Education By The Numbers | Union Square Ventures

We have been spending a fair bit of time thinking about education in the US and wanted to share some of what we’ve learned so far.

Below is a deck with some of the data we’ve come across, and broadly the patterns seem to be:

• Traditional K-12 education hasn’t changed very much overall in the past 20 years, although there is a small but growing number of homeschool and charter school students.
• What is rapidly changing are the economics around higher education. University revenues are growing much faster than student enrollment. This may explain why there is a lot of momentum around Income Share Agreements.
• The other thing that is rapidly changing is the number of educational resources available online, which makes us wonder whether the role of schools may change from a place of instruction to a safe space where learning is encouraged. This is also an area where we are seeing some startup momentum, although because this change is less urgent than the economics of higher education, momentum here seems to be happening more gradually.

Understanding education in the US is an ongoing effort for us. If you think there is something we missed, we will be enthusiastic to hear from you.

Below is the deck and here is the link to view it on Google Slides where the data sources are listed in the presenter’s notes of each slide.