Rethinking college education: Put the student first, not the university | Dan Rosensweig | Big Think

Rethinking college education: Put the student first, not the university

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are modern colleges more interested in their bottom lines than the needs of students? Dan Rosensweig, the CEO of Chegg, says more and more parents are looking at alternative ways for their children to become successful in business and as citizens. If colleges, many of which are on shaky financial footing, don't adapt - the whole system is ripe for disruption.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CEO, CHEGG:

Dan Rosensweig joined Chegg in 2010 with a vision for transforming the popular textbook rental service into a leading provider of digital learning services for high school and college students. By leveraging technology, mobility, and connected networks, Chegg today offers a suite of high quality, low cost, personalized and on-demand educational resources that help students pursue, control and improve their own outcomes. As Chairman and CEO of Chegg, Dan commits the company to fulfilling its mission of putting students first and helping them save time, save money and get smarter. Under Dan’s direction, Chegg has become the Student Hub®, a connected learning platform that brings together people who want to learn with the tools and resources that accelerate the achievement of their educational and career goals. Prior to Chegg, Dan served as CEO of Guitar Hero, COO of Yahoo!, and CEO of ZDNet. Dan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York. When Dan isn’t attending a Springsteen concert or enjoying quality time with his wife and two daughters, he sits on the Board of Trustees of Colgate University, the Board of Directors for Adobe Systems, Inc., Rent-the-Runway, Fender Guitars, Birchbox and the Advisory Board of the nonprofit DonorsChoose.org. Dan also serves as a Senior Advisor for TPG Growth Ventures.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Rosensweig: There’s a really interesting question which is: what are the ramifications of the college education system—potentially, and we believe—in a bubble that’s likely to burst (and is already bursting), and with parents and employers looking to find alternative ways to get their kids or their students the skills they need to be able to be successful citizens and successful in business?

So what was interesting about the education system is everything in the education system was designed to support the existing system, like most businesses—designed to serve the publisher, the professor, the administrator, all the people that worked at the school.

But you looked at the student and you said they’re forced to live in a dorm they don’t want to live in, pay a price they don’t want to pay. They’re forced to use a cafeteria the first year or so because it’s in the best interest of the school, not the student. They have to pay a fortune for books that they don’t want to buy and subjects they don’t want to take. You just think of all the things. You go to an ATM on a college campuses, the kid takes out $10 and they pay $3.50 as a fee. And so we realized very quickly that the biggest problem with the education system was that it served everybody in it but its core constituent, which was the student. And so one day I wrote on the bottom of my email to the staff – I just put it in as a tagline – “We put students first.”

And that became the way in which every decision we get made gets filtered through it. What we do, why we do it, when we’re going to do it. What we can charge for it. The order in which we offer it. How many different modalities or languages or devices can it be on? All of those things are if you put the student first what would the student want?

Now some people say, “Well if you do that, Dan, they’d all want it for free.” The truth is they wouldn’t if they didn’t think they could get it for quality for free.

So, for example, there are free alternatives to Chegg Study but they all prefer to pay for Chegg Study, because what we give is not free—We give overwhelming value for the money. And so by putting the student first the choices that we make become limited. The definition of success becomes clearer. How does this help the student and can we benefit by doing that? The order in which you do it, how much you’re willing to invest and the return on that investment become much clearer by putting the customer first.

And look, we live in a world now where everybody in the middle is being cut out if possible. So we’re living in a much clearer world of direct c...

For the full transcript, check out