also have something that's really cool
called career paths and the career paths are going to push you in the direction that you
should be going so if you already know you want to be a web developer a software engineer front end
developer etc they even have one for freelancing down here you can take one of these career paths
and it's going to help you along the way say this is the kind of course you should take then you
should go do this then you should do this and it helps provide that road map for you. Now if you
don't know what you want to do right away you can also use this right here that says find my career
path and i'll link all of this below but this is awesome because you can just start to enter your
information and it'll help guide you in the right direction so what i'm trying to go over here is
that there is a big difference between just online learning and incredible online learning and what
you want to be able to do is align yourself with those credible marketplaces because that is what
is going to help you get hired and not only just get hired but once you get hired that's just half
the battle then actually delivering the work that you got hired for. Now, just going to college a
lot of times you'll learn a bunch of general stuff and of course you're going to pick up
some cool specifics but for the most part, I mean even half your classes for the first two years
are not even related to your major so the other advantage of the future of online learning
and the future of higher education is that you can get snipper pinpointed in on the exact skill set
you want to learn. You can learn from people that are doing this in the field so it's not
like college where half the professors don't even really have the knowledge of what they're
teaching, and what I mean by that is it's not that they don't know what they're talking about,
but they're not in the field so you know you'd have marketing teachers that used to do marketing
20 years ago and they're talking about just outdated methods, they don't know anything about
social media anything about digital marketing, and when I say they don't know anything of course they
have the understanding of it but they weren't in the trenches, they aren't doing this, they haven't
made hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from it. That's who you want to learn from
so what am I trying to get at? I'm trying to connect the dots for you, I'm trying to let you
know if people are already hiring people whether it's for a remote work position whether it's for
a freelancing position they're already posting thousands if not tens of thousands of jobs a day
and you have college kids who are coming out of college hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,
no real world experience, no specialized skill set, it doesn't make sense, it really doesn't.
So even if you're a parent thinking about where you want your kid to go to college
start to think about what skill set should they master, what is in demand in today's marketplace?
Because I'm telling you if your kid starts to learn coding, or if you start to learn coding,
you start to learn digital marketing, specialized areas in advertising,
those are not highly saturated, not everyone knows about that and if you can build up your expertise
in this area there are thousands of clients out there you can go and apply to right now.
But that goes back to the online education you need to have all of that expertise under your belt
and then once you have that understanding and that knowledge from people who already know what
they're doing and that can actually support you which is the other great thing about ZTM. They
have a discord with thousands of members on it that helps you get to that next step. So after
you graduate from college yeah you're an alumni there, but there's really not that much support,
although I know there's career services but to be honest with you they're just going to line
you up with some random interviews. But if you can start to think about where the future is heading
and you place yourself ahead of the curve that is where you can have the most success. I hope that
was a helpful video! Click this video over here after this to keep watching more of my content to
learn about freelancing, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle freedom. Until the next time my name
is Paul Mendes with Profitable Freelancer and I look forward to your future success.