Live from ASU-GSV, Day 1

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe Live, a special episode of Future youe. For the first time, Jeff Salingo and myself, Michael Horn and Paul Friedman, who you may remember from past episodes as my first guest co host and as well as a guest on the first season of Future youe. We're excited because we're recording live in front of an audience at the ASU GSV Conference. There's you all can cheer a little bit if you want. There we go first. Thank you. Thank you very alive. So they are coming alive here with a little happy hour at the ASU GSV conference. 10th year of this conference. For those of you that don't know, this is sort of the epicenter of investment and entrepreneurship and education going on for 10 years now, 4,500 attendees in San Diego partnership between GSV, which provides investment services of an array to education and other companies, and Arizona State University, the most innovative university. And we're really excited because we're going to do in honor of the 10th year, we're going to have 10 guests over the next two episodes where we highlight some of the folks that are really making a total change and transformation in higher education. And Paul, it's particularly exciting to have you on the on this because you've been a mainstay and staple of this conference since year one.

I've been here since the beginning and

that makes me feel really, really old.

It also makes me feel old that I didn't realize we were having 10 guests to match the 10th year. That just occurred to me right now.

But it's exciting and there's, I mean, the guest list for the next two days is incredible.

The things to talk about are amazing.

It's a really exciting time to be

at the intersection of innovation and education.

And so with that, we are going to bring up our first guest because big news today where 2U announced that it's acquiring Trilogy. For those that don't know, 2U, the most successful OPM company out there online program manager and of course Chip Palacek was a guest on Future youe can't remember how many episodes ago, but you were and and I acquiring Trilogy, who we've also had Dan Sommer as a guest on this podcast back in December, I believe it was. And so to have those two companies past guests on Future youe announce a major acquisition today on tv, in the news, Bloomberg and so forth. And then timed with this GSV conference. Very neat that we get to have them.

It's exciting to get to have them. And, you know, we have a strict

rule on the podcast not to have

repeat guests, but if you spend $750 million to get to be on the podcast, it shows how much Chip and

Dan want to reho.

And so with that, we'll bring him on up.

Yeah.

So thank you guys so much for

coming on the podcast.

Again,

the first question for either one of you is you both had what were considered, still considered to be the most successful independent companies in the education space.

Why combined?

So for us, when we really thought about this and we met at ASU GSV just two years ago, we met in Chip's suite 2U suite. That was the first time we really had a chance to really sit down and get to know each other. So first and foremost, we aligned on a common set of core values. We really believe that together that universities are the place for lifelong learning. We believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that students are in great hands with the programs that they take, and we have exceedingly spectacular outcomes. And then when we really dug into it, we realized that we had a shared vision in terms of the impact that we want to have in terms of transforming millions of lives in many places across all areas of their career. And that we also realized that there was a lot of scale that we could bring together by having 68 university partners on our platform across short courses, boot camps, and degrees, all the way through to the enterprise, to the corporation. And when you combine all of those things together also with our mission and cultures of our two organizations, we thought that this would be a spectacular combination.

What's an example of something that you guys can do together that you couldn't have done separately? So I thought in some ways, the more meaningful announcement today, not that acquiring a company, you know, obviously it's big news at a conference like this, and I do think we should talk about investment in the space. But UNC today, UNC Kenan Flagler, one of our first partners, when they signed with two. Um, everybody thought this idea was really idiotic, to be honest. That's not too strong. People thought that the great school shouldn't do anything online. It was very controversial. We had one school do a sit in to prevent the school from opening. The students actually did a sit in. So preconceived notions of online education have been terrible. My entire time at 2U, it still today is a challenge. And I would say that if you look at what Trilogy has done and you bring it to 2U on some level. Today we announced the future proofing of the degree. Keenan Flagler when we brought them under the tent, which was complicated, so this is, we're obviously a public company which has its own stress around process. And so when we got to a point where we felt like it was more likely than not against some wishes internally on both sides, we decided to bring them under the tent. They've been my partner for a very long time. The continuing ed school at Chapel Hill partners with Dan. And so we brought them under the tent and we said we'd like to talk about what this combo could do. And our idea at the time was to embed the boot camp for credit. And they said yes to that very quickly. And then they went much farther and they basically said they're going to build digital competency into the entire B school in a very meaningful way. So they, they will offer not just the individual courses in the boot camp for credit, which, you know, It's a top 20 MBA program. So you know, you have to be somewhat risk averse if you're in that overall sort of top 20 zone. But they're also offering the boot camp to their undergrads during the summer, which we think is a huge opportunity. And they will offer individual short courses of technical courses. So you put it together and like that definitively doesn't happen without the team at Trilogy. And I would also say, like, I've been doing this a long time. It's my third rodeo in Ed Tech and 2U has been a blessing on all levels. You know, we. Ed Tech doesn't have a lot of companies like Trilogy. They don't. It's a pretty remarkable place with a great team and one that I'm genuinely honored to bring to you in a way that I do think this is an example of 1 plus 1 equals 3. I hate the word synergy because I feel like it's, you know, ever since the AOL Time Warner merger, it's been, you know, it's not a term that you love to use, but in this case it is real. Like you look at the continuum of opportunities from the standpoint of putting the university at the central part of learning. And that's something that we align on very quickly, which most of Ed Tech doesn't think that way.

Chip, I'd love to get into that investment point actually through this question, which is, I don't know if a lot of people know. I believe you got your MBA on the 2U platform through UNC, am I correct? So this is personally meaningful also to be able to go with them in this partnership for you, I would imagine. And it doesn't happen without that investment. Talk about the role that that investment can, can play, not only personally, but in changing lives.

Well, I feel like right now, you know, there, there's always controversy and, and I feel like we shy away from discussions about investment, about money going into education. And we shouldn't. We invest heavily in each of these programs now. We invest through sort of sweat, blood, tears like we really, these people pour themselves into these programs. And I lived it. When I went to gw, it couldn't have changed my life more. But I didn't take a single business course. And in running 2U, I really wanted my MBA. I didn't do it for the Hair Club for Men effect. I didn't do it to eat my own dog food. I did it for me and my wife and my board, honestly, both thought I was. They both thought I was crazy. But I really wanted it. And God bless my wife that she put up with it because it was hard. Doug Shackelford said to me in his wonderful way, if you know Doug, the dean of the B school, that I was the longest standing student in the history of Kenan Flagler Business School. But I think I'm the only student that did an MBA while doing an ipo. Right. So it does allow you the inherent flexibility to do it.

Would you get credit for that?

I did not.

They would not give me any special treatment whatsoever. They did extend the time. So yes.

No.

Experience there should have been.

I was going to say experience there should have been experience cracks.

I know you're going to listen to this.

We're going to try to change.

So what should we be looking for? Let's be objective judges of this acquisition's success. A few years down the road, what are we going to see as observers of the market that this acquisition enables?

So Chip and I both have a thesis around the career curriculum continuum. We call it the 60 year curriculum. And I'll attribute that to a number of the deans that we work with.

Say a past guest of ours, Hunt Lambert, who's a client of obviously Gary

Matkin at UC Irvine. And it's the idea that learners at 17 or 77, they're on a journey to really, I would say, future proof themselves and to learn new skills. And with the half life of a skill being two to three years, ultimately you might be lucky and go to college. You might be lucky and get a master's degree or take a MOOC or a certificate or a boot camp or a PhD or you might go to a company and be fortunate enough where they're going to offer you some training. And so one of the proof points you'll look at is are we able to fulfill for our university partners, for 68 world class university partners, are we able to fulfill this lifelong learning continuum, the 60 year curriculum to give people more in demand skills as they need it? Because it's about certainly future proofing the degree. It's also about future proofing people. And in an environment where the economy is changing and where half of the population is going to need new skills over the next five years, it's critical that we empower people to do that. I think this partnership is going to empower people to get the skills they need to ultimately be successful.

Guys, thanks so much for joining us again on Future youe really appreciate it and congratulations again.

No back row baby.

All right, thanks again to Chip and Dan for joining us. And now we're really excited by our next guest. Jeff Magin Kalda and the CEO of Coursera, one of the hottest names in education technology. For a long time you all have carved out I think on your third business if you will, where you've had the direct to consumer, you've had the within businesses building quite a nice business there and then more recently acting essentially as an online program manager yourself where you're helping stand up not just online programs but low cost online programs for universities. There was a major article and I'd love to start with you here. There was a major article recently by Kevin Carey dissecting the role of OPMs in the, in the sector and not necessarily in the most favorable terms. And so I just, you know, basically they were saying that as a for profit instrument that they were actually maintaining prices in the market and sucking dollars out of higher ed into investors pockets was essentially the thrust of the article. I'd love your take on that because you all seem to play a very different place in this ecosystem.

Yeah, so I've heard about the article, I confess I have not yet read it. So I no problem. Probably speak too intelligently about it. I would say at a really high level. It feels to me like there's a question of what are the economics associated with offering a certain service. Is it a good price for customers, is it delivered efficiently and at a good price? And then among the money that's made, who gets what share of it. So I think that one of the things that technology does, industry after industry is it figures out what's the most efficient way to deliver real high value to people. Sometimes that's through distribution innovations, sometimes it's through manufacturing innovations, sometimes it's using data to more efficiently customize a product to people. And I feel like higher education will be no different from many different industries where technology and innovations do a lot to extend a higher value service to more people at lower cost. And so long as there's some level of competition, generally consumers win. And so I think a lot of what we're seeing today, and it's striking how much capital is moving into this sector. I think what it's really reflecting is the global need and the opportunity and the advances that are now being made, where I think people are starting to get a glimpse of what some of these solutions are going to look like. And I do think it's just more value for the learner.

But Jeff, I think that was the point of Kevin's piece, was that most of these solutions now are coming from outside of traditional higher education. They're coming from for profit companies, many of which are represented here. And we've been seeing this throughout different parts of the university. Right. I'm working on a book now about admissions. A lot of admissions has been, even at the undergraduate level, has been outsourced to enrollment management companies. And I had a president recently tell me if he walks into his admissions office and tells them, asks them how things work, they might get about 85% of it.

Right.

They have no idea what happens in the other 15. And I think that was Kevin's point, was that our university has given away too much here. Let's move, let's move beyond the split and the cost and all that stuff. But, but the intellectual property, the idea of, of how to do this stuff, of how to build online programs and stand them up, that was, I think, big point of his piece.

Yeah.

So I think on that one at least, my sort of, sort of first blush is that the provision of these types of educational services, it's really a stack of different activities and kind of deliverables. When we think at Coursera about what is the product that a learner gets, we like to break it out into a foundational piece of content. That content gets delivered through a learning experience. It could be mobile, it could be through video, it could be in a classroom, it could be with live engagement with professors. The content and the learning experience ultimately deliver some competencies, you know, some skills and knowledge to do something or to know something about yourself or about the world. Oftentimes that competency gets credentialized. Someone sets a credential that says this proves that this person knows these things and the value of the credentials, often related to the credibility of the issuer. And then the final stack is the career, which is how does this advance economic opportunity and jobs. So when I think about content and learning experience, the competencies, credentials and jobs, the careers, different people are going to play a different role. And I think when I think about the university and say, well, what role will the university play? I think about comparative advantage. Well, what are they really good at doing? They're really good at advancing research, they're very good at teaching. And different universities obviously can be more research and more teaching. My sense is that there's going to be a wide spectrum of response among universities. Some, my guess is the more elite, better endowed folks will probably try to own more of that value chain themselves and not outsource very much at all, frankly. Others who don't have the resources or scale of some of these folks, they're going to need to rely on partners to, to do things at a higher level of scale. So I don't think it's like higher ed is outsourcing this or that. I think every university needs to decide what are we going to do and do well and what do we need partners to do for us. And some might ask for more help from partners and honestly, others will ask for a lot less help.

And so where does Coursera now play

a role in the world?

You've pivoted a few times in the business model, but where do you sit in that world you just described?

Yeah, so we think of ourselves as a learning ecosystem that connects learners, educators and employers. We have 4,40 million learners. We have about 160 universities, 30 industry partners. These are companies that publish on Coursera. And now we have about 1800 businesses who've hired Coursera to upscale their employees using our partners content. We came out obviously in 2012 with the Open courses, very, very free, I was going to say very affordable free. And there's a lot of questions like what is this going to do to higher ed? I think for a number of reasons it was a first step and it wasn't obvious where it might evolve and nobody really knew. But what has emerged is that the open course is turning out to be a really wonderful service to the world and one that attracts a lot of people because it's very high quality, very low cost. The credential value is pretty low. So I finished a course and so I have a course certificate. Was it proctored? Is it ranked against other people with their admissions process. No, no, no. But still, it's definitely valuable. Essentially, what we've done at Coursera is we have really expanded the product portfolio. So I think about, okay, courses is a very accessible, faster, you know, lower value credential, but there's still a credential all the way up to. Most recently, we announced a master's in machine learning with Imperial College London, which is the top 10, you know, math and engineering school in the world. So you'll be able to go for an open course for free all the way up to a master's degree from the most advanced mathematics department in the world, depending on what you want. And there'll be credentials all in between. So I'd say that fundamentally the open courses are the gateway to these online degrees and there will be, you know, intermediate credentials throughout the lineup.

Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.

Absolutely.

Lightning round of live at GSV for Future youe and as a proud instructor on the Coursera platform, appreciate you being awesome.

Thanks for the shout out.

Thanks so much. All right, thanks. And we'll be back on Future you.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher

education and those who want to lead

organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions.

If you want to shape the future

of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

So welcome back to Future U at ASU GSV here in San Diego. Our next guest is Rachel Carlson, who's the co founder and CEO of Guild Education and Guild announced an exciting new partnership with the University of Arizona earlier today. Rachel, can you tell us a little bit about the partnership and what it means for Guild, U of A and education more broadly?

Yes. So thanks for having me. First of all, thanks for being here. Excited to connect. So joining the University of Arizona into Guild's network is just one more step for us in the work we believe is necessary to make education as a benefit and more broadly to general education available to working adults. So we work with Fortune 1000 companies who want to have choice available to their employees, and we believe that version one of this education benefits movement was a single university working with a single employer and we studied that model deeply, and we learned that we can advance it by helping more universities be around the table with many employers. So University of Arizona meets a lot of what we're hearing from our students. They want a brand in that region. They want a university that's a flagship. They want a school that they both have heard of and that they can respect. And that doesn't mean all of our students want that. A pillar of guild is to have a variety of choice. So we've got high school completion programs, we've got master's degrees. But the University of Arizona fits in a really nice sweet spot for us in meeting our student demand as well as meeting the employer demand of companies like Disney, Discover Financial, Chipotle, Mexican Grill, et cetera.

So some of our listeners, I suspect, haven't heard this phrase before, education as a benefit. Can you unpack that? And then my big question for you is, it's hot right now. It's a tight labor market. What happens if the economy tanks? Are companies still investing in this benefit?

Yeah, sure. So two parts. So one, education is benefit. We believe that you look at the movement of companies offering more services to their employees, especially as the social fabric of the United States is somewhat crumbling right now in terms of really providing those social services via a government vehicle, we're seeing employers play a larger role in the lives of their employees outside of their job. We think healthcare 401k, sure, that makes sense for an employer to be involved. We think employers actually can play the largest role in influencing the education of their employees because they understand the job market better than the government does. They understand what roles are growing at their company. And for the enlightened companies who've said, hey, look, we might not have a job for you in five to 10 years, but we want you to work here for the next five, and we're willing to help put you through school to then be positioned well to have your next role. The ROI is actually clear there because as they say, employee for now, customer forever. And when you align that way, it makes sense. I think that answers your second question, which is a lot of the companies we're talking to are actually increasing their education benefits, budgets as they see automation coming, as they see a looser labor market, as they see robots taking on some of those human jobs, because they recognize that the consumer market is going to expect corporate America to play a socially responsible role in helping align. Okay, this employee maybe needs to learn a new skill to move up in our company, or, or maybe needs to move on from Our company, but it's our job to ensure that they have relevant skills to get another job.

So Michael and I do not have employers. Well, we have employers, but we don't have an employer. We are employed. And so this brings me to my question about it's been a long day of travel. This brings me to my question about the gig economy. Right. And the freelance economy. Right. I spoke recently at Google. They have more freelancers than they have full time employees. What if you don't have an employer? I think this is a great concept. We all need professional development. But what happens when you don't have an employer?

Yeah. So I think that puts either more responsibility on the employer or the government sector. So we're not seeing the government sector address this problem today. In fact, they've made it harder for companies to invest in their freelance population. So a company like Lyft cannot give a non taxable investment in their employees education the way a company like Taco Bell can. We think that's sort of ludicrous. We hope government changes that. It's high on the agenda. But for example, you probably saw Google last week added tuition reimbursement for its freelancers would be a generous term. I'd call them contractors because I've never heard of a freelance janitor. Maybe they assume themselves that way, but in most cases they're contractors who are trying to make a living and trying to support a family. And so we're actually seeing the movement of offering education benefits grow into populations that sit outside of the W2 population. But we think government probably needs to catch up and acknowledge that reality.

So you're saying we're in luck. Okay, good, good, good. I just wanted to make sure.

All right.

Yes.

Awesome.

Rachel, thanks a million for joining us. We know you have a tight schedule today. Really appreciate you carving out time. And congratulations again on the announcement with the University of Arizona.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Rachel. All righty. And now welcoming Anne Kubeck, the chief operating officer at Re Up Education. RE up is one of the companies incubated and entangled that re enrolls dropout students. And Ann, I'd love you to talk about because this is a concept I suspect a lot of our listeners haven't thought about before because it's not a major category. Re enrolling dropped out, or you call them stopped out students. Talk about the big problem that you're trying to solve in education and its dimensions of it.

Sure. Well, there are 37 million Americans with some college and no degree and we refer to them as the forgotten student because they're not really owned by usually any one department or individual at a university. So when we go in to talk to university partners, we're building coalitions of stakeholders that have some element of responsibility for this stop out student. But typically once that student leaves, they sort of fall off the radar. And in fact, when we connect with students to try to bring them back, oftentimes the first thing we hear is, I've just been waiting for somebody to reach out to me and let me know that you want me back. So we learned that this population is sort of forgotten at the university level. And there's no clear pathway back, especially after you've been gone for more than a year or two. Right. So if you're out 5, 6, 10 years, navigating your way back into a university is near impossible.

So speaking of that, so then what is the key student or the key re enroller here? Is it somebody who's been out one year, somebody who's been out 10 years? Give me a Persona of kind of the key person that a university could get as part of this program.

Yeah, we work with students who've stopped out anywhere from one to 10 years. And you know what we find is that the students that are interested in coming back, 90% of them say that they've always wanted to come back and yet they didn't know the pathway back. So for us we're looking at students that are typically a little bit older, they typically have a job, they have a family. So the pathway back to their educational route is different than say a typical junior. So they might have the same credit hours as a junior, but they're no longer that same student. And so we help them figure out not only what are the practical steps it takes to get back into school, but also what are the life challenges, what caused them to drop out in the first place, and what are the types of barriers that they are facing in coming back and what are their motivations to return?

So what are those barriers? To me this seems like a no brainer for institutions especially, especially that have capacity. So what are the barriers, especially on the institutional side, to doing this?

Sure, some of the simplest barriers are the ease of getting back in. So universities often make it very difficult for students to figure out how to re enroll. Maybe they had a $25 parking ticket and they can't even begin to speak to anyone at the university until they cover that, but they didn't even know that it exists. So there are a lot of challenges that are put in front of the students that are just simple barriers that the university could wave away. But, but the broader issues that we see are really these fundamental challenges of, you know, feelings of some shame, feelings of failure and needing to overcome what those issues were the first time they've dropped out in order to come back again.

So.

But what are the institutional barriers? Are there barriers at the institutional level from either faculty or administrative systems beyond the student barriers to enrolling? When you talk to institutions about this, why haven't they done this up until this point?

Yeah, I think some of it is a lack of ownership, a lack of awareness. I think sometimes they don't understand why the student isn't coming back on their own, and they don't understand what those problems are and how they can help a student overcome them. And typically these are life issues. These are concerns that may have. Maybe they had health issues, maybe they had finance issues, maybe they had family issues. And so the university tends to look at them as well. They dropped out because they had poor grades. Well, they dropped out because they had poor grades, but they had poor grades because it was a symptom, because they had, you know, real life challenges that they were facing that they couldn't overcome. And the university wasn't structured to support the student in that manner.

So the way you all work with universities, obviously is that for those that don't know, is that you partner with them, typically on a revenue share or some type of that basis, you support them, the students, with lots of coaches and mentorship to help re enroll them, and then you stay with that student all the way through graduation, hence the revenue share. Right. So I guess the big question that I'm curious about is, is it always a good idea for these students to re enroll in the university from which they've dropped out? Is that the right match, so to speak, for them?

Not always.

Okay.

And we know from the work that we've done with the first hundred thousand students that we've worked with, roughly 25% of the students that want to come back don't want to go back to the university that they stopped out of. And that could be for a variety of reasons. It could be that they didn't have a good experience. It could be that it's no longer a good fit. Maybe they want a different program. Maybe they need online and their former university doesn't offer that. So we know that there's a population where we need to provide various offers in order for that student to be successful. And our coaches will work with students to help them identify what the right path is for them to come back to school.

And I think this is just a great idea. I think there's so much opportunity out there given the tens of millions of people who have some credit, but no degree in particular. Particularly worrisome to me are people in their 20s who fall into that category. So best of luck in all your work.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

And welcome back to future you here at ASU GSB in San Diego, and with us, a longtime friend of both Michael and I, Ben Nelson, founder and chairman and CEO of Minerva Schools. Ben, I visited with you now, what, five, six years ago, I worked on for the Chronicle of High Rich.

You're almost no longer a startup.

Yeah, yeah, that's true in some respects.

In some respects.

Tell me, tell us a little bit about where you've been and where you are today with Myrnova, especially from that founding vision.

Yeah. So the founding vision is that universities are both the most important institutions in society. They're training the people who are going to take the most consequential roles in society, and at the same time, they generally do a pretty terrible job. And so that combination of factors has inspired us, except in all of our cases, including especially in those cases. And that general perspective was the impetus behind creating effectively, a prototype, a model institution that other universities can look at and say, wait a second, here's a university that starts from scratch and can produce outcomes that no other university that has been established for hundreds of years can produce and do so while actually being more accessible and lower cost. And the idea was once you establish that marker, you then enable other institutions to look at that and say, wait a second, we should be able to do that too and inspire others to reform.

So you've been at this now for a few years. You're actually about to graduate your first class of students from Minerva. So congratulations on that.

Thank you.

Very exciting for them at Consequent, I think it's called in May. And so you've been doing this. And for those of you who maybe have read Atlantic articles about your, about the platform you've created, it's an incredibly high touch, active learning experience. It sounds frankly exhausting by the end of it, but it's been very high touch in the sense of one teacher, like 12 students, maybe, something like that.

12, 15 students. 12, 15 at most.

18 at most. Okay. And today you're announcing here at GSV a new platform to dramatically scale those efforts. Tell us about that and what it looks like.

So the research behind active learning was almost Exclusively done on large format classes. So it wasn't to show, oh, you know, you take a professor that teaches a 200 person class, when that same professor has the same type of instruction methodology with a 15 person class, they're more effective. What it actually showed was you can take the same professor, the same material, the same quality of students and the same scale. But when you move from a passive environment, right, lecture and test to an active environment, flipped classroom was the initial idea. You do your reading at home and then you come into class and do homework, you have dramatically better results, 7x results, a bigger difference than penicillin is compared to a sugar pill. And so this was, I've never heard that one before. That is, it's actually three times more effective.

I'm not even sure I want to think about that.

Three times more effective, right. So just imagine that we know sugar pill. Yeah, we know what works so much better. And the higher education industry says, yes, more sugar pills for us, please. And so the concept was really always demonstrated in large format classes. And so even though we chose to implement it in small format classes, we realized that if you just adapt technologically to a larger format environment, you can have the same types of demonstrable benefits that were shown empirically in many, many, many studies in the past. Now that's easier said than done. The technological barriers are substantial, but we have an amazing group of engineers and a great group of academics. And so we were actually able to put that solution together. And that's what we announced today.

And so who is the primary audience for this solution? What do you think are the types of institutions that would be interested in this? And then I have a follow up for that.

So overwhelmingly, the first relationship that we announced, which was with the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, highly selective institution, it can afford to teach certain courses in small format, but even, you know, very wealthy universities still wind up having the 2, 300 person introductory level courses. And so even in those institutions, you have very large format classes. And that's not going to go away. And so any university, any educational institution really, that needs to have high efficiency, especially introductory level courses, even though we don't condone the teaching of introductory level material, but we do condone the concept of core curricula. The idea of providing certain habits of mind and foundational concepts to all students is going to be extremely difficult for those institutions to say, yes, we'll teach students 18 students at a time. And so really it's meant to enable institutions that have large student bodies to Adapt fully active learning and a more robust curriculum.

But I'm wondering if it could be also used on the other side. I heard Carol Quillen, who's the president of Davidson, speak last week and she gave this incredible talk about the need to scale liberal arts education. Yes, right. Because we think of liberal arts education in the US as small and intimate. And she feels that the habits of the mind that are taught at very selective liberal arts colleges must be. It's an imperative now to scale those, given the demands of the future workforce. Can it even be used in places like that to scale up what is considered now kind of an intimate boutique experience?

Well, not only can it be to the point, it must be. What people don't understand about the term the liberal arts is that the origin of that term comes from the founding fathers of this country that were convinced that the enfranchised citizen must be taught the disciplines or arts that allow them to be free or have liberty. And that wasn't about reading poetry, it was actually about having practical knowledge that they could use to be a successful dentist one day and then a successful senator the next. Right. That's the entire concept of the representative republic that we live in. And so if we don't scale up, a liberal arts education, which I would argue in many institutions is basically extinct, but is really the core of the Minerva reform effort. And I think that we're going to continue seeing a fraying of the society.

And do you think that also can even save the humanities at some of these places?

Absolutely, because the humanities are a core element of those practical, that practical knowledge.

But there's a distinction in your mind between liberal arts and humanities.

Correct? Liberal arts and humanities are Venn diagrams. Right. Humanities are a component of liberal arts, but so are sciences, and so is mathematics and logic and social sciences, etc.

So I'd love you to forecast now, this being future you, and think five, ten years from now you've introduced this platform. It's obviously the first of many building blocks I suspect you have on the roadmap. What sorts of institutions are using this and how has it changed the complexion of higher education in terms of from a curricular perspective, in terms of the creation of new institutions, maybe even disruption and cost.

So this may sound like a cop out to the answer, but the reality is, when you look at the initial set of partnerships, we have the most highly ranked young university in the world in the University of Science and Technology, a brand new, perhaps the most ambitious education project in all of India, an srm, a complete Startup University that is meant to address the teacher shortage in rural America. There is nothing that connects one of those institutions to another except the fact that they have leaders who are deeply committed to educational outcomes and are willing to take the bold steps that are necessary and admit that there can be dramatically better forms of education in the future. And so what you're going to see is you're going to see many of those institutions that have leaders that can both see that need and be able to bring their faculty, their student body along with them, succeed in implementing a Minerva type of program. Whereas you're going to have many others who love the limelight, love to get on stage and talk about how great they are and how they teach critical thinking and are going to have the exact same course catalog today that they had 30 years ago.

Well, that is a sobering vision. I don't know if that was as much of a cop out as you said, but thank you, Ben. Thank you for joining us.

And we're going to have you on a future a full episode of Future you live.

Yes. So we can dig deeper. So appreciate it very much.

Looking forward to it.

Thank you. We're all going to have you.

All right. And for our last guest on Future you Live, we have Ryan Craig. No pressure. Ryan, longtime friend of Jeff and mine, who came out with a not so new book anymore, but we've been trying to have you on the podcast for a while.

There's a glut of higher education books out there.

You know that book is old news

by now and it's about last mile short form programs.

So I'm no longer, I'm no longer talking about the book.

Yeah, talk about the next book.

There's a moratorium.

The moratorium on disruptive university minimum viable products that are last mile providers. Did I get all the jargon?

That's all pretty good.

Yeah. Okay. But in seriousness, you came out with this book that I blurbed as saying it was the book that I wish I had written because I think I wish I had had the guts to say all the things that you said. Can you break it down for us? What is a last mile provider and why is it so meaningful for higher education right now?

Sure. Last mile training or last mile providers are those that are trying to fill the gap between what employers are actually seeking for entry level positions and what the existing post secondary ecosystem is able to provide. And the primary elements of the gap are a combination of digital technical skills and soft skills. And we find that the providers that scale fastest and furthest are those that are able to absorb frictions out of the system, the education friction away from the candidate and the hiring friction away from the employer. And we know this because at University Ventures, we've invested in probably about 15 companies that try and do this. And we observe those that scale further, faster and those that don't. And so we've now sort of come to preference models that absorb these frictions away that tend to be what we call employer pay or employer down solutions.

Ryan, you've written a lot about the kind of in the employer ecosystem or the hiring ecosystem. And that ecosystem has largely been defined for the most part by colleges and universities for decades, even centuries. Right. They essentially produce the graduates. They flooded the job market and they said accept them because they have this piece of paper. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, especially given that increasingly most people are going to college for a job. We know that from every survey out there, whether you're 18 or 48. So does this mean that employers now have the upper hand and are able to dictate more to colleges and universities what's happening on their front, or do colleges and universities still hold all the cards when it comes to producing graduates for this job market?

Yeah, I'm not sure colleges and universities hold any cards at this point. I think employers do hold the upper hand and they're demonstrating that by adding all kinds of skills to their job descriptions beyond the degree. And increasingly it's technical and digital skills. And a lot of that is due to the fact that hiring has changed. The fact that it's now, you know, you can apply for a job in less than 10 seconds. So the average job, the average job posting generates hundreds of resumes and applications. And so these employers aren't actually looking at these resumes. They're using applicant tracking systems to screen them. And so the natural impulse is, once you get 400, 500 resumes for every position, is why don't we add skills to these job descriptions? And, you know, technical skills. We now believe technical skills outnumber all other skills combined for entry level job descriptions across virtually every sector of the economy. And there's a good reason for that and a bad reason for that. The good reason is that obviously these enterprises have digitized. The bad reason is that there's only so many ways to say critical thinking, problem solving, communication skills, but there's any number of technical skills you can add to a job description. So that's what these hiring managers and HR managers, but you said they're adding

those skills on Top of the degree or some sort of credential. Does that mean that credential is still always going to be the foundation?

No, I don't think so. I mean, you know that's not the way applicant tracking systems work. Right. It's a keyword density. So the more skills you add to the job description, it's our understanding that essentially it dilutes the importance of the degree in that job description, meaning it's more likely that employers are going to actually look at and potentially interview candidates who don't have that degree.

So you all at University Ventures started with a thesis that a lot of innovation will happen within universities, but you've migrated from that in terms of your investment activity. At least it seems to me where you're investing in mostly these outside providers that reduce hiring friction and education friction and fill that gap. Where's your current thesis and where this goes for the traditional universities?

Yeah, I mean, I would go so far as to say is we are actively not investing in education companies today with the goal of investing in companies that are actually in a business and turning them into pathways to implement by adding last mile training to what they do. I think it's very hard for an academic institution to compete with an intermediary that has a commercial incentive to scale the provision of entry level talent. These intermediaries, the ones that we're helping to build, they have a cycle time that is weeks in terms of knowing whether their curriculum is producing candidates that employers are going to take or not, as opposed to think about what universities, if they have a cycle time, it's years. And as technology changes more rapidly, we think intermediaries are going to have a major advantage. I just don't see how an academic institution competes.

Okay, so does that mean institutions that have been around for centuries are gone?

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. What's the future of.

Yeah, look, I think the single value of the elite institutions, institutions will continue to persist for decades for sure, at least. But there is a risk that your alma maters are.

Okay, my mind, maybe you're just screwed

for a note.

I sit on the board of trustees, so I worry about that.

You think about this. Well, they kicked Ryan off of the digital board of directors.

Yeah. No longer on the Yale board, so. But look, no, I think, I mean, there's a significant risk that even where we went to school, 20, 30 years from now, there's a risk that, you know, you view that the way, and I say this somewhat only semi facetiously, that the way you think if someone were to tell you that their daughter's coming out as a debutante, Right, you think that's old fashioned and elitist and unnecessary. And faced with a plethora of these pathways that lead you directly to good jobs where you're being paid from day one to learn, as opposed to paying and taking a financial risk, and you're guaranteed a pathway to that good first job, you know, why would you take the risk, even if it is Yale? So I think there's some risk of that. I don't think it's going to happen in the next decade or two, but the risk of risk, I think non selective schools, and I try to make this point in the book that I will reference now that, you know, there's a big difference. You know, for too long we've operated under the assumption that a degree is a degree is a degree and college is college is college. And we know that's not true. That's not how employers think about it. A degree from a selective school is viewed very differently from a degree from a non selective school. And I think that the non selective schools are going to be in big trouble when there are millions of seats in these new pathways to good first digital jobs.

But can I just press on that for one second? Because this is something that I've been thinking about as I write my new book and after the Varsity Blue scan plug. Sorry, I had a plug. It's not out till 2020 though, so I'll be plugging it a lot more. But you haven't seen anything yet. But after the Varsity Blue scandal, we saw a proliferation of all these pieces, all these think pieces in every publication out there. It doesn't matter where you go to school. Like, why did all these people spend so much money to go to selective schools? But you're saying it does matter. At least right now it does.

Sure it does, yeah. I mean, it matters to the parents, it matters to the student. But I agree with you. I mean, you know, fundamentally it's a macro signal. And in a world where it's easier than ever to create and sustain micro signals, signals of competency, signals of work product, these macro signals become less and less and less important. Having said that, you know, I'm not going to argue that the snob value of having your child attend an Ivy League school will not be significant 20 years from now. I think it's still, I think it still, I think it may, it may go the route of being old fashioned, viewed as an old fashioned signal. In the same way the debutantes are today.

Do you have any connections on the Yale soccer team or anything?

Absolutely.

He's been prepping that.

And on the Yale Rumpus, which is going to start a sports team soon, if you don't know. Esports team.

Actually, I'm actually moderating the esports panel on Wednesday.

That's amazing.

Which is ridiculous.

That's amazing. So. So for those that don't know, Ryan started the tabloid campus team newspaper at Yale University, the Rumpus. And you can read about his hijinks in his various books that he. That he took in college and his newsletter. And his newsletter, the. The Ed.

The Gap Letter.

The Gap Letter. I always mess it up. That you can sign up for at University Ventures Fund. And then his. His latest book, a new you that you can get on Amazon or any place hawking last mile providers.

So.

But, but in seriousness, Ryan, I mean, obviously your thesis follows a disruptive innovation, one quite closely. So it's near and dear to my

heart, but definitely I referenced Christensen in the first pages of my.

In the first pages of your book. But. So I think it's something. We're gonna have to have you back on this podcast because we're gonna have to dig deeper into this question.

I don't think we have anything more

to talk about, so we'll.

Perfect.

And with that note, we're gonna say it's the last mile and close out future you Live with Ryan Craig.

Thank you, Ryan.

Thank you.

And that concludes our first episode of Future youe Live. We'll be back with another Future you Live episode, special episode with four guests coming up. That will be from day two of the ASU GSVX conference. And again, thank you to our producers, Lauren Dibble and Steve Echegaris, who without whom this would not be possible. Thank you to Paul Friedman, once again stepping in and doing some guest co hosting with us. And for Jeff Salingo, I'm Michael Horn. We'll see you next time.