Hey Innovators: Here’s An $800 Billion Opportunity

Humans have an amazing ability to adapt to unprecedented challenges.

Many of the trends that appeared to emerge during the Pandemic were actually an acceleration of trends that existed ‘B.C.,’ or before Coronavirus. For example, automation, telemedicine, pet adoption and working from home were already happening in a major way before last year. The virus put gas on the fire of all those trends but none so much as Digital Learning, something widely considered now to be a megatrend.

In January 2020, the overall Digital Learning industry was $160 billion out of the $7 trillion learning industry. That’s about 2 percent of the overall spend.

Before the pandemic, investment analysts had expected Digital Learning to be a $1 trillion dollar Market by 2034 and reach 10% of the overall education Market. Now, we expect it to reach $1 trillion by 2027. That’s over $800 billion of opportunity in the next 6 years.

Venture Investment in Digital Learning was $600 million in 2010 (which was a record by far). By 2019, it reached $5.2 billion, which is a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In 2020, it reached $13.8 billion, so the growth accelerated to a 37% CAGR. YTD, $13.3 billion of venture has come into the Digital Learning Space so the trend has continued.

There were 18 unicorns in Digital Learning in January 2020, private companies that are valued at over $1 billion. Today, it’s doubled to 36. Looking at public valuations, Digital Learning companies’ enterprise value has soared in the past 20 months. For example, Chegg has gone from $3.1B to $9.2B. 2U has increased 150%.

While it’s exciting to see a huge acceleration in Digital Learning, which is a key part of how we can give everybody an equal opportunity to participate in the future, there are way too many people being left behind. Millions of students and adult learners may have access to devices, but their access to substantial digital learning for education and training is limited to the capacity of the school or business serving them.

In May 2020, Operation Warp Speed was launched to create a vaccine that would subdue the Coronavirus. Against all odds, multiple vaccines were developed in less than a year. This extraordinary accomplishment happened by uniting as a society with urgency and critical importance. People were dying, and we were scared for ourselves and our loved ones.

Equally urgent, however, is the fact that hundreds of millions of people who don’t have a future because they don’t have the education or skills to participate in the Knowledge Economy. Just 7% of the World’s Adult Population has a college degree yet over 50% of the jobs of the future require post secondary credential or education of some kind.

If we as people would unite with the same urgency and level of importance for providing the education people need to participate in the future as we did with creating a vaccine for the Coronavirus, we’d move the world forward in a really material, positive way.

That’s the genesis of the STOP Award, a $1 million prize for transforming education which will honor innovators who are creating solutions for underserved communities during the Pandemic. STOP stands for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding and Permission-less, and is a partnership with Forbes, the Center For Education Reform, and GSV. We hope it can become the educational equivalent of Operation Warp Speed, because education is the pathway to the future.