Education Is Unbundling and Reassembling in Unexpected Ways
The end of the one-size-fits-all university
For most of the last century, education was delivered as a single, tightly bundled product. Curriculum, credential, campus, community, schedule, and career signaling all came together inside one institution. You enrolled, you attended, you graduated, and only then did work begin.
That bundle shaped generations of students. It also shaped something deeper than academics.
For many people, college was not just where you learned a subject. It was a safe place to grow up. A period of socialization before adulthood fully set in. Where lifelong friendships formed. Where people met their spouses. Where weekends revolved around games, traditions, and shared identity. Where the institution itself became something you identified with and pulled for long after graduation.
These are rarely the first reasons people give for why college matters. But in personal conversations, they are often the hardest things to imagine losing.
Over the past two decades, that familiar bundle has quietly come apart.
Not just in higher education, but across nearly every form of learning.
The great unbundling
Education first unbundled along three dimensions: space, time, and institution.
Learning no longer requires a physical campus. This shift appeared early in online higher education, but it also shows up in K–12 virtual schools, homeschooling networks, bootcamps, professional certification programs, and corporate learning platforms. Education stopped being something you had to travel to.
Learning no longer requires full-time, synchronous participation. Asynchronous coursework, modular programs, part-time enrollment, and rolling start dates are now common. Education increasingly fits alongside work, family, and life, rather than replacing them for years at a time.
Learning no longer requires a single, vertically integrated institution. Content, instruction, assessment, credentialing, housing, dining, retail, and even community are now routinely provided by different organizations. What once had to live under one roof now operates across an ecosystem.
In this sense, the modern university increasingly resembles something else many people remember as a “whole”: the indoor shopping mall.
For decades, the mall felt like a single, unified place. In reality, it was mostly real estate housing a collection of independent businesses, services, and experiences. As consumer behavior changed, those pieces began to separate. Some disappeared. Others moved elsewhere. Many were simply done better outside the mall altogether.
Universities have been undergoing a similar transformation. Dining is outsourced or replaced by national chains. Bookstores are no longer central. Housing is increasingly privatized. Curriculum, textbooks, and learning platforms are sourced externally. Even long-standing elements of campus life are no longer fully controlled by the institution itself.
This unbundling is no longer theoretical. It has momentum, scale, and legitimacy across the education landscape.
The point here is not to argue whether this evolution is positive or negative. In many cases, it may be neither. Unbundling often improves individual components while leaving gaps that were once filled by the whole.
But if we want to understand what education is becoming, it is important to first acknowledge what it is no longer.
Unbundling within the university
The unbundling of higher education is often discussed in terms of delivery models, credentials, or careers. But one of the most recent and clearest signals that the traditional university is no longer a single, coherent bundle comes from somewhere else entirely: collegiate sports.
For much of the twentieth century, athletics were tightly integrated into the university. Sports programs were departments. Student access to games was assumed. Institutional identity, campus life, and athletics were all part of the same package.
That bundle has been quietly coming apart.
Over the past decade, athletic programs have increasingly begun to operate as semi-independent entities, governed by professional rather than academic logic. Financial structures, leadership roles, talent movement, and external partnerships now look far closer to professional sports organizations than to academic departments.
Universities are hiring general managers to oversee athletic operations, a role borrowed directly from professional leagues. In 2024, Stanford University hired Andrew Luck as General Manager of Football, formalizing a shift toward professionalized team management. High-profile athletes such as Stephen Curry and Jayson Tatum have taken on similarly structured roles with their alma maters, reinforcing the idea that athletic programs now operate with their own leadership, strategy, and stakeholder relationships.
At the same time, player mobility through transfer portals increasingly resembles free agency. Coaches move with similar fluidity. NIL arrangements, donor collectives, and sponsorship ecosystems further separate athletics from the academic core of the institution.
Even the student experience around sports has changed. What was once a default part of campus life, attending games as a student, has at many universities become scarce, gated by lotteries, access controls, or donor privilege. Athletics, once bundled with enrollment, is quietly becoming its own domain.
If even the most tradition-bound elements of the university can be separated, professionalized, and reorganized independently, then the unbundling of education is not an anomaly. It is part of a broader structural shift already underway inside higher education itself.
From pieces to possibilities
The first wave of innovation after unbundling typically focuses on the parts. Better content platforms. New credential types. More flexible delivery. Improved assessment. Specialized communities. That phase is important, but it is rarely the most consequential.
The more interesting shift comes later. Once the pieces exist independently, new combinations become possible. Increasingly, it is those new combinations, rather than the individual components themselves, where the most meaningful experimentation in education is happening today.
What follows are several of the rebundlings now taking shape.
Rebundling reputation, flexibility, and affordability inside universities
One rebundling is happening from within traditional universities themselves, particularly at the graduate level.
Institutions such as the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin now offer fully online master’s degrees in computer science, AI, and data science at a fraction of the historical cost. These programs are intentionally designed to be part-time, asynchronous, and compatible with full-time work.
What is notable is not just the delivery model, but the combination of elements being brought together.
These programs bundle institutional reputation, academic tradition, and long-standing prestige with academic rigor, flexibility, and affordability. Rather than asking learners to trade credibility for convenience, they offer both in a single package.
They do not integrate work directly. Instead, they assume learners are already embedded in professional life. The rebundling here is not between education and employment, but between seriousness and accessibility.
The signal is subtle but important. High standards no longer require full-time residency. Strong credentials no longer require six-figure tuition. Respected universities are increasingly willing to separate the value of their degrees from the campus model that once defined them.
Rebundling education with work
Another rebundling goes further, collapsing the boundary between education and employment altogether.
In these models, work is no longer the outcome of education. It becomes the context, the learning environment, and often the funding mechanism itself.
Programs such as Clarke College's Work-Integrated Bachelor's, Flatiron School’s Work Study pathways, Reach University, BMW Scholars, and Aon’s apprenticeship programs all reflect this shift. Students are not asked to pause their economic lives to prepare for work later. Instead, real roles, real responsibility, and real compensation are built directly into the educational design.
Here, the structural implication matters more than the brand names.
When work is integrated into education, financial risk shifts away from the learner. The distance between theory and practice collapses. Education begins to resemble professional formation rather than prolonged preparation.
This is not a return to trade-school thinking. It is a rebundling of higher education around how professional careers actually develop in practice.
Rebundling education with brands, industries, and experiences
Not all rebundlings center on credentials. Some address a different gap altogether: exposure.
As institutional education has focused on academic preparation, it has often struggled to provide meaningful visibility into what many modern careers actually look like. Most students move through high school and even early college with a narrow set of reference points, shaped by their immediate family, their local community, or the professions most commonly depicted in popular culture. Entire industries remain abstract or invisible.
In response, a different kind of rebundling is emerging, one that combines education, industry exposure, and brand affiliation.
Organizations like Edconic exemplify this approach. Many of their offerings take the form of short, experiential programs, often during the summer, for high school students or learners in the transition between high school and college. These experiences are intentionally designed to sit alongside, rather than replace, traditional education.
Through partnerships with organizations such as The New York Times, Vogue, Sotheby’s, and Wired, these programs offer participants a window into how fields like journalism, fashion, art, media, and technology actually operate. Students do not just learn about an industry in the abstract. They see the workflows, the roles, the language, and the cultural norms from the inside.
The educational value here is not primarily about credentials. It is about orientation.
For many learners, these experiences provide the first concrete understanding of what it means to work in fields like marketing, editorial media, or the art world. They help students move beyond vague aspirations toward informed interest or informed disinterest before making high-stakes educational or career decisions.
Brand affiliation plays an important role as well. Having a recognizable name attached to an experience creates a sense of legitimacy and identity, even when the program itself is short. It signals exposure, proximity, and seriousness rather than completion of a formal pathway.
These models are not necessarily a substitute for credentials. But they point to something important. Education is no longer expected to do everything on its own. Increasingly, it is being complemented by experiences that help learners understand the worlds they may eventually choose to enter.
In that sense, this rebundling is less about replacing the university and more about filling a gap the traditional model was never designed to address.
Rebundling community without enrollment
Perhaps the most understated shift is happening around community.
For decades, community, belonging, mentorship, and social life were bundled with enrollment. If you wanted access to peers, networks, and shared identity, you enrolled in a school. Community was not a separate decision. It came as part of the institutional package.
That assumption is now being questioned.
Across society more broadly, there is growing momentum around what are often called “third spaces.” These are places that are neither home nor office, but support identity, connection, and daily life. Social clubs, coworking communities, and hybrid spaces that blend work and culture are increasingly common responses to more fragmented and mobile lives.
Education is not immune to this shift.
We are beginning to see experiments in spaces that support learning, exploration, and community without requiring formal enrollment. Some are designed for high school age learners. Others serve college age or early-career adults. Many are informal, small-scale, or intentionally experimental.
At a deeper level, these experiments point to a change in how educational choices are made. For some learners and families, community may be the most important layer of the experience. Location. Peer group. Cultural or religious alignment. Proximity to family. Access to particular lifestyles or environments. Historically, prioritizing those factors often required sacrificing elsewhere, whether in academic fit, cost, or opportunity.
As community begins to unbundle from enrollment, those tradeoffs may become less rigid. Learners may increasingly be able to choose where and with whom they live independently of what and how they study. Community becomes a layer that can be selected and prioritized based on individual needs, rather than something inherited wholesale from an institution.
At Bletchley, we are exploring this idea through Bletchley Commons. It is not a replacement for school, but a micro-experiment in what community can look like when it is no longer contingent on a credential. Similar questions are surfacing repeatedly in conversations with education leaders, where alternative campuses, independent communities, and hybrid spaces are increasingly part of the dialogue.
This shift does not diminish the importance of community. If anything, it elevates it by allowing it to be designed and chosen intentionally rather than accepted by default.
What AI changes
All of these shifts point in the same direction. But one force is likely to accelerate them dramatically: artificial intelligence.
AI reduces the cost of creating, adapting, and supporting educational experiences. It lowers the friction involved in managing complexity across systems that were never designed to work together. It makes experimentation faster, cheaper, and easier to sustain.
As recombination becomes less expensive, we should expect to see more variety rather than convergence. More niche programs built for specific goals and contexts. More unconventional pathways that do not fit neatly into existing categories. More combinations of work, study, community, and credential assembled in ways that would have been difficult to manage at scale even a few years ago.
Perhaps most importantly, AI reopens a promise education has made for decades but rarely delivered.
Personalization.
Not personalization as a marketing slogan or a minor adjustment to a standardized curriculum, but personalization as a practical reality. Different pacing. Different contexts. Different blends of work and learning. Different sequences and combinations assembled around individual lives rather than institutional defaults.
For most of modern education’s history, personalization was constrained by cost and coordination. AI does not dictate what education should become, but it dramatically expands what is possible.
From institutions to systems
Education is no longer something people simply attend.
It is becoming something they assemble, from unbundled parts, selectively rebundled models, and increasingly personalized pathways. Degrees, experiences, work, community, and identity no longer arrive as a single package. They are layered, sequenced, and combined over time.
The role of institutions is not disappearing, but it is changing. The most durable educational models of the future may look less like single monoliths and more like systems. Networks of programs, employers, platforms, communities, and experiences that work together without being fully owned by any one entity.
This shift is not inherently better or worse. Unbundling often improves individual components while leaving gaps that were once filled by the whole. Rebundling creates new opportunities and new responsibilities.
By Peter Barth
Bletchley Institute Board Member
December 29, 2025
