It’s far too early to say much about what the year has in store for ed-tech. But I want to call out a couple of trends – many just a continuation from last year – that seem to be popping up in “the future of education” narratives:

1. For-Profit Higher Education (the sale of the University of Phoenix)
2. Student Loans (perhaps this will be eventually expanded to talk about financial aid as a whole, but right now I’m still seeing plenty of investor interest in the private student loan market)
3. Credentials (just today, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about a new credential program that aims to make professors better teachers. Not sure how a credential program does that – I mean, why not improve graduate education? This strikes me as another example of “credential creep.”)
4. The Employability Narrative (In the past, I’ve talked about the reframing of education’s purpose towards meeting the demands of employers. That seems to be continuing with, for example, the President’s “Computer Science for All” proposal tightly linked to the need for “high skilled workers.”)