Venture capital and education: a visual history of the past decade (infographic)

Last month super-angel Dave McClure told me that one of his hottest areas of investment was education. McClure and 500 Startups are mostly investing in informal education, but all of education is ripe for disruption, as Codecademy, Khan Academy, and MIT OpenCourseware are teaching us.

Boundless, the free educational content company, looked at the last 10 years of venture capital investment in education.

Overall, it’s not a great track record, with education taking only three percent of VC investment in the past decade, even though the sector is 5.5 percent of the economy. And the total investment has only been $2.8 billion — less than half of what was invested in biotech in 2011 alone.

But there is good news.

2012 will see five times more investments in education than 2002, and total investment dollars will likely hit almost $600 million, compared to $150 million in 2002 and only about $60 million in 2005.

Trends include digitizing textbooks and other educational materials, online courses and institutions, and better ways of validating or assessing student learning.

For all the information, here’s the infographic:

photo credit: yauhin1 via photo pin cc