More Stress on the Bottom Line

The things private schools must spend money on which are not immediately chargeable to those paying tuition gets longer every year. Additional administrators for human resources, health and safety, and compliance come to mind. So too do upgrades to every school's security infrastructure and personnel. However necessary these expenses may be, none of it is productive in the sense that it does not add value to the a student's education and experience.

This trend will continue and may be on the verge of accelerating given other trends already in motion. Two ventures foreshadow what is coming. First, the potential for AI platforms to undermine academic integrity is driving developers and entrepreneurs to create AI-detection platforms for screening student work. Honorlock is one example, cited here simply because an email blast from them landed in my inbox minutes ago. Honorlock is not alone in this space.

A second area where we expect growth is using AI for threat detection. Intellisee is an emerging example and there are others as a vast tranche of venture capital flows into this area given the increasingly violent nature of the world.

A large school can absorb these expenses, more or less, but we are concerned that small schools will either shoulder the risk and do without or find their net income lines strained even further. Will it become too expensive for some schools to stay in the game? We may be about to find out.