As AI puts powerful tools into every student’s hands, the next chapter of edtech may belong to the learners helping build it.
GUEST COLUMN | by Tyler Maher
Long before humans built schools, humans gathered around fires. The fire was rare, expensive, and dangerous to keep alive. Whoever tended it held something the rest of the tribe needed, and the rest of the tribe stayed close. Every institution humans have built since runs on the same principle: a small group controls a scarce resource, and everyone else shows up to access it.
The first universities were sanctuaries. In 1096, scholars gathered at Oxford around the sacred fire of their age: books. That bargain held for nearly a thousand years. Through the printing press, through the Industrial Revolution, through the internet, the institutions kept their grip on their sacred fire as it evolved. The tools and the talent lived inside, and the institution decided who got close to the warmth.
The bargain doesn’t hold anymore, and students know it.
Every student today walks around with the fire in their pocket. The whole library at Alexandria fits inside a phone. ChatGPT can explain quantum mechanics at any depth, on demand, in any language, at any hour. The fire isn’t exclusive anymore. It’s everywhere.
The Middle Collapses
When access becomes abundant and frictionless, the middle of the market collapses. Only the top-tier competitors survive by becoming status brands. Everything in between gets squeezed. This is the same cycle that struck retail when Amazon commoditized access to goods. Remember Toys-R-Us? Circuit City? Radioshack? If you’d told someone in 2004 that these companies would be gone within twenty years, they would have asked who let you into the building.
Higher education is on the same curve. In the first nine months of 2024 alone, 28 institutions shut down, nearly double the previous year’s total. The share of high school graduates going straight to college has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022. The middle market – which is most institutions – will collapse unless they take action.
For years, institutional edtech has delivered products to students assuming they will engage because they have no alternative. But now, the students DO have alternatives. They’re using them every day.
The C-Word
Every time a faculty committee procures a tool without consulting the students who have to use it, the institution spends a little of its remaining authority. The student opens the software. It’s clunky. It’s clearly built for someone else’s workflow. The student closes it. By senior year they assume anything their school hands them is going to be useless.
To survive, institutions and the edtech firms they work with need to start treating students like customers, because that’s what they are.
This is uncomfortable to write because nobody in higher ed wants to think of students as customers. The word “customer” feels transactional, beneath the noble mission of education. But the word doesn’t change the dynamic.
A Fork in the Road
There’s a way through this. Two ways, actually.
Option 1: Institutions can solve it themselves. Instead of purchasing a tool and tossing it downstream, ask students what problems they actually face, and go deep. Then find solutions to those specific problems. Use the institutional authority that remains to back tools that students actually need.
Option 2: Institutions can let students solve it. The reason this matters now is that this option is increasingly viable. A student today can build a software prototype in days. The next generation of edtech is going to be built by students because they’re closest to the problems. Institutions don’t need to procure tools from a third party who is miles away from their students’ problems. They need to accept the students who know the problem inside and out.
Both paths require institutions to acknowledge something: The student is no longer just the user of the tool. They’re becoming the builder of it.
I would know because I’m one of those student founders. Two years ago I was in community college trying to figure out how to transfer. The tools we were given didn’t solve my problem. So I built the platform that would’ve let me transfer to UC Irvine. Thousands of community college students use it now, not because their schools made them, but because the tool was built for them.
Kavitta Ghai, a UCSB student, built Nectir to help students learn from each other, and it’s now used across 100+ institutions. Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan launched Turbo AI in early 2024 because they couldn’t take notes during lectures. Five million students use it today.
The next generation of edtech isn’t being built in conference rooms. It’s being built in dorm rooms. The institutions that participate will help shape it. The ones that don’t will see it shaped without them.
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Tyler Maher is the co-founder of Pipeline, a transfer planning tool for community college students. Pipeline recently won first place ($30,000 grand prize) at the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition at UC Irvine. Connect with Tyler on LinkedIn.
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