How Amazon Could Destroy College As We Know It

Alex Holt wrote for Vox from the vantage point of Jeff Bezos about Amazon University and an era in education beyond the for profit model: 

For years, pundits have speculated that online instruction could begin to overtake traditional higher education, but too often have offered few details about how this would happen. Already, however, you can see a path through which tech companies could gain a foothold in the higher ed market.

Here's one scenario — told through the vantage point of Amazon's Jeff Bezos in 2030. I don't know if it's going to happen, but as you'll see in the footnotes, Amazon is already making moves that could suggest it would be a potent competitor to existing colleges and universities.

To Our Shareowners:

After the spectacular and occasionally criminal failure of several for-profit college companies in the years following the Great Recession [1], some critics argued that the pursuit of profit was fundamentally at odds with the mission of high-quality education. Amazon University, now in its 15th year and serving more than a million customers, has proven those critics wrong and delivers higher-quality, lower-cost educational offerings than the once-vaunted nonprofits that continue to charge high tuition in pursuit of a short-term revenue boost.[2]

A dreamy business offering has at least four characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades. [3] Amazon University meets this standard, and then some.

Like some of our other ventures in the past, Amazon University was started out to fill an internal need. [4] We needed our employees to have certain skills. So we found a way to give them just that.

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