How to make a mint off the coming higher ed contraction

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How to make a mint off the coming higher ed contraction<br>Exploit the trust failure now

Hollis Robbins<br>May 23, 2026

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The next years will be a bloodbath as colleges and universities close. Hundreds of people will lose their jobs and thousands of students will join the millions who have taken a bunch of courses but don’t have a degree.<br>There is an enormous business opportunity for anyone who recognizes that the “college degree” is losing its monopoly on what counts as “completed learning.” Transcripts and diplomas are already weak signifiers. “Trust but verify” has turned into “double check and make a phone call.” But who to call about an online program from a closed institution?<br>Whoever builds the first credible institution that records what students actually know and turns it into a respected form — not a credential, not anything borrowed from a dying system — will define a brand new category, set a new standard, and authorize a new public language for bundles of learning. Tyler Cowen suggested some years ago that if he were designing a school from scratch, “the people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors.”<br>It is time to separate what a student learned from whether he or she finished the degree. Whoever can figure out a new way to do this, wins. Many have tried this. Nobody has succeeded largely because they have been captured by the institutions that want students to “stay” in school.1 That’s ideal but it doesn’t solve the orphan or stranded credit problem.<br>Stranded credits are not a deficit. A student with seventy-two credits has not failed to finish. Those seventy-two credits are completed academic labor. Colleges don’t have a halfway term because a completed degree is their only social product.<br>This new product would be a registry, a kind of credit bureau, land registry, and LinkedIn all at once. The registry confirms you learned something and registers it. The world can check the registry when it needs to know what the student can do. An examination will surely be involved but the registry, not the examination, is the asset.<br>A student’s registry will summarize what has been verified about the coursework. There would be a scale defined to measure what was learned, additive rather than subtractive, growing as the student adds verifications rather than shrinking against an absent ideal.<br>Joining would be voluntary, which means any score derived from comparisons against that population will measure verified-competence-among-people-who-chose-to-be-measured rather than verified-competence-among-stranded-learners-overall. Verifiers would eventually figure out the difference. In the early years, the score would be a measure of how much has been verified at what level. Later, percentile-against-the-registry could be a meaningful claim. The number will not be obvious to set.<br>The new company would be like LinkedIn, the default place to look up someone’s professional identity because it accumulated records faster than any competing institution could. It took LinkedIn fifteen years to become canonical and operated at a loss for most of that time. A registry of verified learning will likely have the same establishment curve.<br>The population that needs this is already enormous. The National Student Clearinghouse counts 37.6 million working-age Americans with some college and no credential. Even at a loss-leader price of fifty dollars to record a verified competence, one percent of that population recording three competences each is $56 million. Five percent is $282 million. Those are gross figures before charging a single employer, workforce board, or state agency for access to the registry. The student side is the loss-leader to acquire the population the way LinkedIn lost money to acquire its database. The company’s value is the market position and the population it registers.2<br>The company will need to be able to refuse registration of old and unverifiable coursework, too-easy classes, no testable skills, failed examinations. Here’s the opportunity. A higher education system whose prestige once rested on the ability to deny admission and refuse to award degrees has been quietly granting degrees for AI work product. A registry of verified learning may become more meaningful than a college degree in the short term, if universities do not move quickly on AI work masquerading as student work. The company should publish its refusal rates the way a selective college publishes its admit rates, and for the same reason.<br>Headwinds: the enormously well-funded, high-minded foundations — Lumina, Aspen, Gates — that are all-in on the completed college degree. Follow the money. Lumina was created in 2000 with $770 million from the sale of USA Group, a student loan guarantor, to Sallie Mae. The endowment sits in the markets and compounds. It is now $1.5 billion. Lumina has no financial stake in...