Why Learner Lifetime Value Changes What an Alma Mater Should Be

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I want you to think about the absolute last time your alma mater reached out to you.
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Really picture that email, or maybe that glossy magazine that randomly showed up in your mailbox.
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Ask yourself, was the core purpose of that message to offer you a crucial, perfectly timed update to your professional skills because they noticed some massive structural shift in your industry?
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Or was it a very polite, very well-designed request for a donation?
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I'm going to guess it was the donation.
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I actually think my last outreach was a pair of socks tied to a donation request.
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When she was an infant, she was going through significant health challenges.
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We were in and out of doctors' offices, specialists, emergency rooms, and every time I had this feeling that she wasn't getting the level of care she needed.
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No one was taking seriously that my daughter was struggling to breathe all the time.
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Then one day I happened to be wearing a sweatshirt from my alma mater.
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The doctor noticed it, asked if I went there.
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It sparked a conversation about college experiences, about the institutions we attended, and I could literally feel the shift in her care.
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The level of attention changed, the level of intervention changed.
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To this day, I do not take my daughter to the hospital without wearing something from my alma mater.
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Every single time, now.
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Why that happens is a separate conversation.
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And honestly not one I'm particularly pleased with.
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But all of that to say, I represent my alma mater.
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I also understand the importance of alumni giving.
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I'm in this industry.
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I understand why I'm asked to donate money, any amount of money, for socks or t-shirts or umbrellas.
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That's not the issue.
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It's just not what I need from my alma mater today.
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And I think that raises a more important question.
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Do we need our alma mater today?
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I would argue that we do, but in very different ways than how it currently shows up.
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Sometimes I get an email about a lecture series or what a professor is researching.
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That gets a little closer, but it still misses the point.
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Because what's in it for me?
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Why are we informing instead of continuing to educate?
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Why are we not continuing to deliver value?
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Of course, part of the problem is what does your alma mater actually know about you today?
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It knows who I was 25 years ago.
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It might have some demographic data about my ability to give today, but it does not understand who I am professionally today.
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And it does not have a way to respond to that.
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That's what we're going to talk about today.
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This whole topic highlights something deeper about the current state of higher education.
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When you look at the landscape of the global economy, higher education is kind of standing alone.
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It's one of the very last major sectors built almost entirely on a one-time front-loaded transaction.
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Literally every other industry out there has completely shifted toward ongoing relationships with recurring value.
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But colleges and universities are still obsessively optimizing for delivering value at a single point in time.
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And this is rapidly becoming a massive vulnerability.
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We are operating in an era of constant economic disruption and rapid skill decay.
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You can actually see this outlined in a recent analysis from the Brookings Institution.
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It's by Daryl West, and he made a really compelling case that the traditional model is radically becoming just this idea that you learn intensely until you're just 25 years old.
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And then you basically stop and you just coast on that foundational knowledge for the next four decades.
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This is completely obsolete.
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The economy simply does not allow you to front load a lifetime of knowledge into a four-year window anymore.
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The half-life of a professional skill is shrinking so drastically.
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Let me ground that in a practical way.
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Buying a traditional degree today is a lot like buying a car in the 1990s.
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You relied on a book or word of mouth to research options.
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You showed up in person to get more information.
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And the dealer had the pricing, deals, financing, everything.
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It was complete information asymmetry.
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And over time that started to break down.
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Consumers gained access to information.
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They could compare, evaluate, and make decisions differently.
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And that fundamentally changed the industry.
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Modern industries just don't operate like that anymore.
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They operate like modern electric vehicles, constantly updating, even updating over the air.
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You don't just buy a static product.
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You buy into a continuous ecosystem of patches and optimizations.
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So here's my provocative question.
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If I wake up on a Tuesday, my car might suddenly have better range.
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Should my college degree operate the same way?
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Robert McMahon, president of Kettering University, actually pointed this out on a piece in Fortune.
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He argues that things like rising tuition, the declining enrollment cliffs, and frankly poor job placement outcomes, they aren't isolated problems.
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They're symptoms.
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They're interconnected signals of a system in desperate need of reinvention.
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Higher education has to stop viewing itself as a self-contained, isolated enterprise, or an ivory tower.
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And it has to recognize its actual operational role in a lifelong talent supply chain.
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If an institution doesn't align its operating model with the lifelong career needs of its learners, it risks irrelevance.
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Presence, but irrelevance.
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So today we're exploring what actually happens when education shifts from just tweaking a pricing model to completely overhauling part of its operational model.
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We're going to look at how learner lifetime value, or LLV, provides a major rethinking about how a core function within our colleges and universities operates.
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When we talk about shifting to continuous value, the immediate reaction from an institution is usually, oh, so you want us to charge a monthly subscription fee for our courses, you just want us to bill monthly.
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But that completely misses the fundamental mechanics of what a modern business model actually is.
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A subscription is not just a recurring billing mechanism.
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It's not a new payment gateway that you just put onto an existing product.
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Same product, just pay us monthly now.
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No, it is a fundamental operational commitment to continuously deliver net new value to a learner over time.
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It's fundamentally an operating model, not a pricing model.
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And just look at the sheer scale of how consumers have embraced that continuous delivery.
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McKinse data shows that the subscription economy grew by 300% between 2012 and 2018.
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It is expanding five to eight times faster than traditional business models.
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Tara La Ju Moke wrote a brilliant piece in Harvard Business Review about this.
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She pointed out that the average U.S.
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consumer now manages four active subscriptions.
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I don't know about you, but it's way more than four in my household.
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It's literally a section in our household budget.
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We aren't doing this because we love paying monthly bills.
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We're doing this because these models provide massive convenience, constant novelty, and the ability to tap into these services at the level of our needs.
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Think about what a modern continuous delivery business optimizes for behind the scenes.
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They optimize for retention.
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They optimize for daily, weekly, or monthly engagement.
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Their entire data architecture is built to maximize customer lifetime value.
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Now look at the dashboard of most colleges and universities.
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What metrics are we optimized for?
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Enrollment numbers, credit hours, graduation and completion rates, and so on.
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One operating model is meticulously engineered to keep you engaged in an ecosystem forever.
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The other is literally designed to hand you a very valuable piece of paper, get you out the door, and terminate the primary reason for the relationship.
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We might still engage with you later, but you know how you initially engaged with us for learning.
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That's over.
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Now I can easily imagine some of you listening to this and pushing back hard.
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You're probably saying, look, a university is not a pasta sauce company.
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We aren't Spotify.
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We aren't selling access to a music library.
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We deal in profound, transformational human development and rigorous academic research.
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It's incredibly reductive to treat a four-year life-changing degree like a monthly software license.
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I get it.
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But it completely ignores the harsh reality of a learner's life the minute they step off the physical or virtual campus.
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Hugo Saurazin, the CEO of Udemy, actually addresses the dynamic in an interview with Fortune.
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He was pretty blunt about it.
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He called it silly to think that the education someone absorbs in their early 20s is going to adequately set them up for a 40-year career.
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It's just not realistic anymore and actually hasn't been for quite some time.
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What the modern knowledge worker requires isn't a one-time transformation.
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It's an ongoing continuous evolution of their skills portfolio.
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When a college or university insists on treating education as this rigidly completed event, they aren't protecting the sanctity of the degree.
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They are actually pivoting away from the learner at the exact moment the broader economy demands they continuously adapt.
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Great.
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But if we accept the premise that colleges and universities need to pivot to continuous value delivery, or learner lifetime value, how do we actually engineer that behavior?
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Getting a 20-something to cram for finals is one thing.
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Getting a 35-year-old mid-level manager to voluntarily log into a learning portal every single week is entirely different, right?
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So to understand those mechanics, we actually have to look completely outside of the education sector at industries that have already solved this problem.
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Social media is arguably the best case study for this.
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Connie Chan, a partner with Andres and Horowitz, delivered a deep dive into the mechanics of building winning paid membership programs, and she looked specifically at Chinese social apps.
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Her analysis of Weibo is incredibly revealing for anyone trying to build a continuous engagement loop for learners.
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Weibo Social Media Platform launched a VIP program that was generating$123 million by 2020.
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In the context of a massive platform like Weibo,$123 million was only about 7% of their total revenue.
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Now, from a purely financial perspective, the VIP program might almost sound like a failed initiative.
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Why maintain a complex VIP program if it barely moves the needle on revenue?
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What's fascinating here is that the revenue was never the actual goal of the program.
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The behavioral data was the goal.
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Chan's analysis points out that 84.8% of those paying VIPs were active on the platform more than 15 days a month.
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That's four times the posting and engagement rate of non-VIP users.
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They didn't build the subscription tier to extract a QuickBook.
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They built it to engineer massive regular engagement.
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They created a structure where the user felt deeply invested in returning to the ecosystem constantly.
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Now let's break it down because how does paying a small fee suddenly make someone log in 15 days a month?
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It's not just the sunk cost fallacy.
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Chan points out that they use very specific mechanics.
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They offer tiered perks.
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They built in gamified levels and integrated partner discounts that created this really sticky web of community identity that encouraged people to remain active in the network.
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The subscription itself isn't the actual product.
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The data-driven engagement loop is the product.
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All right, I'm sure you're thinking.
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Fair enough, that's a social media platform.
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How do you apply an engagement loop to something as dense as professional knowledge?
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Well, it requires prediction and curation, and we're all quite familiar with the impact of that.
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In a piece in TechCrunch, Carl Meta and Rob Harls discuss the concept of building a Netflix of education.
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Their argument is that the solution for the knowledge economy is an adaptive platform that uses AI to curate and aggregate content.
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It delivers exactly what a knowledge worker needs, precisely when they need it.
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Think about the mechanics of Netflix.
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They don't have a random movie selector that populates your home screen and says, hey, hope you like it.
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They know what you want.
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Their algorithm tracks your viewing habits.
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It understands your changing tastes and it surfaces the exact documentary you are primed to watch on a Tuesday night.
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Educational institutions need to leverage similar data architecture for professional development.
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These systems do not exist in most institutions today, and that is exactly where investment needs to happen.
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I'm looking at all UAI initiatives in higher ed.
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I actually worked on this problem during the Discovery to Product program at UW Madison.
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How institutions could build data systems that understand what learners, their learners, need over time and deliver it?
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Now I'm keenly aware that almost every legacy administrative structure shatters if you optimize for learner lifetime value as our institutions are structured today.
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Does tuition morph into recurring revenue over 40 years instead of four?
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How does an accrediting body certify a curriculum that is technically never finished?
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Are professors refreshing their content the same way a smartphone requires software patch updates?
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No.
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There's a specific place where this work needs to sit, and I think it's in the reimagination of continuing studies that desperately needs to take place in our industry as a whole.
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I know great work in this regard is being undertaken at several individual institutions.
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A lot of colleges and universities are actively questioning the role of continuing studies.
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I argue that this is the role.
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Not just offering more programs, but building the infrastructure that allows the institution to stay connected to a learner over a lifetime.
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We have historically defined lifelong learning as serving different learners at different stages of their lives.
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What I'm describing is different.
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It is serving a single learner over their lifetime.
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Continuing studies has the opportunity to become continuous content creators and curators for an active working alumni base.
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This is a complete paradigm shift from the isolated ivory tower to an integrated talent partner.
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And frankly, it is highly dangerous if an institution tries to execute this poorly, meaning if they just try to slap a new pricing model onto their old operating model.
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That's why I say that subscriptions are really about the operating model, not the pricing model.
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Harvard Business Review provides a cautionary tale about the Financial Times, which wanted to aggressively boost their digital subscription numbers.
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Their initial strategy was to simply remove all free sample articles and force users into a binary choice, either convert to a paid subscription immediately or leave the site.
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The result was their web visits plummeted by 30%, which was a pretty predictable disaster.
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The underlying lesson is that you cannot just put a toll booth in front of existing content and call it a continuous value model.
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We cannot just put a paywall around career services or gate our monthly alumni newsletter and expect people to pay for it.
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We have to shift to true subscriber centricity, which means aggressively creating new continuous value that solves immediate problems for the learner.
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We have to build an ecosystem the learner actually needs to log into to survive in their career.
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Hugo Sarazin touched on this in that fortune piece with his idea of cohabitation between traditional degrees and ongoing skills training.
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The university has to reenvision itself as a launching pad.
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Campus is not the final destination where you achieve enlightenment forever.
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Not even through a graduate degree program.
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Our colleges and universities need to be base camps.
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They are the institutions you constantly return to when you need to re-equip for the next climb.
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It requires moving from an alumni relationship predicated entirely on nostalgia.
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You know, remember the good old days in your dorm.
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Please send us a check.
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Imagine an alumni relationship that says our data indicate you just got promoted to a mid-level management role in the logistics sector.
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Based on that, here's a highly curated three-week asynchronous module on Modern Supply Chain with AI fully integrated in your ongoing membership.
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So what does the first step toward this operating model actually look like?
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What is the most immediate, implementable step that doesn't require tearing down the legacy degree program?
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I think it's to launch an alumni learning membership.
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This is completely different from a standard alumni association fee, which usually gets you a bumper sticker, a magazine, the tote bag.
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This is a cohort-based ongoing learning community that bundles highly curated mechanics, directly drawn from that Weibo example we used where tiered benefits drive habit formation.
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Maybe the perk is exclusive priority access to virtual office hours with top industry professors.
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Or maybe it's placement into highly vetted peer mastermind groups based precisely on your current stage in your career.
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That's the engagement loop.
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Then you layer in the AI curation concept, the Netflix of education model from TechCrunch.
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Remember, this requires building the data infrastructure that allows you to leverage new learner and alumni data, to create custom learning engagement, and send personalized marketing for learning.
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Here's where the over-the-air updates to EVs come back into play.
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Let's say the college updates its core undergraduate marketing curriculum to include a heavy emphasis on generative AI prompt engineering.
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Instead of that knowledge only going to 19-year-olds on campus, the alumni learning members get a compressed content refresh module sent directly to their portal, so you're patching their skill gap in real time.
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It's a powerful retention tool because it visually proves to the alumni that the institution cares about their ongoing needs, not just their wallet.
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There was an ed tech startup called Epic, which was purchased by Baiju, which was essentially a Netflix for kids' books.
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The true genius of their operating model was how they completely blurred the boundary between home and school.
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Teachers use the platform in the classroom, but families subscribe to the same platform.
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One investor interviewed in a piece about Epic pointed out that a separation between school and home is a false one when it comes to learning.
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If we connect this to the bigger picture, that philosophy is the exact paradigm shift traditional colleges and universities must internalize.
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The strict separation between the campus and the workforce is a completely false boundary.
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It is an artificial wall erected by that outdated, front-loaded operating model that I talked about at the top of the podcast.
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Colleges and universities have the capability to seamlessly weave their academic rigor into multi-format pathways that follow the learner everywhere.
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A learning module doesn't have to be rigidly constrained to a 16-week semester.
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It can be a custom podcast feed, a short-form video series, a module within a peer learning cohort of alumni leaders in a particular industry, all dynamically triggered by the learner's immediate career needs and passion projects.
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This idea effectively dissolves the line between being a student and being a professional.
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You stop being an alumnus of a past event, and you simply become a continuous learner, permanently attached to your college of university.
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This also forces a shift in the capabilities of our leaders and program managers.
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Suddenly, we're not just looking at the spreadsheet of who completed a degree program in May or who we retained from last semester or last fall.
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We're actively monitoring retention.
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Actively monitoring retention.
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We're asking who is logging into the portal this week, who is engaging with new modules on emerging skills, which cohorts are finding continuous value in our mastermind groups.
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The institution begins almost by necessity to optimize for learner lifetime value, which brings today's entire conversation into sharp focus.
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The core takeaway is undeniable.
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We are actively witnessing an evolution away from point-in-time value in the education sector.
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The 1990s car model of buying a static degree and hoping it lasts is entirely broken.
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The future of learning belongs to the institutions and platforms that can seamlessly integrate continuous, personalized value delivery into the daily lives of their learners.
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The organizations that thrive and influence the market in the next decade will be the ones who figure out how to maximize learner lifetime value through ongoing utility, not just initial enrollment numbers.
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This is a lifelong relationship.
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This also raises an important question to push that concept even further, because think about the generational expectations that are being set right now.
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If platforms are already conditioning children in elementary school to view learning as a seamless, interest-driven, continuous subscription that blends effortlessly into their daily lives?
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And if the modern workforce absolutely demands relentless, ongoing upskilling to just remain relevant, it forces us to reevaluate the entire structure of our colleges and universities.
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Will the traditional, highly expensive four year campus experience eventually be viewed not as the culmination of an education, but simply as the onboarding period for a 40 year educational subscription?
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What would it look like for the four year or three year Degree to be nothing more than the learner acquisition phase?
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Should our conversation even be about compressing the four-year degree into a shorter three-year degree?
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Or should it be about extending the window within which learners look to us, their alma mater, a single institution, as their trusted source of professional learning across their lifetime?
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When you look at what your institution offers, is it designed to end or is it designed to continue?
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Thank you for joining me today to look beyond the Ivory Tower.
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Talk to you soon.