

The Classroom as a Cash Cow - sew
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/technology/discovery-invests-in-digital-textbooks-in-hopes-of-growth.html?hp&pagewanted=all

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benackles
On the one hand, it frightens me to think that an ideology-driven company like
News Corp thinks it can generate 10 percent of it's future revenue from
education. On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely they'll succeed in this
objective. The future of education will come form the bottom up, where
innovators create new technologies to solve problems, not prop up their
struggling print divisions.

The reality is education will be solved by entrepreneurs and forward-thinking
educators. If you attack the problem with a pure profit motive, you aren't
solving the core problems. Education is a sector rife with inefficiencies and
ineffectiveness, but it's not cash cow, at least it won't be in the very near
future. Budgets are getting slash and the cost of traditional education is
becoming misaligned with value.

There's plenty of opportunities in education, but it's hard to believe an
aging $55 billion company is going generate 10 percent of their revenues from
a sector in budgetary decline.

