Category: Education

Jesse James Oct 26th, 2021 3:31 pm

You know college—the hugely expensive four-to-six year investment of time and resources that many students spend their entire lifetimes paying off? Yeah for some reason more people are opting out of it.

College enrollment was supposed to bounce back this fall. Instead, more students opted out.

Nationwide, fewer students went back to school again this year, dragging undergraduate enrollment down another 3.2% from last year, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that’s based on early data from colleges. There were roughly 17.5 million students enrolled as of the last tally.

In that same study, 97% of companies said customer education impacts their overall revenue by increasing brand awareness, boosting product usage and decreasing churn. Yet 68% believe they could be using customer education to derive even more value—a gap that Academy Builders aims to fill.

By Emily Hubbell

As you read this article, 31.7 million small businesses are operating across the United States, delivering the goods and services that fuel a strong economy. The lifeblood of the nation, these small businesses employ 60.6 million workers; that’s nearly 50% of all U.S. employees. They create two-thirds of new jobs and represent 44% of our domestic economic activity.. Think those statistics are impressive? Get ready to watch them explode.

Before COVID-19, Bain & Company predicted that the number of entrepreneurs and small businesses in the U.S. would skyrocket to 70 million by 2030. Now, the number of Americans who own a company could eclipse 100 million in that same timeframe—a shift triggered more by necessity than opportunity. Artificial intelligence could eliminate more than 20% of current jobs by the end of the decade. And then there’s the recession, which has historically inspired high levels of entrepreneurship. But no matter the impetus for starting a business, there’s one common thread: More entrepreneurs than ever are entering the role unprepared—and unable to afford business school as a source of training.

Business owners are good for the economy. They fuel innovation, increase competition and create high-quality jobs. But as the number of entrepreneurs skyrockets, it raises a critical question: How can we educate small business owners affordably and at scale? For a growing group of innovators, the answer is “customer education:” a market segment that shifts small business training away from universities and toward the companies that entrepreneurs do business with. Among the leaders shaping this emerging space is Scott Duffy, whose Academy Builders, Inc., is launching as the race to disrupt entrepreneur education accelerates.

By Kenrick Cai

American universities dominate, but it’s not all Ivy Leaguers on the 2021 World’s Billionaires list.

The 2,755 people on Forbes’ 2021 World’s Billionaires list received their undergraduate degrees all over the world, from Al-Azhar University in Egypt to the Zhejiang University of Technology in China. Hundreds did not attend college at all, or left before obtaining a diploma, including a pair of Harvard dropouts who are among the five richest people in the world: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

But among the billionaires who completed their undergraduate education, a few schools stand out. Harvard leads the way, with at least 29 billionaire alumni on the Forbes list. (We found information about the undergraduate education of a majority, but not all, of the list members.) Four other Ivy League universities make the top ten. Nine of these ten schools are located in the United States—MIT and a trio of California schools round out the American colleges—although their alumni hold diverse citizenship, from Colombia to Ireland to the Philippines. The lone non-U.S. school? The University of Mumbai, a public university in India that is one of the largest colleges in the world by enrollment. Just missing the cut are South Korea’s Seoul National University and China’s Tsinghua University.

Here are the ten colleges with the most billionaire undergraduate alumni, based on education data collected by Forbes; net worths are as of March 5, 2021.

BY JUSTIN BARISO@JUSTINJBARISO

Get a first look at Google’s new certificate programs and a new feature of Google Search designed to help job seekers everywhere.

This morning, Google is announcing the next steps in its plan to disrupt the world of education, including the launch of new certificate programs that are designed to help people bridge any skills gap and get qualifications in high-paying, high-growth job fields–with one noteworthy feature: 

No college degree necessary.

The new tools could be a game changer for a growing number of people who consider the current educational system broken, or for the millions of Americans who are currently unemployed, much due to fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic has led to a truly horrible year,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells Inc. in an interview. “But it has also created profound shifts along the journey to digital transformation in ways no one could have imagined.”