Why MasterClass Isn’t Really About Mastery

What exactly does a university sell? 

You might say they sell training and skills to help students earn a job. 

You might say they sell a space for young adults to explore their intellectual and occupational interests in a low-risk environment. 

You might say they simply sell a stamp of approval; a guarantee that students won’t fall into the cracks of society. 

Or maybe they just sell a year-long summer camp to have fun, meet lifelong friends and let loose. 

The truth is that universities sell all of these things, bundled together. And that’s a big reason they’ve been able to raise prices to astronomical levels over the past several decades — it’s really hard to disrupt all of those things at once.

Now, when any industry raises prices and inflates costs, it will start to attract hungry entrepreneurs trying to change the status quo. Education is no different. But despite many attempts, there have been very, very few billion dollar education companies. Education technology (edtech) is just really tricky to build in. 

In fact, one of the few success stories in edtech is a company that doesn’t really sell education at all: MasterClass.