Amicus Partners

One of the courses in the graduate program I attended focused on the economics of a startup, where you had to build an economic model of your venture. The idea was to understand the fundamentals of revenue, or rather the cost of revenue. In simple terms, how much would you have to spend to make how much.

Central to this question is the paying customer – how does on acquire a customer (and at what cost), what are the conversion rates through the “marketing funnel”, what is the customer journey, and perhaps the most relevant of them all – what is the customer’s “lifetime” value.

These are important questions, central to forming a credible business model. If nothing else, these are questions that you need to ask.

Having said that, and this is where the vexation begins, can these questions apply to education? More specifically, can you apply these questions when the “product” you are selling is education, and the “paying customer” is a student?

For at least five years, I certainly thought so.

After all, Amicus Partners was and is in the business of education, helping paying customers fulfil their educational aspirations. The cost of acquisition, finding the right marketing channel, evaluating the customer’s lifetime value – these are all fundamental parts of our business model.

It is a business model which rests on viewing students (and education) as a product, to be sold and bartered.

This can get a bit discomforting. Or rather, it can get discomforting once you have been through the process yourself – becoming the very source of revenue for another organization.

Which, in my case, turned out to be a US university.

At various points in the graduate degree experience, I felt that all my university really cared about was my tuition dollars. Nothing more, nothing less. Worse than a cog (which is still a component of the whole), here it was your capital which was the cog, you are nearly insignificant.

This was reflected in the relationships you built with your professors, the ways in which the university and its components viewed you, the often-exhausting levels of “brand building” that took place, and the campus experience itself.

Of course, part of this strained relationship stems from the perspective students bring into the learning environment as well. The relationship between the two is that of service provider and paying customer.

It is a perspective that I certainly held. 

For instance, I entered the graduate course expecting a quantifiable return on investment, be it in social capital or capital of the more important kind. The degree, or the actual learning experience itself, was secondary. I suspect that there I am not the only one to think so; a high proportion of clients at Amicus Partners share a similar view of the LLM degree. 

Is this all inevitable? Will universities and students view the other as simply a means to make money? To see how much can be extracted from the other, without forming a deeper bond, one that is not based on monetary or selfish gains? Is that what education will boil down to?

I would like to believe otherwise.

After all, I continue to place faith in the inherent power of education, and of the good that can come with stepping outside one’s known environment. And I think many Indian law graduates can and should derive this benefit.

So, what is the way out?

That is a question I am unable to answer.

But there are some clues I have picked up along the way. Or rather, clues others have been kind enough to share with me. For instance, one of the most thought-provoking conversations I had was with Jon Boeckenstedt, who amongst other things, wrote this piece on the stress faced by admission teams in US colleges. 

It was an article that deeply resonated with me; conversations I had with graduate admissions teams in US law schools supported a lot of the arguments Jon had made. Over a Zoom call, Jon told me (and here I paraphrase) to be very clear as to why you want to work in the field of education. And that if money is your primary motivator, then perhaps you ought to reconsider.

I am only now beginning to understand what he meant to say.