ETCH Weekend Reading 11/5/23

Home schooling, direct admissions, changes to Carnegie classifications, and not enough seats for computer science majors

Hello!

2 announcements from me this week:

1. End of year survey: I am looking forward to writing an end-of-year post about the state of the EdTech market. I’d love to incorporate ideas, and data, from all of you to make it better. You can find the survey here - it should take < 5 minutes to complete!

2. Boston folks: I am working on a happy hour for Tuesday November 21. This is the Tuesday of Thanksgiving Week, so many of y’all will be travelling. But, if you will be in town, please send me a note!

With that, on to the update.

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Funding / M&A

Venture Funding

• Noon raises $41M / Saudi Arabia, Tutoring / Wa’ed Ventures, Raed Ventures, STV, SVC, Riyadh Valley Company, Endeavor, Sanabil 500, Qyem Development Holding, Nahlat Alarab Holding

• Spotted Zebra raises £7.7M / UK, Skills-based Hiring / Nauta Capital, Act Venture Capital, Playfair, Entrepreneur First

• Shakers raises €6M / Spain, Team Collaboration / Adevinta Ventures, Brighteye Ventures, Athos Capital, Wayra

• Earlybird raises $4.5M / US, Tax Planning (including 529s) / IDEO Ventures, 776 Ventures, Fiat Ventures, RareBreed Ventures, ResilienceVC, Sweater Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Goodwater Capital, Wintrust Bank, Parallel

• Skillstrust raises €1M / Ireland, Hiring Simulations / Rethink Education, Emerge

• Klassroom raises $450K / India, School Infrastructure / Ah! Ventures, Meteor Ventures

Mergers & Acquisitions

• Instructure acquires Parchment for ~$800M / US, LMS (Credentialing)

• FullBloom acquires EmpowerU / US, Student Support Services

Venture Funds

• Norrsken22 raises $205M / Africa-focused, Growth Stage

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People Moves

• Sandhydeep Purri joins Unacademy as Chief People Officer / via Business Standard

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Links

K12

• Home Schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest growing form of education. How homeschooling evolves post-COVID is one of the most important stories in US K12 education (and something ETCH | examined last Fall). Unfortunately, as anyone with a basic grasp of fractions will tell you, comparing growth rates from (vastly) uneven bases is apples-and-oranges. Making growth rate the headline stat of this article makes the whole thing difficult to take seriously. / via Washington Post

  • Related, an analogy that is growing on me is the Chipotlification of Education. Sounds silly, but bear with me. The thesis: most parents are not ready to take on the entire construction of their child’s education (meal). But they wouldn’t mind having some choice in their child’s studies (white rice vs. brown rice, black beans vs. pinto beans, etc.) with the right assurances that the end result will still come out alright. It follows that there might be opportunity for organizations who find and facilitate this middle ground. / via Fordham Institute

• The pandemic cash that bolstered school budgets is about to run out. It is hard not to be critical of schools that used funding broadly messaged as “one-time” on permanent staffing positions. At the same time, the spending requirements were tricky and I sympathize with the situation districts now face, characterized well by Georgetown’s Marguerite Roza, “They have this complicated task this year of hurrying to spend it down, while simultaneously planning for it to be gone.” / via Wall Street Journal

• Common App expands direct admissions program to 70+ US colleges. We’ve covered this trend before, but a new thing that struck me this week is how it might change the psychology of the last year of high school. From: “I hope I get into college, but I guess I won’t know until Spring.” To: “Well, I have 17 different options. I don’t know which I’ll pick yet, but I know I’m going somewhere.” / via Higher Ed Dive

• Did you know that 27 US states now have registered teacher apprenticeship programs (with 6 more have them under development)? / via New America

• Elite UK private schools opening branch campuses in India. / via Bloomberg

Higher Ed

• Student loan repayments plagued by errors, bad customer service. This is causing real pain for a lot of borrowers. Sadly, it was also entirely predictable - student loan servicers have been warning the public and the senate all year that they were insufficiently funded to re-start collections. / via Axios

• Changes to university research Carnegie ratings. With this change (which, for reasons too complicated to get into in a roundup, is actually being led by ACE) and their push in K12 for mastery-based learning, Carnegie is driving the overhaul of two of the more important structural components of education in the US. Throw in the turmoil over US News rankings and maybe the seeds of change are taking root? / via Inside Higher Ed

  • Related to Carnegie’s K12 push (with implications for Higher Ed), Ryan Craig argues that the College Board’s AP program encourages an advanced courses arms race and discourages high school students from taking continuing technical education (CTE) courses that might lead to more compelling careers. / via Gapletter

• A proposal for a free, online national university. Before I tell you who proposed this, consider the proposal: A federally funded university that awards credit for prior coursework and whose curriculum - which includes embedded credentials - is aligned to the skills required to succeed in federal government jobs (the largest employer in the country). Financed by taxes on large private endowments to keep student loans manageable (I’m skeptical that a tax like this would provide enough capital for a fully free institution). This is a really big and surprisingly detailed idea, which would dramatically change the education market. The sad part: it was proposed by Donald Trump, in the name of combatting “wokeness and jihadism.” / via Politico

  • Sort of related, and at the risk of going too far down this rabbit hole, Parent Plus loans weren’t included in the new income-driven repayment options. Parent Plus loans are one of those well-intentioned - what parent wouldn’t want to help their child realize their dreams through education? - but often ill-informed financing mechanisms. The advantage of a national option is that it would (probably) shrink and/or simplify the student loan machine so that these types of loans were less necessary / via Wall Street Journal and Hechinger Report

• Universities can’t accommodate all the computer science majors. Universities, even universities as presitigous and desirable as the University of Michigan, are struggling to find enough faculty to meet student demand for these programs. / via Inside Higher Ed

  • Related, while schools may not be able to meet demand for computer science studies, at least faculty are (mostly) able to acknowledge that they need to do a better job training students on how to leverage AI tools. / via Tyton Partners

  • Also related, perhaps the leading counterexample to this trend is at Arizona State University, which is helping turn Phoenix, Arizona into the semiconductor capital of the US. / via Financial Times

Workforce

• Three young activists who had never worked in an auto factory helped deliver a huge win for UAW. Lots of financial reasons the major auto companies had to give up a lot in this negotiation, but also an important moment in what continues to feel like a resurgence of organized labor movements. / via Wall Street Journal

• Udemy 2024 workforce trends report. Two things I am keeping an eye out for as we entire year-end reflections + predictions season: 1) the increasing baseline complexity of knowledge work and 2) a commensurate increase in the amount of formal re-skilling the average knowledge worker has to do on an annual basis. / via Globalnewswire

EdTech

• Executive Order on AI includes mandate that Education Department roll out guidance on the way schools should use AI technologies. / via 74Million

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This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

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Disclosure - September 2022