A View from the Top

All corners of higher education are experiencing their own pressures and opportunities right now, from selective institutions in the Ivy League that often drive the mass media narrative to those in the world of online learning, workforce development and adult learning. Sometimes those worlds are so disparate that it's difficult to have a conversation that is both comprehensive and coherent about the future of higher education in America.

This isn't a new tension, of course, but it does seem that with much of higher education at an inflection point right now, the decisions leaders make in this environment are incredibly important. That means making sense of the broader landscape and the drivers to help us have that comprehensive, wide ranging conversation. We're really excited to welcome Rick Levin, who served as President of Yale for 20 years and then served as Chris CEO for three years during inflection Points in both of those organizations histories.

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I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn. Jeff, I want to take you back to 1994. The scene in New Haven is dark. Yale University's buildings are literally crumbling. Its finances are in shambles. A Yale student, Christian Prince, had been shot and killed in 1991 in New Haven. The relationship between town and gown, New Haven and Yale, it's frayed, to put it kindly. And at least one trustee wondered aloud whether New Haven was the place to even have a top university. Yale's prior president, Benno Schmidt, who had basically fled from his post and into the presidency, walks rick Levin in 1993, who had initially been looked over for the job by the search committee because he didn't seem presidential enough and he didn't have that president level experience. And then one year in in 1994, on the COVID of GQ magazine is the headline the Death of Yale. And the article reads, once the bulldog of the Ivy League, Yale University now finds itself riddled with death, debt, doubt and denial. And yet, over the next 20 years, Levin leads a complete turnaround at the university. Sparkling buildings, investments in the sciences. Not just a financial rebound, but incredible fundraising. And with David Swenson's stewardship, Yale becomes the envy of endowment management. And there's a restoration of New Haven and a relationship between the university and the town that breaks A lot of the historical tensions, and he manages to create a really global institution. And then, as you know, just a year after he stepped down, he took over as CEO of Coursera, the leader of the MOOC providers that, I think it's fair to say, was trying to find its business model and its real value proposition in that world. And within three years, he sets it on a path toward explosive growth, clear strategic value and focus, and ultimately an ipo.

Yeah, MICHAEL soon after Rick took over as president at Yale is when I was really started to dig into higher ed, first as a reporter covering higher education and then as editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. And what was clear is that we often speak of higher education as a system, but it's anything but a coherent one. There are several different sectors of higher education that share certain things on the surface, but in practice often have very little to do with each other. Their challenges are different, their purposes are different, and their opportunities are even different. As a result, there are only a handful of leaders who really jump between them in such a prominent way and experience success in both. And given the enormous challenges and opportunities staring down at higher ed right now in this very big moment of change, we really wanted someone who can help us think about what it means to lead across these different areas of higher education. And Rick seemed to be a good voice for just that.

I think that's right, Jeff, and it's why I'm so excited to talk to Rick Levin today, or as I knew him as an undergrad, President Levin. And for those who don't know, and for full disclosure, when I was a reporter at the Yale Daily News, I got the chance to cover President Levin and half of his cabinet as a sophomore. And in practice, that meant Rick and I literally talked on the phone roughly four times a week, not just about whatever I was writing on, but also to get comments from him for all of the other stories that reporters were working on. And it was an incredible commitment, I would say, from Rick to students. And through that experience, I really came to appreciate his leadership style, his perspective. But frankly, Jeff, I also learned a ton about the university, higher education more broadly, and what it takes to create change in a really complicated organization with lots of different voices and perspectives. And he's continued to be helpful to me in my own career ever since. So with that as prelude, Rick, thank you for joining us.

In future, you Glad to be here.

So, Rick, there are a lot of places where we could start, but I think our listeners will be curious to have you weigh in probably on a bunch of issues that are facing higher education today and hear you address them through the perspective you bring and the lessons you learned from your own time leading Yale and Coursera, serving very different student populations, of course. So let's start with some of the big questions, I think, being asked of selective institutions like Yale right now, with a focus perhaps on admissions, since I've written a lot about that. The Supreme Court is going to hear a case about affirmative action that's perhaps not new, but they're going to do so with a very different makeup of justices, of course, from the past. At the same time, there's been a lot of pointed criticism of the role of legacy and admissions, and we're seeing both bills at the federal level, but also even in Connecticut, and the extreme selectivity of places like Yale and the lack of growth at those places and at top universities right now. So we have a lot of pressure, obviously, on getting in. And of course, then we have test optional, waiving the SAT and ACT requirements, and we're starting to see maybe those changes might stick. They're at least going to stick for the next couple of years. We'll see. So how, as a leader, would you think about these questions and the pressures about how these institutions select their classes? And what do you think of these specific challenges, whether it's legacy admissions, test optional affirmative action, etc.

Well, thanks, Jeff. Of course, you've written very incisively about all of these issues, and I follow what you write very carefully. I think it's a big problem. We only have limited resources at the top institutions, and we have many more highly qualified students than there are spaces in those elite institutions. The obvious answer which you hinted at to relieving the pressures is to expand, and I must say I've been an huge advocate of that in my first years at Yale. We really didn't have the financial resources to do it because at a place like Yale, there's really no economies of scale. It's so intensive in terms of the matching of students to faculty, the physical resources we provide in terms of residential colleges, that when we did a cost study, we found basically, if you expand the student body, almost every expense goes up in proportion, so it doesn't really save a lot of money. So we had to wait till the university was in stronger financial condition, and by the middle of the 2000 decade, we began planning for two new colleges, and we did finally open them in the subsequent decade, expanding the student body by 15%. Princeton had made a previous move of similar magnitude, just a Couple of years earlier, I applauded that. I encouraged it in all my colleagues at the other elites to do that. And we had on the boards when I left, plans for another two colleges. So we would have gone another what it would have been 12% at that point. The talent is there. The faculty would welcome being a bit larger. We're still a lot smaller than our counterpart state institutions. So in general, I do think expansion would be the best answer.

Rick, let me just pause you there because do you feel like after the experience, not only at Coursera, but over the last couple of years during COVID and the rise of hybrid and online education, that physical experience matching those students with faculty face to face, do you feel like expansion has to happen in the same way that it might have happened when you were there, or do you think there are opportunities given technology to perhaps add some hybrid in there that gives you a little bit more flexibility?

Yes, I do. If you could change the norms of, of behavior at some institutions and for example use a trimester or a four quarter system that would utilize facilities more effectively, there would be some benefit to that. It's been tried. And the only place that's, I would say partially successful at that is Dartmouth. But most places aren't very successful. That is an option. We'll talk about this, I'm sure, as the conversation goes on, but I think that technology has an extraordinarily important place in the system of not only higher education, but what the bridge calls further and continuing education, education of adults throughout their lifetime. Very important place, its place in the actual operation of the great universities of this world, the Ivys, Ivy plus the Oxford and Cambridge. It's limited. You have technology enabled classrooms, smart classrooms that can do some great things. But I don't see the model changing because the model is about more than just conveying content. The model. The model is about developing critical thinking skills, about forming character, about giving people scope and opportunity to do things on their own initiative, to form groups, to learn how to operate in teams and organizations, all of which are things that are more easily done face to face than through technology. While I'm a huge advocate for technology for its purposes, I'm also a huge advocate for the intimacy of the liberal arts educational model for whom we can make it affordable. And for those who are being educated to, and I hate to say it because people don't like elitism, but for those who are being educated for leadership in society and for taking leadership roles, there are many other important roles and there are other modalities of Education to help people accomplish those.

So I want to come back to the idea of these pressures on the. On the seats. Right. So we've seen this huge increase now of test optional, and as a result, huge increases in applications when, again, no more seats. But now we also have this issue around legacies, which seems to not go away at these selective institutions. And now we're starting to see this push both at the federal level and at the state level in Connecticut to ban legacy admissions. So these two things are kind of playing at each other right now on these seats. What are your thoughts on that?

Legacy is the easier of the two. Let's take that.

Wow.

At most elite institutions, Ivies, the preference given to legacies has done nothing but diminish steadily over the past 25, 30 years because of the extraordinary surge in applications, influx of talent, and opportunity for building strong classes. The weight that legacy has in the probability of admission is probably less than half what it was when I started as president, and it's probably not very strong at all. What is a fact in the data, at least my data are nine years old now, since I've not been president for then, but up to that time, it was very clear. On average, legacy students have better test scores, better high school grades, more activities, more athletics. I mean, you name it. Go through the list of criteria and things that we look at. The legacy pool was markedly stronger than the average fool. So some disproportionate representation of legacies is almost inevitable. Inevitable if you're doing it straight on merit. And why is that? Well, because the education of their parents conferred an advantage on those people of growing up in a household of highly educated folks. So it's not surprising. It's also true from the study that my daughter Sarah and Bill Bowen did 20 years ago. Now, that surprising result was that legacy students not only were more qualified in the applicant pool, but they outperformed their predicted college class rank when they got there. Whereas athletes, the main subject of their study, did the opposite. They were lower than the pool, and they underperformed. The legacy problem is kind of taking care of itself is what I'm suggesting.

So maybe we should keep legacies and ban athletics.

Well, you know, I had a pretty strong position on that and tried to reduce the number of recruiting slots at Yale, kind of without success. I mean, I did. Yale was below the Ivy League averages across the board in sports when I took this position. But I couldn't really convince my colleagues that we ought to deemphasize athletics somewhat. I mean, I love athletics. And I think excellence has its place. And I think that athletes, we admit, are superb people and very good students to boot. But the question is, what's the opportunity cost of admitting 200 plus athletes a year to a school like Yale? I mean, wouldn't 100 or 120 be okay?

You are a big Yale sports fan though, from when I covered you at the News. So I remember that well. But I also remember the stance. I want to shift a little bit, but come back to this costs question because you mentioned the lack of economies of scale of expanding at a place like Yale. But as you know, and you needle me for sometimes a lot of institutions catch a lot of flack around rising tuition and rising costs more broadly. And we recently had Ron Lieber, the New York Times columnist on the show and he decried the opacity behind what an individual student will actually pay for college on the front end when they're going through the application process. Now Yale, of course, has done a lot to bolster financial aid. A lot of that started under your time as president. Jeff was recently on campus in New Haven and just remarking how students from families with family incomes less than $200,000 often found Yale far more affordable than their local public options. I'm just sort of curious, as you step back from maybe just the Yale context and think more broadly, how do you think about these issues of rising tuition and costs across higher education and how to make higher ed more affordable?

The case of the extraordinarily wealthy schools with large endowments, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, mit. It really is true that the net cost of education is lower than state for low income families and even middle income families.

Much higher than that, yeah, is more

affordable than even the state alternatives. But when you look nationally, of course, it's a very different picture. I haven't updated the data from about four years ago when I gave the Clark Kerr Lectures at Berkeley, but I did update it then. And in the 15 years prior to 2017, what I found was state institutions, public institutions had a net increase in tuition, a tuition increase of averaging four and a half points more than inflation. And financial aid at the same time went down relatively so that the net price, that is tuition minus financial aid on average for a student was actually growing at 5.5% per year. Now, interestingly, in the same time period, private schools raised their tuition 2.5% faster than inflation, but the net price was zero, increase was zero. Financial aid increased just as much for lower and middle income families. The real problem has been the rise in state institutions. And I tried to unpack the source of that. And it's pretty interesting actually. I mean, if you look at state budgets over the long period since the 1980s, what you see is just a steady erosion of support for higher education and what is taking its place? Health care. The share of health care and state budgets has more than doubled in the past 30 years to more than 20, 25% now of state budgets, what you see is education, transportation infrastructure, primary and secondary school education. All of these elements have shrunk as a percentage of state budgets. My conclusion in this talk was if you want to fix higher education, you have to fix health care. It's sort of a cheat, I suppose, but the erosion of state supports a real problem. And the same time, by the way, the Pell grant system, which served us so well for so many years, I mean, I'm really preaching to the choir here. I know, Jeff, but the Pell grants cover much smaller, smaller share of tuition these days. So for the lower income families, I mean, it's the public sector that's failing. There are lots of solutions and I know the Biden administration is considering substantial increases in Pell grants and all of that, and it would be important to do all that.

So Rick, if I could just quickly follow up there, because during the pandemic, the haves among higher education in terms of institutions, they just got more, right? We talked earlier about more applications, but they also had these huge endowment returns. For instance, while many colleges were struggling, the rich institutions just seem to continually get richer, whereas the struggling and kind of middle institutions really do seem to be in an increasingly tough place with pretty challenged business models, if you talk to their leaders and board members. So as you think about this from a higher education system point of view, thousands of institutions in the US publics and privates, what's the way forward for both the haves, which are probably a pretty small group, and the have nots. Is it that some of the have nots just go out of business? Do the haves take over some of the have nots, which we're starting to see a little bit of in terms of acquisitions in some cases? Like what do you think happens to. And I know this is a system in quotes, right? But what happens when you have a growing divide between the haves and have nots among institutions?

As you say, it's a complex set of systems. Let's take the privates first of all, that's probably the gloomiest picture in some ways is for the tuition dependent, medium to low quality Private institutions which are struggling with the economics and they're also struggling with the demographics. The American college age population is not going to be rising substantially over the next period of time. And our immigration stance is problematic. I mean, we may or may not be letting enough foreign students in to sort of take up the slack. I think in some ways it's almost inevitable that that sector, the four year private liberal arts college and even the four year private comprehensive university that's not of the, in the high quality tier, they're going to have trouble. Dozens, maybe even hundreds will close over the next couple of decades or three decades or merge or be absorbed or whatever like you say. So I think that's a bit problematic. There is a conversion strategy. I have a very strong view that's kind of idiosyncratic here. I think that we ought to pay much more attention to vocational education. And I kind of learned this from my experience at Coursera when I saw how much demand there was for skills training from people who had been through college and were trying to improve their career prospects. I've actually studied the sort of Singapore system of vocational education and I must say it's such an attractive alternative. It's so far superior to our community college system as currently constituted because it is linked closely with industry. You go to like the Institute for ITE Institute for Technical Education in Singapore and you see state of the art equipment in virtually every trade and profession. I mean, you have Marriott hotels equipping them with an entire mock hotel with every type of facility where they're training people for the hospitality industry. You see, GE Aircraft has put in a whole constellation of equipment so people can work on being aircraft engine mechanics. I mean, it's phenomenal. And the placement rate into jobs after this kind of education is like 93 to 95%. You know, what's our success rate with community colleges? It's like below 50%. My big vision for reforming the higher education system would be to give up the myth that community colleges are a gateway to four year colleges. I mean, they are for a very small fraction of the students and convert at least many of them to vocational education. That really links to jobs. We're not talking about necessarily low skilled jobs. Every one of these jobs practically in this Singapore school uses technology. Technology is going to be part of even low skilled jobs in the future. I mean, a really visionary approach would look at something really substantial at that level. That's half the students or more are in that system.

Yeah, and I think it's interesting, Rick, because also that Clarity of mission. Right. Could allow them to focus all their operations on that rather than being pulled apart in different directions with shoestring budgets in many cases, and really focus. And it's interesting also from my time in Korea, looking at the Meister schools and how they have semiconductor fabs in these schools where people are going with state of the art technology, it changes the prestige equation also a little bit. Right on what's good and so forth. And I want to stay just one more beat on sort of this technology question before we jump into the Coursera and skills gaps and some of those conversations. You know, you're still connected to Yale. Your wife still teaches there. You obviously know a lot about online learning. We talked a little bit about the technology before. I just want to come back to it in this sense, which is, you know, we've seen startups like Minerva University really change the way they use technology. And I don't know that that decreases the costs of the teaching and learning experience per se, but it's a very different use of technology. Right. In a small scale seminar format and things of that nature. Do you see any room for that, of technology being used at a place like Yale? And do you think that'll be the reality? And if not, I guess I'm more curious your ideal and what you think will actually happen and why there might be a gulf if there's any separation between what you think will become reality and what you hope to see in the future.

I think the interesting innovation is going to come from faculty who get interested in technology and in figuring out creative ways to use it in the classroom. I mean, I've seen classes at Yale more on the science and technology, STEM type classes. You've got a set of interconnected computers, one at each conference table. And the groups of students work on a collective problem on their equipment. They can broadcast to a screen, they can share solutions with the other groups. And it's very intriguing. With the right instructor, this can be really stimulating and fun and great learning experience for students. So are things like that going to emerge? Absolutely. And I think universities can invest in the kind of staffing to support that activity, which Yale has done and many other schools has done, with enhanced teaching and learning centers that support pedagogical innovation. So I'm. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that, whether it's going to completely reshape the classroom experience. My wife's not going to be teaching the Iliad that way anytime soon.

Well, Rick, we're going to use this moment to take a quick break. And when we come back on Future youe, we're going to talk to Rick Levin about his time as CEO of Coursera. We'll be right back.

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so we're back on Future youe with Rick Levin, the former president of Yale and former CEO of Coursera. And while honestly anything here could be a good segue into your time leading Coursera, the last question was as good as any. So let's go there. You turned a lot of heads when you decided to become the CEO of Coursera. So let's start with what drove you to take on that role and what was it like leading a for profit company that was based on dramatically increasing access to higher ed? It was obviously a place that worked with a lot of institutions like Yale, but its mission and focus and value proposition was very different. At the time you joined the company.

I was excited to take that opportunity. I mean, I didn't expect to when I left Yale, end up being an Internet CEO of a startup company that had 50 employees. It was a big change in MO but I had pioneered online education, high access with outreach education at Yale. And what I learned we started in 2000 with a little experimental venture with Stanford, Oxford and Yale, producing courses for our own alumni called All Learn. It wasn't financially successful and the technology was still primitive and so the Internet streaming was jumpy and jerky. So it wasn't a great product. It didn't succeed. What I learned was the faculty who were involved thought it was amazing to have contact with students all over the world that they then emailed with and corresponded with and they thought, wow, I'm actually reaching external audiences. What a great thing. So then when the MIT OpenCourseWare came down in the early 2000s, we followed very quickly with Open Yale, which was to put some of our very best lecture courses primitive again, classroom capture. We just took a camera into the classroom and recorded them. But the same thing happened. All of a sudden it was out there on the Internet for anyone to see and many of our courses had thousands of hits and many of our professors were getting emails from people all over the world saying what an amazing thing that Yale was opening up this precious resource to people. And I began to think about it conceptually and thought this is a way to scale the university. What is the cost disease all about? The cost disease has to do with fixed proportions between faculty and students. I mean, it's because we still have 15 person classes at these elite universities. But what if we had 50,000 persons classes and the same faculty could teach many more people, even in this low intensity way of just recording the video content. I was convinced of the potential of this to reach a broader audience. And I thought it was a great way for the university, which is criticized for holding in to a limited number of people the extraordinary content its faculty produce. Give it away. Give it to people. It's only part of what we offer. It's the easily shareable part. And faculty publish their books. Why not publish their lectures? I was sold. This was a great idea. So when Coursera came along, we had to have a faculty committee to take nine months to decide whether to join. But we did. We were off and running in that show. When I got to Coursera, I learned a very important lesson there. There were really two audiences. There were the lifelong learners, which is what we'd seen at Yale. I want to take Diana Kleiner's course on Roman architecture because it's really interesting and she's a great teacher. But then there were actually equal numbers of people who wanted career credentials, who wanted to advance their careers, and so they were looking for STEM type courses or business courses to do that. That was a key insight that came very quickly once I was at Coursera and actually was at the center of shaping the business model.

Rick, I think that's a perfect segue into the next question that I'm curious about, which is remembering the All Learn days, by the way. I think I covered that partnership actually at the Yale Daily News. But I think it's fair to say that when you came into Coursera, like Yale, when you came in as president, there, it was in a place that was struggling and it had an incredible brand and had grown users. It had incredible partnerships with places like Yale, great professors teaching on the platform. But it was a bit adrift in trying to find that real business model. And what you just alluded to, that value proposition. Who really wanted to take these courses? I'm curious. Take us through how you conceptualized that opportunity and found that learning for those people that wanted credentials to advance in their career and how it perhaps changed then the direction you took.

Coursera itself, well, first, a little revisionist history. It wasn't really struggling. It was suffering from the media hype cycle, the new York Times did a piece in 2012 saying the year of the MOOC and predicted the whole world was going to change in three years. This was just barely two years later, not even 19 months later, we didn't have 100 million learners then. We had gone from a million and a half to 6 million learners in two years. It was growing, it was doing okay, but it was giving the product away. Just started thinking about a business model when I got there and about the possibility of charging for some of our courses. First insight that we had about that was just looking at the data that among our most popular courses did bifurcate into these the kind of fun liberal arts courses on the one hand, and the career readiness courses. So that Andrew Ng's machine learning course and one of our first multicourse sequences, the Johns Hopkins Data science specialization, were like big winners in terms of people joining. So we introduced a paid version of the course that gave you a certificate from the university. Unfortunately, we had already in place some kind of Coursera gave a piece of paper to you if you finished these courses. We had to eliminate any reward for the free and pretty quickly migrated to the idea of audit versus credential. So we didn't want to abandon the free access because we thought it was a great lead generator for future business. And besides, it was fulfilling our mission, which was to provide access. So with most Coursera courses, not the degrees, but most of the regular courses, you can audit the course for free, you can watch the videos, but what you can't do is take the assessments and get a certificate and people pay for the latter. And it worked. That proved out as a successful idea. You know, we still only monetize maybe 10% of our learners. It's not like everybody's paying. It's like way more people are watching the stuff for free than are paying. But we're half a billion dollar a year revenue company now, so the model is working. That was interesting. Going to try to convince our universities, yes, we want your content, but we especially want your content that will monetize. And maybe you should want that too, because it will help you in the long run. That was an interesting sales job. And I think in fairness, I was a good person for that role because I was trusted by the unit. I was not a business person coming in, telling him, hey, try this. You're going to find there's something in it, because I was one of them, that really did help.

So what do you think, Rick, then, about where they're leaning in now? And it really seems again Going back to leveraging all those student names that they have or potential student names that they've had and collected over the years, it seems like Coursera is really kind of leaning into the OPM space and being able to stand up some very low cost online degree programs for universities. Thinking of the imba, for example, at the University of Illinois, but also many other institutions as well. Clearly it has this big user base to acquire students, lower the cost of marketing, which is such a huge cost for most of the OPMs, and offer everything from free to degree. So what do you see this space shaping up to be and what are some of the biggest opportunities for Coursera for whatever you can tell us, Jeff,

you put your finger on the secret of Coursera's success in this space, which is, and we intuited this back in 2015 when we started the Illinois degree. 2014. I came in, we had just started with these multi course sequences. We found that we could monetize by bifurcating the courses into audit and paid versions. And then in the summer of 2015, we undertook a strategic review. What else should we be doing? And by the way, we'd gotten Illinois interested in this degree with this disruptive concept of coming in at $20,000 for a two year MBA program total and realized that we could recruit students for precisely the reasons you had, because we had millions of email addresses and we didn't have to do much paid marketing to get the students. You know, between the Illinois website and their outreach and our email list, we filled up the classes at five times the throughput of their residential program. And then we thought, what do we do next? And that's where we basically explored all the possible options. It really led to a model that says we're going to be a full service educational provider at the higher education level with a set of content that ranges from individual courses to multicourse sequences to professional certificates to degrees. And so we have the spectrum. In many cases the content's stackable, like parts of the degree you could actually take as a specialization, or at least the non assisted part, the part that's asynchronous and can be done on your own. So we had a spectrum of content and then we also thought about channels. Where do we go? Who do we market to? So the top of the pyramid here is of course the degrees, which are the most expensive product. You kind of put your finger in the secret, which is the low marketing costs allowed us to charge disruptive prices and convince universities you can scale and run your degree. So what we've seen as a consequence of this is it's not like we're driving 2U out of business or anything. But our example is directly responsible for 2U's acquisition of EDX. I mean, I think they needed to have the kind of same full spectrum offering with the mailing lists that could get them. You could lower their marketing costs. And so they're now the direct competitor from across the whole spectrum of what we do. And I think other OPMs are going to find and many of them are sort of seeing that they need to do other things, shorter form content in order to increase their user base.

The problem, I guess, is that there's no other EDX or Coursera out there for them to acquire. And that EDX acquisition costs cost to you a lot of money.

You know where there are things happening is India. There are some really good companies in India in all parts of the space, and there's consolidation going on there too. And some of those companies, one or two of them may well emerge as a direct competitor.

Rick, I think that's a good transition to the last question where we want to wrap up because we've done a remarkable job, I think, of talking across the ecosystem in a relatively short amount of time. You joked beforehand this could take a couple hours, but. But we've talked a lot about the stories that people are talking about. I'm curious on your radar, what are stories that people aren't talking about but maybe should be?

Oh, well, I hate to keep coming back to my pet idea, but I think vocational education from high school throughout a life is critical. And it's not like people aren't talking about it, but the higher ed sector isn't talking about it as much as it should be.

Right. K12 has started to talk about it, but less higher ed.

There are many people in the Department of Commerce, Department of Labor and policy circles worrying about reskilling American workers and the need throughout the lifetime to continue to develop skills. That's Coursera's bread and butter. Are the people taking these courses and these master's degrees sort of when they're 35 years old without having to leave their jobs in order to upskill. Universities are slowly coming to the realization that the role of the university in society is not the education of 18 to 22 year olds, it's the education of everybody over 18. We're not going to be the exclusive providers of education at the adult level, but we have an important role to play in that ecosystem, particularly the master's degrees, but also professional certifications. There's a tremendous scope here for expanding your footprint and expanding the nature of the things you do, many of which are going to not only widen access and thus be socially beneficial and consistent with your mission, but also will raise revenue and help to offset the rising costs of traditional higher education.

And with that, we'll wrap it up. A big thank you to Rick Levin for spending a good chunk of time with us on Future youe, and we'll be back next time with your questions and more. Until then, thanks for listening.

Sa.