LONDON, Jan. 24, 2019
Global education market intelligence firm, HolonIQ, released its 2019 Global Education Outlook today in London at the global education conference Learnit. HolonIQ’s outlook includes key market estimates for 2025, critical trend and policy analysis, and assessments on the potential impact from new technologies. The Outlook includes global data demonstrating that even with impressive 11% annual growth, today’s Education Industry will leave 500 million students behind without serious and immediate transformation.
The Outlook finds a grossly under-digitized industry (less than 3% of expenditure), unable to scale and meet the needs of an additional 500 million students around the world by 2025. The half a billion un-served students represent a critical source of human capital for global growth – for developing and developed economies alike. A protracted decline in public funding and ongoing political instability, are producing a significant delay in both reform and innovation policy from many governments around the world.
HolonIQ’s Smart Estimate™ for Total Global Education Expenditure is $8 trillion for 2025. While the formal sector is not expected to change significantly over that period, Education Technology Expenditure, fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), is expected to double, reaching $341 billion by 2025, evidenced by the aggressive acceleration in venture capital invested through 2018, which reached a record $8 billion. Education focused AI expenditure itself is estimated to be a $6 billion market by 2025.
“Gradually, then suddenly. That’s how we expect education technology adoption to change through to 2025,” explained Maria Spies, Co-Founder and Managing Director, HolonIQ. “We estimate that the speed of digitisation in education will overtake healthcare, due primarily to the build-up in capability over the past 10 years, and fueled by explosive growth in artificial intelligence with China, the US and India taking the lead on innovation.”
Worldwide Impact: Asia Leading, U.S. Behind, Europe playing catchup.
Education technology is becoming a global phenomenon, and as distribution and platforms scale internationally, the market is projected to grow at 11% per annum, to $341 billion by 2025. The US set the pace for the prior five years and now Asia, led by China and India, are experiencing the world’s fastest growth in investment into the Education sector.
Europe has seen strong grassroots innovation; however, the region remains a largely under-invested and fragmented market, home to the publishers and content giants that dominated the last century. Africa is poised for explosive growth post-2025 as population growth fuels enormous demand for skills and the tech-ready continent of almost half a billion unique mobile subscribers leapfrogs the traditional infrastructure of developed nations, adopting mobile-first learning solutions.
Patrick Brothers, Co-Founder and Managing Director, HolonIQ explained that the growth and innovation in education and training will come from the informal learning and technology-led sectors, driven by consumer and enterprise investment outside of the traditional schooling and post-secondary market. “Pre-K, tutoring, language training, credentialing, professional upskilling, online programs, peer-to-peer and mentoring models are but a few of the innovation clusters which will either augment or displace more traditional, expensive and slower alternatives,” detailed Mr. Brothers.
Population growth will be a key challenge for the Education sector. By 2035, there are expected to be 2.7 billion students worldwide. “In order to meet higher education demand under the current structure, at least two universities need to be built each day, over the next ten years,” Mr. Brothers said. As such, the report finds that leading education providers must seek new ways to capitalize on growth by expanding their brands to export markets, allowing individuals to access internationally-recognized qualifications.
As a whole, Education is very early in the technology adoption stage, giving it the opportunity to leapfrog the typical linear technology path most other industries have followed. This opens the door for Education Technology such as AI, voice interfaces, machine learning and others, to address the student cost, access and ROI challenges and institutional efficiency, effectiveness and growth objectives. With 90% of the world’s population under 30 living in emerging markets, education and vocational training in the area will be led by mobile-first strategies that provide knowledge and skills when and where they’re needed. In other words, the global market for education and training will turn from a supplier-driven to a learner-led market.
“In a rapidly evolving economy where skill sets continue to progress at an accelerated pace, innovative digital models offer a way to capture these changes and provide new routes for re-skilling as well as addressing widespread labor shortages,” Mr. Brothers continued. “An enormous number of new and radically different jobs will emerge by 2025, and consequently, there will be a growing need to continually re-train the workforce in order to address current skill gaps and increase the use of continuous learning.”
The 2019 Global Education Outlook will be discussed in detail at the Learnit education conference in London on 24-25 January, during which more than 1,000 delegates and over 100 speakers from around the world will come together to champion growth and innovation in the education sector.
