Start a vocational school today!

There has truly never been a time when it is easier to start a school. I was on a panel at Bloomberg Beta the other night, and a bunch of founders were asking about where to focus. In my opinion, vocational is a greenfield right now, caused by five factors:

1 — There is a jobs crisis as we accelerate the move from industrial to the information economy. This creates the need.

2 — Higher education is broken. It costs too much and doesn’t think its purpose is to get students jobs.

3 — Income Share Agreements make schools free for students until they get a job and pay you back. This causes your applicants to skyrocket.

4 — Zoom and Slack now allow you to create a fully online school which is more interactive and personal than a physical school. Since no one has done this before, it’s a competition among startups. Online schools are inherently global, so your applications skyrocket again.

5 — There are areas where employers can’t hire enough people. Yes, there are the obvious ones like coding and sales, but if you look at reports like this, they show you dozens of areas where there are 100,000 or more open positions. Combining this employer need with the need of people to find jobs is the combination you need to start a new school.

So get on it, and send me your decks, I want to fund 50 vocational schools in the next year or two.