Are We In The Data Business?

The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, But Data

Fuel of the Future: Data is Giving Rise to a New Economy

From the 5/6/17 issue of The Economist.

Are we in the data business?

Absurd? Maybe. Although The Economist makes a compelling case for why we might wish this to be true.

The 5 biggest companies built on data - Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are the world’s 5 most valuable public companies. Together, these companies earned $25 billion in net profits during the first quarter of 2017.  

How might we be in the data business?

To answer this question, we have to think about what it is that we create. The two “products” that come immediately to mind are knowledge and education. Research and credentials.  

It may be that thinking of higher education as any one thing is a mistake. The postsecondary bundle contains many goods. We are both an experiential business and a public good.  A highly regulated but loosely coupled system, defined more by variation than consistency. Ask what higher ed does, and you will get as many answers as people answering.

Can we think of data as the unifying link? Is the creation, manipulation, dissemination, classification, and value adding of data the connector - or organizing metaphor - for all the diverse and seemingly disconnected tasks of modern postsecondary education?

What is a diploma (and a transcript) but a piece (or pieces) of data. Data on an individual that is used by someone else - an employer or another school - to determine suitability for hiring or admission.  The move towards alternative credentials and reimagined transcripts are an attempt to improve that form of data. 

It is through the lens of data that we can think of what happens inside of our institutions. The analytics revolution is only just starting to come to the world of teaching and learning.  If we do this well, we have the possibility of making evidence informed decisions on everything from course design to student mentoring.  We have the potential to leverage data evolve how we teach and support all of our students - and in the process lower costs while increasing completion rates.  

We are at the very early stages of effectively using data to improve learning, lower costs, and increase access (the iron triangle).  Increasing productivity in postsecondary is very very difficult - Baumol (1922-2017) taught us why with The Cost Disease - but any road towards decoupling that iron triangle will run through the effective use of data.

Higher education is the ultimate information business. Our classrooms and research labs are worthless without the brains of the people who occupy these structures.  Our schools are built on ideas, not products.  

Does this mean that we are in the data business?