What Makes Pricing in Higher Education Difficult with Chris Uthe

Christopher Uthe is the Director of Product Management at Ocelot, where he champions scalable day-to-day organizational changes to transform it to a product-driven company. He's been working in the education market since 2006, both for an educational institution and for companies that sell education. Chris started his first business at the age of 16.

In this episode, Chris explains how pricing works in institutions of higher education as he discusses the factors that make pricing difficult in that field.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Find out how to find value if you can't get a good and apt pricing metric
• Understand how pricing in higher educational institutions work, as well as the thing that makes it difficult
• Discover why higher education should be more focused on B2C pricing than on B2B

"It's so hard to bundle and discount correctly, that most of the time, that's not being done right."

– Chris Uthe

Topics Covered:

01:28 – The story behind Chris' interest in pricing

02:15 – Pricing and purchasing decisions in higher education

04:37 – What institutions of higher education value: The thing that makes pricing in higher education difficult

08:18 – U.S. News and World Report as a metric: The intrinsic value of one's degree and/or university

11:15 – In B2C vs. in B2B pricing: Where should institutions of higher education be?

14:17 – Talking about RFPs: How it leads us to lose sight of the possibility of a better and smarter solution

19:42 – Chris' pricing advice for the listeners

21:45 – Connect with Chris Uthe

Key Takeaways:

"It's so difficult to come at these purchasing decisions, saying, 'Okay, we have to do only what's best for the student here,' because you've got so many competing priorities that are sort of odd for the market." – Chris Uthe

"Some would tell you that they don't care. There are a sad few that would tell you they might care a little bit about profit because they do have to pay the bills, still. Not all of them are living on generous endowments, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. They care about, hopefully, students' success at the end of the day. They want to talk to you about placement rate. They want to talk to you about probably job acceptance rate. They want to talk to you about average salary coming out of school." – Chris Uthe

"Some of the value – the unspoken value – of your degree or just going to an institution comes from all the doors that it opens for having it on your resume." – Chris Uthe

"It almost always starts with a very altruistic need, which I think is amazing in higher ed, because our students aren't getting the help they need at the right time, for instance, or these students aren't able to log into the learning management system and do something meaningful at the right time or they don't know how to do it, they can't get it done. It starts very altruistic, which is one of my favorite parts of higher education, because it does usually come back to making the student more successful." – Chris Uthe

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Ocelot: https://www.ocelotbot.com/
• CARES Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/748

Connect with Chris Uthe:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisuthe/
• Email: uthe@ocelotbot.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com