I’m not a business major, so I don’t know if this is sound.  But another discussion thread I created made this thought pop into my head.  I think if I knew how to be an entrepreneur I would totally try this.  I’m not, though, so I’m just going to post this here so someone else can do the work and reap the benefits.  I don’t need millions of dollars.  I just want to learn languages.  XD

As a student, I see myself as a consumer.  The product I consume is education.  The seller of that product is higher education.  What I don’t like about this product is I have to make multiple purchases of things I don’t want just to get the thing that I do.  In other words, I hate spending money to take classes I don’t feel contribute to me learning Russian, Korean, Japanese, or whatever else is on my list of languages I want to learn before I die.  Why can’t we all just get a degree by taking classes we actually need to be qualified for jobs we want?  I feel the reason universities don’t let us do this is because they want to make money.  But you can’t hate them just for that.  They’re a business.  That’s what they do.  If you don’t take enough classes, they don’t make money, the school closes down, everyone loses their jobs, families go hungry, etc.  I mean, why are we even at college in the first place?  There are many reasons, but one of them is the same as universities’ reason for existing.  We all just want to find a way to make money.

So in my other thread there was a statistic that was posted.  “At most 25% of the US has a degree at the bachelors level or higher”  There you have it!  That is the way universities can allow us students to only take the classes we really need without losing profits or worse.  That statistic is a glass that is half full to me.  If you are selling a product, you want to make money.  The product here is higher education.  If only 25% of America has degrees, that means 75% of Americans don’t have degrees or (maybe not the full 75%) never even purchase the product of education from universities at all.  Universities are not seeing a single dollar from them because 75% of their potential consumers are not even consuming their product.  Why?  I say it’s the price.  If certain types of products cost too much or are too expensive to justify buying, some (or even all) consumers will go without.  75% of America is deciding to go without the product that higher education is trying to sell them because they think they can’t afford it.  So what should universities do?  I say drop your prices.  Dropping your prices doesn’t have to mean you lose money in sales if it increases the amount of consumption.  If it is done right, it means you make more money.  With 75% potential out there the only sound I hear is CHA CHING!

So why can’t higher education do that then?  Why can’t they just drop their prices making things cheaper for the consumer and themselves richer?  I’m not an expert, but if I was to guess it would either be because they are terrible at business, don’t care about making money, or they can’t.  I’m going with the choice of “they can’t”.  Well, why can’t they?

That made me look at how business is done in other industries in America.  There have been many wonderful inventions throughout American history that have made things better for us all.  A lot of them are things that every American has and doesn’t even realize they couldn’t do without.  But how much did these products cost when they were first invented and offered to the public?  Some of them still cost a pretty penny but others have dropped significantly and are owned by every household in America.   Think of the car.  What makes it able to be priced so that it’s affordable enough for so many American households to own?  How many cars are in your driveway?  How many drivers are in the home that driveway leads to?

So what is it that higher education is doing wrong?  Why can’t they sell their product to that 75% of America so they can make enough profit and stop having to force us 25% to take classes we don’t need.  Again, I’m hazarding a guess, but I would think an industry like higher education doing that would require at least two things.  Mass production and big corporations.  Higher education already has one of those.  Their product is knowledge, and knowledge is everywhere in this society.  It’s already being mass produced, so what’s the issue then?

The issue is big corporations don’t exist in higher education.  Higher education is an industry made up of little mom and pop stores.  That 75% of consumers doesn’t live in one town in America.  They are all over America.  You can’t drop your prices to attract consumers if they can’t even come to your school.  Not every student is willing to be “out of state” or even “out of county”.  Profits made by universities in California do nothing for ones here in Maryland.  But if you as a “higher education company” became big enough that money going to schools in California and Maryland went into the same pot, your pot, maybe you could change the system.  I mean, if all you want is a hamburger, Mcdonalds doesn’t make you buy a drink and fries too do they?  Why can they do that?  They can do that because Mcdonalds is one company that sells its product on an international level.  They make enough profits to be able to be more flexible and respond to what their consumers want.

And, you know what else?  If Mcdonalds, an American fast food company, can go international, then why couldn’t American “higher education companies”?  They say the entire world loves our higher education so much they leave their countries just to come here to attend our universities.  That means there probably is a demand for it on an international level.  Why not expand and take America’s product of higher education straight to the consumers abroad?