How Much Money In That Edusector?!!

When you're starting to wonder why so many people are interested in education, even though they have no training, experience, or apparent deep interest in education, it's helpful to see some numbers.

Like 2,600,000,000.

Reportsnreports is an international outfit that provides "market research reports to industries, individuals, and organizations to accelerate decision making process." They offer a library of over a half million reports with coverage of at least 30,000 niche markets. They've got reports on negative pressure wound therapy growth and the zirconium dioxide market. And they pay an average salary of $83K. So this is not some guy writing market reports in his garage.

Reportsnreports has released a report on the "Education and Learning Analytics Market." $2.6 billion is how much money they reckoned was in that sector for 2018. And that's peanuts compared to their projection for 2023, when they figure the sector will involved $7.1 billion.

That's $7,100,000,000.

Analytics are expected to grow in connection with the growth of computer-driven personalized [sic] learning, as well as the growing business of simply collecting and connecting data from education, plus the continued use of the Big Standardized Tests. The list of "key players" from the US includes familiar name like Microsoft and Oracle and SAS as well as lesser-known players like Alteryx and Schoology and iSpring.

So any time someone comes into your country or state or town or school to all about how awesome it would be to wire up your students and help them get a super-duper education powered by super-duper analytics, remember-- the people pushing this stuff may be sincere and may think this stuff will help teach students, but they have probably also noticed that there is just a giant mountain of money to be made in the field of education. analytics and they are just trying to cash in and gather a chunk of it.

Whenever someone is pitching the Next Big Thing that will save education , it's always important to follow the money, particularly in the 21st century, because there is just so very much money involved.