Fixing College and Career Guidance for Parents, Students, and Schools

Welcome to the Future of Education. And now here's your host, Michael Horne. Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think about how we can do that better, today I'm thrilled to have John Carson, the founder and CEO of College Guidance Network, cgn, where, full disclosure, I host shows on occasion for them on careers. I'm just delighted though, that John is joining us today to talk about their work and about how they're helping individuals, families, parents, better navigate the landscape of post high school. And John, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Good to be with you.

Yeah. So let's dive in because you're a serial entrepreneur, you've had a lot of interesting ventures in your background. Let's start with the why behind this one, behind College Guidance Network. You know, why this company? What's its mission and what does the work look like?

So it really kind of started four years ago with my oldest, and he was in the college process in high school. And there were a set of experiences that I had that really sort of as a sort of, as an entrepreneur, sort of made me sort of start to dig into how the college and career guidance system works kind of writ large. And what I ultimately came out of that with was a much better understanding of how the system has fundamentally begun to sort of not even begun. It does not work. And it does not work in some very sort of structural ways. And because, you know, I have worked in the world of ed tech for many years and as well as kind of content and media, it seemed to me like there was a way to kind of solve this. And candidly at that time, AI had not come into sort of the picture. And as that is now entered into the scene, it seems clear to me that we're really in a period that is sort of best kind of you could think of as previously was around 1995, 1996, when the Internet started. And all of it comes together to sort of, I think for us as sort of entrepreneurs, we've come up with a design that I think can fundamentally change the way college and career counseling is provided in the United States at scale.

So super exciting to hear that. And I want you to, before we get into the solution, let's diagnose the problem a little bit. In your view. You know, there's some big structural factors that sort of drive the challenges, I think, around guidance for high school students in Your view, I know you see it in the outcomes, right? Student graduation rates, dropout rates of college are not that great. And I think in your view, at least some of that is structural. And it starts with the guidance system in place. Talk through what those major factors are in your mind that lead to sort of the brokenness of the current system.

So I'd say you almost have to start with the supply side, which is the colleges. And what has happened is we've got an increasingly complex process that is a bigger and bigger kind of high stakes decision financially. And so with that complexity you sort of have a situation where unlike when I sort of was graduating from high school and all escalators went up, not all escalators go up anymore and in fact some go down and they can become non recoverable. So that's the supply side. On the demand side, the issue is that you start with a high school counseling department. And so those, those counselors typically have a union contract of about 180, 185 days a year. So right away about half of the year they're not available. Then you have this next kind of issue which is more, it's the one that's most commonly cited, which is the high ratios. And so I was unable to get a hold of my kids counselor. And that school is like 220 kids for counselor. So you get into 34600 kids for counselor. You know, it's just, it is not possible. And that is not the counselor's fault. It's just there's a math problem going on. So you have a big access problem. That's, that's, that's a math problem. Then you have this issue that counselors are typically have their degrees in social work and they're being asked to be knowledgeable across a very wide range of topics. So it's very hard to be good at all of those. And so how can a counselor who's supposed to talk a kid off the ledge in the morning also be able to be an expert in how STEM careers are unfolding in the world of AI? And the answer is they can't. Then lastly you have this issue which is sort of a special twist to the way we've approached it, which is if you think of this whole process as a metaphor of a car and the kid is driving the car, that is their journey into life. They're driving the car, but they don't know how to drive the car. They may not even want to be driving the car. They're often distracted by social Media. And so that's not a great answer. When you're in a high stakes situation, you have a counselor in the backseat, but they're in like 400 backseats. And, and then you have me as the parent in the passenger seat and I want to be helpful, but I don't know how to. And so one of the structural problems is the counseling department really doesn't have anything for the parents. And the parents are the only other adult authority figure in the car that can like reasonably have capacity to help the kid. And so you put all those things together, the system's not working. And you talked about the default rates and dropout. Here's one that I think is really important. Burning Glass has just released data that shows that 52% of all college graduates are underemployed after a year. So, you know, you add all this up and we clearly do not have good decision making at a very high stakes point in the cycle. And so the system is crying for something that can fix it and you can't do it internally because schools are just, just not going to have the dollars to throw, you know, kind of more counselors at the problem. You have to have something else.

Super interesting to hear you break that down at all levels, frankly, in terms of how the matching problem starts and the dynamics throughout the system. So one of the parts of your solution of course is, revolves around AI. You mentioned that earlier and you've launched this AI solution. Your agent is named Ava, I believe. But importantly, you're coming to market with ava, not frankly as like this sole AI offering standalone product, but it's really bundled with a variety of other elements. So how do you think about this AI product strategy? How do you think about AI in this current solution? And talk to us about how it's woven into what you all are doing to solve the challenges that you just described.

So first I'll just say that I may sound fairly coherent right now, but it has not always been. So when we first started out, the idea was to mimic a company called Masterclass, which had begun producing very high end, very high end video library around things like cooking and sports and such. And our idea was, what if you could create Masterclass for college and career guidance? And we began building this library of experts, but it turned out that was not like the right answer because not that many people want to walk the stacks. That's like work. And so the next step was, so that's kind of version one, version two was we put a layer of technology on top of the library and turned the whole thing into a personalized roadmap generator for mom, dad and the student. And so kind of a month by month roadmap that, you know, included workflow management videos from top experts that was personalized to, you know, you and your kid. So the third piece of this, which is what we're currently in the process of rolling out over the next two months, is adding the AI piece. And so ava, which stands for another virtual assistant, is our AI counseling assistant. And Ava's distinctive characteristic is Ava's being trained by the content we have across these experts. And we currently have just under 300 experts across 110 topics and just under 3,000 videos. And that becomes what we've now sort of better understand is that content equals data, and very high quality content equals very high quality data. And that's actually very important in having a quality conversational assistant. And so we think if you put together, you know, a conversational counseling assistant with a personalized roadmap, with personalized text and email nudges, with a year round live programming schedule of live experts that people can access, that becomes a total solution. And we kind of think of it as it's kind of guidance in a box. And this now allows a school to provide the capability to a family to have access to the best guidance 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. And this takes enormous load off of the counselor's plate. And that's important because there's a whole teenage mental health crisis that's going on that desperately needs more counseling time. And so we think this can kind of be a win for everybody.

So it's super interesting because if I understand you right, you're basically saying counselors, you can actually lean into your expertise around social work and working individually with students who need the help. We have this breadth of content experts, 300 plus 3,000 some odd videos, that allows us to handle the breadth of questions that any young individual might bring. And, you know, my interest might be different from yours. So we have the expertise and the content breadth to work with that. And then you basically use the experts to say we're also going to have the best advice for any given topic and have this sort of knowledge graph, if you will, that Ava is trained on so that I get the right piece of advice, the right direction, the right nudge at the right time in my journey. Am I getting this right? Is sort of how this all comes together?

It is, and I'll simplify it because we've done a ton of field research and it doesn't really matter the socioeconomic background of the student or the family. Everybody really wants the same four things. That actually makes it easier from a design standpoint. What we. What we. And I'll say we because I'm a parent that just sort of finished this process. But what we want is we want to know what to do. We want to know when to do it, we want to know how to do it and want to know why to do it. And if that can come from top experts that we can trust that are credible, well, then that's the package. And so, you know, it's really about how do you deliver what, when, how and why. And to do that, you have to have a conversational capability. And so that's ava. You have to have workflow, project management. That's the personalized roadmaps. You have to have access to live experts. That's our live programming. And you have to have remind nudges because, you know, we're all so busy. You know, there could be, you know, a window closing for the SAT registration, you know, test this summer, which is actually how this whole project gets started. My wife and I barely made one of these within like four hours. And she turned to me and said, I just want to plan. And so we. This is the plan. This is what, you know, a guidance in a box would look like for somebody who's trying to navigate a very complex thing that they've never done before.

I can hear the exasperation in her voice as you tell that story that leads to this as a solution. Talk to me about. You talked about limited budgets, right, of schools, states and the like, and how, you know, they can't just throw money in people at this problem, given the reality. But I also want to just sort of, you know, how this content centric approach coexists with some of the software solutions like, you know, Naviance, that are out there score, right? And I, I'm sure you hear it a lot of times. I hear it a lot of times. A lot of states schools I talk to, they say, we've already got something. So what's your take on how this is complementary and actually critical to their operations alongside of what they think they have anymore?

So the best way to think, the best kind of core distinction is it's software versus content. And so the software solutions are very robust sort of aggregations of tools. So, you know, there's something to go build a college list, there's a tool to go do scholarship searches, there's a tool to request A recommendation letter. There's a tool to, you know, kind of provide your transcript to integrate with the common app. These are software tools. The people who come to work every day in these companies are typically software engineers. So those are the tools. Using my car metaphor, this is the steering wheel that the kid is using to drive the car from A to B. You must have, you know, that steering wheel in the car to sort of get from here to there. We are more like the GPS system that helps the family navigate. We are more about guidance, we're about content, not about software. We do not have a robust software team. We are more content. Our people come from pbs, from espn, from Family Education Network. And so we think cars drive better with navigation. And, and so that's our role in life, is to aggregate experts into a cohesive user experience that's not overwhelming and that is personalized and that complements the steering wheel.

So you just said something, a few interesting things there that I want to, as we start to wrap up this conversation, I want to key in on. Because you use the word like we're really the guidance, right? We're not the software, we're the guidance. And that's a critical piece that's missing in the depth and breadth that we need across the system right now. And you have a real focus on parents as you do that. Talk about why parents and guardians are really the linchpin from your perspective. And this is such an important solution for them. Because I think a lot of people find like, okay, now the answer, my kid has access to it in the school, they jump on in the career office or the guidance office or whatever, they can put in their scores, interest and get some lists of colleges. You're saying we're providing a lot more guidance and so forth, but really helping parents with this talk about that decision and that focal point.

So first we know that the current system's not working because if it was, we wouldn't be having these sort of massive dropout rates, default rates, et cetera. So just giving somebody a large toolbox is not enough. You have to sort of give them the instructions, the navigation as well. And so to some degree, as if you think of this from a system standpoint, you know, somebody once said, you know, asking a 17 year old to make this kind of high stakes decision with all the complexity is really asking a lot. And so, you know, asking them to do it by themselves is where you're going to get problems. You can't really say, well then let's have it all fall on the Shoulders of the counselor because we've already identified there's a math problem there. Okay, well, we're starting to run out of options here, but there's actually a really good option. It's the person in the passenger seat who's going to be either writing a check or co signing a loan for a lot of money, who's biologically wired to care about this individual in the driver's seat and who's desperate to kind of be helpful, but just doesn't know what to do, when to do it, how to do it and why to do it. And so you have to make it easy for them. And you know, what they need is they need that kind of that expert, you know, access to experts, because they're on the journey as well. And so we think parents are really a linchpin. You know, Jeff Riley, the Commissioner of Education for Massachusetts, has called them the sleeping giant. And so they just want to be harnessed and their anxiety levels are high. Of course they are, because they see these issues. And frankly, as we watch the effects of AI start to like, get into the sort of workforce in entry level jobs, I think that it's going to become even more complex and more important that kids are really thoughtful about picking, you know, journeys, their sort of career path journeys, so that they're able to navigate this tricky world where AI is going to be changing a lot of things. And we, of course, spent a lot of time getting experts on AI because we think the future of work, this is a lot of the stuff we do with you, is really important so that people can start taking a little bit of a longer time horizon. But parents, yeah, keep going. But, you know, parents are the ones who have to write the check. They care about their kid and they can see that they're distracted and they want to get it right and just nobody's given them the right solution so that they can become engaged and be kind of that counseling assistant at home. We always, we talk to schools about what if you could turn all your parents into an army of counseling assistants with a caseload of one or two. Like that's an enormous amount of capacity that can be unlocked and you don't have to pay for it because they're going to do it because they care about their kid.

No, that makes a ton of sense. And I think something you just said just to key in on that, right, is the parents, they care about this. They have a lot of anxiety. They're probably spending a lot of time on this as well. And so it's not like you're asking them to do more. You're just helping them be smarter and more secure in the decision making, right, as they go about helping their kids through it. And for parents who maybe tune in and listen to this, I will say there's also some great resources in there for parents to help their kids be, you know, assume more agency, develop their executive function skills so that they can take more ownership as well. And there's some great guidance in CGN around those topics as well. Not just sort of the how do I make this choice? What's the next thing I have to do? The checklist, if you will. That's part of it. But it's a much more comprehensive solution. Right, John?

Well, and, you know, so we think there's four content categories. There's college, there's, there's money, there's careers. And then the one that has really been, I think, an increasingly important one, which is family dynamics. How do you talk to a teenager who won't talk back because that's a fraught issue. The kid is separating biologically. That's important for them to do. And there are right and wrong ways to engage that kid. And a lot of parents make the wrong decision. They lean in too much and the kid sort of pushes back. So we try to give, you know, kind of access, give parents access to family therapists and experts and things like that, teenage phone, you know, screen addiction, you know, the things that are really kind of getting in the way of those sort of healthy kind of exchanges that can and ought to happen between, you know, an engaged parent and their kid.

Perfect. John how so, folks tuning in? How can they learn more about CGN and what you all are up to and get in touch?

So, you know, it's our URL is collegeguidancenetwork.com and there's an ability to request a demo or to sort of reach out to us. And this, you know, at the end of August, we're rolling out, you know, this combined kind of solution that is, you know, personalized roadmaps with AVA integrated into the, you know, the, the experience. And so we're very excited about, you know, the, the fall pilots are going to be running and we have, you know, the Commissioner Ness in New Hampshire rather has just funded a pilot in New Hampshire. And so we're, you know, we're excited to like, really step out and, you know, have a scalable solution that can really change the way guidance is done in American high schools.

Incredibly exciting to see that happen. John, thank you so much for joining us and for all you tuning in, we'll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.