2U Goes Undergrad

Last week was a brutal one for 2U, the online program control employer that had been the darling of buyers for a great deal of the remaining decades. As its officers stated for the second time in three months that the organization would develop more slowly than it had previously predicted, stockholders bailed in beautiful numbers, lowering 2U’s value through roughly -thirds (and $1.Five billion) in 24 hours. Today it’s back to enterprise, as usual, starting what is in all likelihood to be an extended process of reassuring investors (and possibly the complete higher schooling generation panorama) that 2U can and could remain a colorful, innovative leader within the area.

This morning, the company announced that it’d begin its first-ever undergraduate diploma program, an internet bachelor of science in statistics technology and commercial enterprise analytics, together with the London School of Economics and Political Science and its figure, the University of London. The program represents a departure for 2U now not handiest due to the fact it is a bachelor’s diploma; however, because its structure — regarding larger cohorts, greater asynchronous transport, and using 2U-employed course “facilitators” — will bring about a charge tag of $20,000 for the 3-yr degree, much lower than a maximum of the business enterprise’s existing master’s degree applications.

The timing of the information, coming days after the agency’s Wall Street massacre, changed into coincidental — 2U and its British partners had been working on the association for greater than two years. But it’s impossible to don’t forget the significance of the assertion independently from what transpired last week, as its leaders acknowledge.

“This turned into us building a program with an existing institutional client, not a reaction to what passed off within the inventory marketplace,” stated Christopher (Chip) Paucek, 2U’s CEO and co-founder. “It happens to be a software this is going to create extraordinary access by way of being priced at an inexpensive degree, and it’s a totally critical step for us to be developing our first undergraduate software. It simply happens to return at a time where we’re being doubted.”

The Undergraduate Market Online

2U has typically occupied the excessive cease of the online schooling market, creating master’s diploma packages with selective public and private nonprofit universities and pricing those programs at those universities’ relatively excessive degrees. In the remaining yr or, though, the company has varied its offerings through buying GetSmarter, a company of shorter-length noncredit courses, and Trilogy, a coding boot camp, and incorporating those providers’ offerings into its partnerships with universities.

Except for one very early initiative in which it sought to pool the online courses of its selective college companions right into a collaborative platform, 2U has in large part avoided online undergraduate packages, as have most selective universities, even though the market for bachelor’s tiers is several multiples large than that for graduate levels.

As Michael Feldstein of literate defined it in an earlier Inside Higher Ed article, “Until pretty lately, the guideline with undergraduate on-line packages has been that the chance of a school imparting such an application was inversely proportional to the popularity of its football group or the excellent of its cafeteria food … In different words, colleges that gift an excellent on-campus experience as part of their price proposition are less probably to find online schooling appealing. But there has been a growing demand in current years for less pricey tiers that also convey the pedigree of a pinnacle-tier faculty.”