About

I am Shashank Shwet. I have been building in HigherEd for the last 8 years. This blog is an outcome of hundreds of notes that had accumulated in my Apple notes. It is actually a dosier that I would have liked to have the first day of entering this space. I hope the next founder who is thinking to open a university, a college, an alt school, an education company or anything vaguely related to higher education first reads through.

Higher education is one of the largest sectors in the economy and one of the least written about with any precision. There are policy papers and there are think pieces. There is very little in between: plain writing about how these institutions actually make and spend money, and what follows from that.

This is an attempt at the in-between. Each essay tries to be the thing I wish someone had handed me: a clear account of one mechanism — a revenue line, a contract structure, a pricing behavior — and the strategic consequences of it.

The goal over time is comprehensiveness. Not a list of hot takes, but a body of work that a trustee, a provost, or a founder could read end to end and come away genuinely understanding the machine.

I revise essays after publishing when I learn something. If you think I'm wrong, you're probably at least partly right, and I'd like to hear it.