2U's David Sutphen On the Reality of the OPM Business Model

Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. Excited about today's conversation with David Sutphin, the chief strategy and engagement officer at 2U, which you may know is the market leading online program management company in the space. Publicly traded, but also much more significant than that, really building a full platform from free to degree offerings that help accelerate individuals lives on a variety of fronts. David has been a incredibly influential thinker in the space as 2U has continued to evolve its own strategy and so forth. And I'm excited to bring him up right now to the main stage if you will. Good to see you, David.

Good to see you too.

Yeah, and have a, you know, we'll have a wide ranging conversation here. If people have questions, they can pop it into the comments. I'll ask some of them, not all of them and, and we'll see where we go. But the, you know, I wanted to dig in in particular because obviously OPMs have attracted a lot of attention over the last several years as you know, some of it, you know, positive for the growth, some of it negative around regulatory and other concerns. Before we get all of that, I think people would be interested in your own personal story of how you got to 2U in the world of education. And so, so maybe let's start it there and then we can ground into some of these bigger questions that people are asking about the industry right now.

Sure. Well, thrilled to be here and you know, happy New Year. You know, I grew up in Milwaukee. You know, my parents were kind of, you know, civil rights era kind of advocates. You know, my mom's Jewish, white, my dad's black, Native American. It was actually a felony still in the United States for them to get married when they got married in the early 1960s. So they had to like go across state lines to on a bus to get married at the justice of the Peace in Kansas City, Kansas. From Kansas City, Missouri. So I grew up very much in a household. Both my parents were public servants. Very much wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, you know, followed my sister out east to college and you know, also, you know, kind of knew early that the law and social justice were important to me. And so early in my career that's what I spent my time doing. I worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and I worked for Bryan Stevenson. And after I graduated from law school and clerked, I ended up at a law firm for six months and then I moved into politics and I ended up being the chief of staff to my Best friend in law school, Harold Ford Jr. Who got elected to Congress at the ripe age of 26, straight from law school. And I did that for a couple of years. And then I moved to the Senate side, which to this day is probably the most fulfilling, compelling job I've had. Love to you. But I worked for Senator Kennedy and I was his general counsel on the Senate Judiciary committee. I was 29. Started the first week of the impeachment trial of President Clinton. But the best part of the role was I got to handle civil rights issues for Senator Kennedy, which kind of allowed me to kind of, you know, realize that dream. Interestingly, I also happened to work on intellectual property issues on the Judiciary Committee because nobody else wanted to do those on the Kennedy staff. And that's when Grokster and Napster hit the scene. And then I ended up leaving the Hill to go become a lobbyist for the major record labels during all of the fights over this, you know, peer to peer. And then I moved to Viacom around the same time that they were grappling with all the Daily Show Comedy Central shows. Being on, you know, YouTube as we are now, who knew what an amazing platform it would turn out to be from, from a content distribution perspective. And all along, I mean, education had been, you know, kind of core to me, like many people, transformational in my life. You know, I got into Amherst because of soccer and affirmative action and I went to law school at Michigan. And you know, after I left Viacom, I worked in the PR space for a long time for a British firm called Brunswick and actually started to do a lot of education work in that role. And, you know, I ended up at 2U because of two people, Jim Shelton and Phil Bronner. Phil was a one of the early stage venture investors in 2U and Jim obviously was the deputy secretary of the Department of Education and the lead innovation person at the department in the Obama era and actually came to 2U after he left the Obama White House to be the first chief impact officer at the company. And then outside of 2U, I'm also very involved in education and, you know, my passion for soccer still exists. So I'm on the board of the U.S. soccer foundation, but all my other kind of philanthropic nonprofit work is in the education space. So I was a trustee at my alma mater in Amherst for six years. I just recently joined the board of directors of Teaching Strategies, which is a privately held company actually based here in the D.C. area, who's the leader in pre K through early elementary, you know, providing curriculum and Teacher training and assessment. Really compelling company that actually just made the GSV, you know, 150 transformation. Yeah, yeah. And then I'm on the board of Citibridge foundation, which is. Was Catherine and David Bradley's personal foundation, has been now become an independent nonprofit that works with innovative school models in D.C. and then I chair the board of Get Schooled, which was launched originally about 12 years ago by the Gates foundation in Viacom and was just actually selected by the NFL as one of their inspire change nonprofits. So, you know, in my day job at 2U and then outside of 2U, I, I spend a lot of my time thinking about education now from K to higher ed. And then I, my most recent thing is I joined the board of advisors at the Ford School of Public Policy where Michael Barr is the dean. So all things education and that throughput of access and equity and making a difference in the world is what inspires me to do what I do every day.

I just think it's. I wanted to start there because I've known some of that story obviously before and heard it. But I just think it's important to ground folks in the lens that you bring to these questions and the answers that we're going to hear as we sort of work through how the OPM model works and what its purpose is. I want to start high level because as online education has grown significantly in the higher ed world, you know, from my disruptive innovation lens, one of the big things of that is that it's expanded access. It has reached people for whom higher education was out of reach for any number of logistical, financial, et cetera, reasons, and brought it into reach and allowed them to avoid trade offs that they would have had to make in the past. OPMs have clearly been part of that story of expanding that access, expanding that pie. But a lot of onlookers, so not even just the OPM model, but just more broadly in online education, they've noticed that there's a big expenditure on marketing as part of those online programs. So I'd love you just to sort of put that in context of how you think about the rise of online programs, the rise of marketing to get folks to enroll in those programs. And you know, is it as different as some people maybe claim from the traditional higher ed model? Or how do you think about the cost of marketing to get people informed and to enroll in these programs?

Yeah. So, you know, happy to dive in there. I think it's important when you talk about where we are in online education and particularly the role that OPMs and you know, digital transformation platforms like 2U n EDX play in the marketplace. It's important to remember, like phase one of online education was almost exclusively for profit players. You know, and by for profit players, I mean for profit degree granting institution as opposed to profit making enterprises that are like 2U and Coursera and others. I mean, we're for profit entities, but we don't grant degrees. And I think sometimes that distinction gets blurred, sometimes intentionally by folks. But the reality is, I think if you take a step back and you look at online education, we've kind of reached a point where everyone realizes it's not going away. I think one of the interesting things about COVID is that institutions have now realized, and all of our partners are nonprofit institutions, realized that it has to be part of their broader strategy. So it used to be individual schools at institutions would kind of go out on their own, think about launching an individual program or the like. And regardless of whether an institution decides to go online by themselves, use a what a lot of people refer to as a fee for service model, or enter into what we would describe as a shared success OPM revenue share, tuition, revenue sharing relationship. One thing is uniformly the case. Regardless of whether you're a for profit university or a nonprofit university. If you go online, you have to find students, they don't come to you. So I think one of the first foundational misperceptions and what I would argue at times is kind of a little bit of intellectual dishonesty at times in the conversation is everyone has to spend money on marketing. So it's not like the two U's and the OPMs of the world are the only players that are spending money on marketing. And by the way, everyone is spending more and more on marketing. And part of the reason for that is as online education gets more crowded, think of it, it means there's more people bidding on the terms that you would want to bid on to attract and identify learners. I think one of the things that people don't realize about the value of an OPM relationship is, I believe it was last year Burning Glass MC did a research report that showed that 27% of online programs fail, meaning they never get enough students. So failure to launch. Yeah, failure to launch or failure to get to a sustainable scale. Because that's the other part about this. Like programs have to be sustainable. It's not just enough to launch a program. You want it to reach a certain size and be sustainable. And you know, there's a lot of upfront costs associated with online beyond just acquiring the students, it's all the technology and developing the curriculum. So it's a major risk proposition. And if you get it wrong, it can be exceedingly expensive and painful. Which is one of the reasons why a lot of the internal efforts that universities have tried to do on their own have not been that successful. And it's because it's complicated. And so when, when you think about the value that 2U brings to the table is we're operating at a level of scale in terms of we now have 550plus different offerings that we're powering from, as you said, now free to degree. But prior to the edx transaction, you know, we had professional education, what's sometimes referred to as short courses, boot camps and degree programs. And we do bespoke white label paid and organic marketing for every single one of those programs in the name of the institution. And the value of that is we bring a lot of scale to that. So you're either writing checks to Google, you're writing checks to Facebook, you're writing checks to LinkedIn. And if you're an individual school or an individual program, I often describe it as like you're going to drop your little rowboat into the ocean and try and navigate the waters of how to effectively market in a digital era, where to be perfectly honest with you, Facebook and Google and others are changing the currents all of the time. Whether it's geography based for this or that or you've got to understand various. And so I would argue from a, from an efficiency perspective, we can actually spend the marketing dollars more efficiently than a university can, both because of our scale and because of the sophistication of the digital infrastructure and data architecture that we have that allows us to understand what's the most effective place to spend money, depending on who the students are that you're trying to attract. The other. I think big part of this debate that people don't realize is none of the degree programs that 2U powers are open enrollment.

So part of the different from the for profit traditional model you referenced.

So one of the reasons why, I think the legitimate criticisms historically of the for profit model were if you control the marketing spend, the admissions criteria and the admissions decision, then you just play with the dials depending on how much, you know, money you're trying to make or students you're trying to enroll, doesn't work that way. For 2U, we front all of the marketing dollars out of our portion of the revenue share. And so but we don't make any of the admissions decisions. And we don't set the admissions criteria. So from a. Even if you're a skeptic of our model and you think that our financial pecuniary interests drive our decision making, then the most rational thing for us to do is to only go after students who can actually get into the programs. And we want to spend our marketing dollars in the most efficient way. Because if we spend them on students that don't convert, we take the hit on that, the school doesn't have to worry about that. So I think this notion somehow that we are incentivized to spend crazy money on marketing just for the sake of spending and drive more students into the programs, we. We can't do that. And then the last thing that I would say, which you and I have talked about before, is we're a publicly traded company. And so when people look at our balance sheet and they say, oh, two, you spent x percentage 40% of its revenue on marketing, that's not really an accurate number. And the reason why is, remember, you have to spend the marketing dollar before the student enrolls into the program. And particularly in the degree program business, where the, you know, the time from the first marketing dollar to a student enrolling can be seven to nine months. So if you're launching a new program and you're spending all of your marketing dollars on the front end, to really understand the percentage of marketing dollars versus the amount of revenue generated by that student, you have to wait until the student completes their program, which in a graduate degree program could be two or three years down the road. So the numbers that someone is looking at in a current balance sheet don't really reflect a fair, you know, apples to apples comparison. And when we do, when we've done that in our transparency report, what you'll find is we spend, you know, on average, 20 to 25% on marketing, which in any industry that advertises and spends money on marketing on the Internet, that's pretty normal. Yeah.

And so by contrast, right, that would look like 40% or something like that if you did the just line it up in the same period sort of simplistic analysis, I think, just to double click on something. And then I want to go deeper on one piece of what you just said. The implication of also strikes me that on ground program programs have done marketing and advertising historically as well. We just haven't labeled them as such on their financial sheets, athletics, buildings, things they do in the community. All of those things are effectively marketing and advertising and building reputation.

And so Forth, we're now different applications go up at top schools when they're footballs, football and basketball 100.

Right. And, and, and a bunch of schools would not, you know, they lose money, strictly speaking on the athletics outside of, you know, University of Alabama, which.

Or in Georgia, or in Georgia in.

This case, I guess if we're, if we're responding to the moment. But, but the majority of schools lose dollars. They're willing to pay for it because it's not just the experience for the students, it's that marketing and so forth that it creates. So I think there are, there's probably a bunch of reclassification we need to have to really add an apples to.

Apples Michael that I think gets lost. And I would encourage people. We just literally put out our second transparency report at the end of calendar year 2021. And it's a backward looking report. So it's for 2020, but we put it out at the end of 2021. But I would argue the other thing that gets lost in the debate around marketing is the quality of the outcomes. Right. Because part of the concern in the past was you're spending all this money to attract people to enroll in a product that delivers a substandard outcome or no outcome at all. Well, the irony in our model is that we have a huge incentive to have students retain and complete because again, because we share revenue and tuition as they progress. The only way we recoup all of that front end investment is if students complete their programs. And if you look at the quality of the outcomes in the degree programs that we power and across the portfolio as a whole, you'll see that as the Gallup research shows, really strong outcomes. So the notion that somehow there's something inherently wrong with marketing. Well, if you're marketing a quality product that's going to deliver a life changing outcome that's positive and enable somebody to become a physician assistant or a nurse or obtain their data science degree, I don't think that's a bad thing. Right. I don't know about you, but over the holidays I signed up for a bunch of 15% discounts on various things and the number of emails that I get or texts that I get from retailers every single day as opposed to, we only reach out to people who have literally gone to a site and said I am affirmatively interested in information about this particular degree program. And we show them not just that degree program, but others that. And oftentimes there's a wide range in price offerings of those programs that they can choose among yeah.

So I think what you're talking through also has another implication for this conversation, which is, and people have commented on it, I'm seeing a little bit, which is, you know, this revenue share model, which is, to your point, really born out of de risking for the institution, that upfront investment, and then aligning incentives for helping students go through the entire program and recouping that investment over time. But something that you've seen in plenty of the media has been this implication that some of the programs that you all support have very high price tags to them. And the implication being, well, of course 2U wants to push students toward the higher price tag program because that's a way for them to recoup this exorbitant marketing dollars or whatever that they're spending. You in conversations with me, have said the incentives are in fact the opposite, that it's advantageous from a 2U perspective to get people to go to lower priced programs. And sometimes you have to push your partners on these conversations. Just wonder if you could reflect and talk about that dynamic and unpack it a little bit more.

Yeah, again, I think it's important to take a step back and remember that, you know, because a lot of people have said to me since I joined to you, well, why doesn't 2U work with, you know, community colleges or, you know, regional state public institutions? Remember when 2U launched, you know, 13, 14 years ago, the only online education at that point were traditional for profit universities. And you know, there was a reputation that online education was not good. And so I think Chip and the other founders of the company realized that they thought there was real opportunity to demonstrate that online could be as good, if not better than a physical campus. And they, I think, rightly concluded that in order to prove that, we need to work with the best institutions in the world. So the disproportionately Large Number of 2 Use partners are private nonprofit. So by definition, their tuition prices tend to be higher. I think the other thing that is important to reinforce, as we've talked about, is we don't set the tuition prices of our programs. I think one of the things that some people, you know, like to imply is that these governance lines and our relationships are blurred and they're not. So the things that we have no control over when it comes to degree programs are accreditation, curriculum decisions, admissions criteria, admissions decisions, the faculty, which are, you know, employees of the university, and they set the tuition prices. And I'll give you a concrete example. You know, usc, which has been in the news a bit I'm sure some people have seen. What people don't realize About USC is USC's price per credit is the same across the entire institution, regardless of the degree program. So the criticisms that we've received about some of the programs at USC being too expensive. Well, if you look at usc, it's an expensive school across the board, and their programs that are online, whether those programs are online in partnership with another OPM or with 2U or on their own, are all priced at the same price per credit. Now, one of the things that I think there needs to be a kind of a discussion about in higher ed is are the accreditation requirements for disciplines, particularly those that require clinical placements. So some of the more expensive degrees are ones that require students to spend as much time out in the field working with real people, which we would all want. You don't want to go, as Chip would say, you know, to the. The midwife that delivered the virtual baby or the teacher that's never been in a classroom with kids, although maybe that's slightly changing because of COVID and virtual.

Sure.

But my point is that, you know, if people have been paying attention, they saw that USC recently reduced the price of its social work program, and they did that by reducing the credit hours, not the price per credit. And the reason is the price per credit is the same regardless of the program and the mode of delivery. So to the extent that there are critics out there that say, oh, the reason why the program at USC is expensive is because of 2U, there's no logic to that, because the reason why the program is priced at what it is is because the price per credit across the entire institution at USC is what it is. And the proof that our model is not driving cost is evidenced by the fact that we have other social work programs in our portfolio. I believe we have seven or eight now, including Fordham and. And Syracuse, which are literally priced almost half of what the program is at usc. So if our model could only work with a program that was priced at the level of usc, Fordham would now not be the largest social work program in our. In our portfolio. But it is. And to your point about cost, education is not an inelastic good, Right? So the more expensive it is, chances are, the harder it is going to be to get people to enroll in it. And the harder it is to get people to enroll, the more money you need to spend on marketing to find that next student. So we, across our entire portfolio, are consistently working with partners to talk to them about how to think about reducing the cost of their programs. And it's their ultimate decision. And you know, we have some examples of partners that have done that. Syracuse has reduced, Simmons has reduced. You know, we have this really great partnership, you know, with UC Davis, you know, the business school, where we're doing, you know, interest free tuition, deferment program, program. And I would argue over time, our scale combined now with EDX will enable us over time to bend the cost curve. Because the reality is an individual program at an individual school or even an individual school will never have enough scale to be able to get at the need to reduce the cost. And what's been interesting in our, in our programs that, that have chosen to reduce the cost of their tuition, they have often done it for both the physical campus program and the online program. So what that tells me is that when you get it right, online actually has the ability to bend the cost curve, not just in the online space, but on the physical campus as well.

That's super interesting. It gets into something that you talked about earlier, which is outcomes and value for the learner. And you know, Beth Akers at AEI is always fond of saying taking on debt to go to higher ed is not a bad investment in many cases. Right. And it's not something we should just totally steer clear of where it's going to pay off and help you in better earnings that allow you to repay that debt and potentially is, to your point, change your life. Those are the family members and so forth. The question is really getting that value equation. Right? And you know, if I, if I read into your comments, right, some of these programs that have a substantial clinical placement, they don't always pay off. You know, like a doctor perhaps might, you know, nurses or teachers or social workers have a different profile of what they're likely to be able to earn. And so higher ed, I think, getting more attuned, this isn't a conversation about OPMs in my mind. This is a higher ed conversation getting more attuned to pricing, right? Getting what is the pricing, what are we willing to pay those employees and those workers for? And balancing those things, I think is an important conversation, as is, frankly, higher ed also getting its hands around what does it actually cost to produce a graduate in a particular program. And as you know, a lot of folks who follow higher ed know a lot of higher ed institutions cannot actually tell you the cost of, you know, of a student in a particular program, graduate or undergraduate in many cases, they, they literally just don't know the actual cost, depending on program type or major or things of that nature. And it seems like what you're put, you know, what you're pointing out here is actually getting crispr on that is a conversation that higher ed needs to invest in and take seriously right now.

Well, the reality is there's a lot of institutions, including elite institutions, where the, if they do have visibility into the cost of educating a student, it's more than the tuition. So even, even wealthy students who are full pay students are effectively getting a discount off of the cost that it actually takes. So very few. This goes to the point about sustainability, which is like, you know, there are some really structural problems with the business model of higher ed in its current format. And you know, I think your point about the ROI and outcomes and is so you heard me talk at the beginning of this call about like, I have always been very involved in like civil rights and equity and opportunity. So for a very long time, people that look like me in order to even get to a place where they can achieve a level of, of, of wealth and income that's commensurate with, you know, white folks have to get additional education. Same thing for a lot of women, you know, to have the same earning potential, you have to have a master's degree compared to an undergraduate degree. Well, guess what? A disproportionately large number of black and brown people historically have gotten those graduate degrees at traditional for profit institutions online. I'm not going to name names. We all know who those institutions are and you know, I'm sure some of them have done a great job. But as a general matter, the perception is that the quality of those outcomes have not been as strong as you would like. This past year we did some Gallup research on our degree programs and found that the experience in program and the career outcomes of students who graduate from our degree programs was equally as strong for black and Latinx students as it was for white students. We didn't have enough students who were Asian American to include in the, in the study and for first gen. So as a progressive Democrat putting on my political hat and my policy hat, what I struggle with in the policy debate right now is online is not going away. All right, New America put out a survey last May where they asked like existing students who were enrolled, hey, for the fall of 2021, would you prefer to go fully online, partially online, or go back to campus? Well, guess what? For black students, it was like 86% of them said they either wanted fully online or partially online. And those numbers were pretty much the same. I think it was 42 fully online, 41, you know, online or hybrid. And for Latinx students, It was like 38 and 37. So, okay, if we now know that people of color, first gen women who have historically not pursued higher ed in the numbers that they need to, to have the kind of, you know, wealth creation and economic independence that they need, need it. They need the flexibility of online because guess what? Many of them have to work full time in order. Would you rather have them go to a traditional for profit institution or would you rather have them go to the Morehouse, you know, degree completion program or to Simmons, which is an all women's college, and complete their degree where the outcomes are stronger, the signaling value of that degree is greater, the community that you're going to be part of. And so what I often want to say to some of my progressive friends is, be careful because, you know, like when we sign a deal with Howard, we now have their social work program or Morehouse for degree completion. Our deals have to get approved by the trustees, the president, the provost, and often the faculty as well at the individual school needs to say, yeah, we want to offer this program online. And in light of everything that happened a couple of years ago in the wake of George Floyd's death, be very careful about the notion that a bunch of people who've never worked in higher ed, who are think tank types and policy wonks, know what's better for Morehouse College and Howard University than the trustees, the president, the provost and the faculty of those institutions. Like these are complicated, very thoughtful decisions about what's in the best interest. And if you listen, if anybody goes to asu, gsb, I interviewed President Thomas of Morehouse and president of Simmons as well at, at that event. And you know, one of the things that David Thomas said is there's a window of time for HBCUs to move online. And if they miss that window, I'm worried about, like, it might be too late. And to your point about the expense and the cost associated, he said it would probably take Morehouse five or six years to move online if we did it ourselves. We signed a deal with 2U in June of 2021 or 20, and the program launched nine months later. And there's now 250 Black men.

Just to put a cap on it, because we got to host Dave right after you did that interview, we hosted him on our Future you podcast. He said, yeah. And he said, I mean, essentially you all filled in six months, an equivalent class size to what is on ground on Morehouse in their Online program which if you step back from it, think about how phenomenal and quick that is. It's quite stunning.

Three million black men in the United States who have not stopped out. But the other thing that people don't realize is the online degree completion program at Morehouse is priced at $600 per credit and the on ground undergraduate program is priced at $1200 credit. So what does that tell you? That tells you that there is the potential, if you get this right to your point where you started off, not only create access in terms of enabling, you know, these men who for whatever reason, financial life circumstance, 20% of whom had gotten into Morehouse, stopped out and have now decided, as you know, I think the average age is 39. As adult men, they want to go back and they want to pursue and finish their college degree. That is a win for society, it's win for them, it's a win for their families and for them to graduate as Morehouse men and to come out with that sense of pride and community and accomplishment is something that we should all be, you know, supportive of. And you know, President Thomas was a professor at Harvard business school for 20 years and the dean of Georgetown's business school for five years. So I can assure you that he is a very sophisticated negotiator and understands what a partnership means and what are the things that 2U is good at and what are the things that Morehouse is good at.

So little little known fact that when I was visiting Harvard Business School to decide whether to go, he was the professor that I sat in on his class shortly before he left for Georgetown. And he is an amazing teacher, not just a leader and administrator, but yeah, I mean, just phenomenal.

So.

Last question I have for you, which is sort of where 2U is going with the acquisition of EDX and what it means for all this. And you know, you have edX, the free offerings from prestigious institutions. You have short courses from the acquisition you all did a few years ago, boot camps from Trilogy, you know, what is this going to do, I guess to this larger. It really feels like a platform play, right, that you all have now. And what does it mean for the evolution of higher ed more broadly, I guess, in terms of unbundling or how these different parts fit together as well as the impact on marketing for you all, because it seems like now you're reaching, you know, a much greater universe of people who are engaging in a variety of ways now with the, with the full suite, if you will, of, of offerings that come through to you. So I'm curious what that means from a marketing perspective as well.

Sure. Well, you know, if you, if you follow, as all of us do, who are in this space, you know, Phil Hill and others, they will say that, you know, this, you know, whether it's Coursera or edx and 2u, you, it is a move away. Like, it's hard to even define or explain what, what even an OPM is anymore. It doesn't really make sense. It's kind of an anachronistic term. And so we are very much becoming, you know, more of a platform company. And when you say platform, you think about, you know, you've got universities and businesses that are creating content that lives on the marketplace. You've got a marketplace and then you've got millions of learners around the world. And those pieces of the triangle or the circle are kind of mutually reinforcing and add value and enable you to do like very compelling things. So I guess what I would say is, you know, I think the ability to unlock the true value proposition of what we have historically called the career curriculum continuum, we now have all of the pieces to that puzzle. Now it's easier. It's not just as easy as, I mean it's not as easy as just saying, oh, you've got all the pieces. They naturally you can just stack them together. But what you are going to see more of is, you know, micromasters pathways that are MOOC based offerings that ladder up into our degree programs or micro bachelor's programs that might ladder up into some of the degree completion or undergraduate degree offerings that we have, you know, boot camps for credit that might enable you to take some of that credit and then enroll into a degree program. And I think the other thing that is maybe not fully appreciated about what 2U has within our kind of ecosystem now is employers. So this year we'll do 35,000 referrals of boot camp graduates to employers. And that's free for employers. And so last year we announced we were going to expand what we call our career engagement network beyond just boot camp to students that are enrolled in any of the offerings that 2U powers in partnership with our non profit universities. So now when we do career fairs in data science, you could be in one of our short courses, you could be in one of the boot camps, and over time, if you're in one of the MOOC courses or boot camps, you'll be able to participate in job fairs, you'll be able to, you know, see job listings at various companies. Because my view is that what the market has always needed and wanted is the ability to help people at that moment where they wake up one day and they say, you know, I need to do and I want to do something different in my life and what skills do I need, helping them understand, you know, what the options are, how those options align with their circumstance and their aspirations and then make the process of them being able to enroll in those offerings, get the kind of support that they need and then on the back end have a very clear sense of what the career outcome. Getting that kind of ecosystem right, I think is really profound and could be very transformational. And I think we are now well positioned to be one of the companies that's able to do that globally at scale. And then when you think about it from a marketing perspective, I mean, you know, last year I think edX had 120 million visits to the site. So what's interesting about edX, and if you think about it, it's really a profound tribute to Anant and Harvard and MIT and all the leadership of that. In a 10 year period with no marketing dollars, they built the fifth most trafficked education website in the world that gets 120 million visits and didn't spend really any money on marketing. And so what's interesting about that is people come to edX, they have a very high intent. Right. It's like when you go to carmax.com chances are you're looking for a car.

You'Re looking, you're not passively sort of browsing. Yeah, right.

And even if you are like you've decided, hey, you know, car might be in my. Well, one of the values for 2U of, of the combination with edX is we take this really powerful paid and organic engine and machinery that we've built over the past 12, 13 years that does all of the paid or an organic program, bespoke marketing and marry it with a marketplace. And I would argue that no other competitor has those two things. Say what you will about 2U, but one of the things that we are most respected for is the sophistication and thoughtfulness of our marketing apparatus and all the data infrastructure architecture that sits underneath that. You combine that now with, you know, one of the greatest, you know, education marketplaces in the world that has a wonderful brand reputation. And by the way, if you look at the partners who are on edX, you know, 35 out of the top 50 ranked US news world schools in the, in the world are on edX. And I think it's 18 out of the top 20 and 10 out of the top 10. So to the extent that people want to learn from the best, I would argue that, you know, we are going to make the, the world's best. Not only universities, but companies that have knowledge available to people in the world for free and all the way up to, you know, degrees. And I am a big believer. I always say this to people and, and this is where my time in, you know, the music industry and in the media business matter. Like no one can escape gravity. And scale matters. And scale matters to be able to drive down cost and create efficiencies. And I think we can all agree that higher education needs to be more efficient and it needs to be lower cost. And as long as you keep your eye on the prize and continue to focus on quality outcomes, which we do, I think that's a winning combination. And so that's what we're trying to accomplish.

David, I super appreciate the time. This has been a fascinating conversation. I think getting into a lot of these points of nuance and where the incentives in fact lie and how you all are positioning yourselves in that world, it's an important one for folks to hear. So I just appreciate you coming on and talking it through. And for all those joining, there was a fascinating little back and forth and conversation on LinkedIn. It looked like check that out as well. But I super appreciative. Stay tuned everyone who's listening and watching for the next time. We're back on the future of education. Until then, David, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.