Scaling 'Hybrid' Colleges

Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. Looking forward to this conversation today with John Gabrielli, who's been studying the phenomenon that I've written about several times of hybrid colleges. These schools that are emerging generally in urban areas to serve a demographic very similar to community college students, but with a blended format that combines the best online competency based learning with those really key in person supports and sort of a no excuses mindset in many ways. And so I'm going to bring John up to the stage, proverbial stage, right now alongside me. And hopefully this, this, this telecast, if you will, will go without incident. But John, it's good to see you.

Good to see you, Michael. I'm a bit, have been for a long time a big fan of Future youe, which is my favorite higher education podcast and longtime listener. So excited to be here with you.

A longtime listener, first time guest. So let's hope it's not, you know, we can make a habit of it if you will. But let's start, you know, with your interest, I think in the hybrid college movement and then I'd love to talk about the research you did and then obviously the group that you formed start scaling that impact. But first your own personal interest. How did you become aware of this? What's been your own journey to studying and then now trying to scale it?

Well, Michael, I think my, my own interest dates all the way back to my time as a teacher teaching middle school math and science in Hartford and Springfield. And I think as a teacher I was keenly aware of this challenge of I had 30 students in a classroom, 31 actually. And I had some students who were doing single digit addition and I had some students who were doing multiple multiplication of exponents. And as much as I tried to differentiate and meet students where they're at, it's almost impossible to provide the level of feedback and support to students and engage everybody at the academic level where they are. And that really led to my interest in the use of technology to drive more personalized learning models. Still, most students learn from a lecture based approach, which we know is not the best, most engaging or effective way of learning. And after my time in the classroom, that led me to Southern New Hampshire University, which is obviously a fascinating place, doing a lot of interesting work around education and the future of innovation. I worked there for two years at the Innovation center exploring everything from AI grading to VR classes, micro credentials, ISAs, soft skills. But of all the kind of models that we were looking at, I think from a student impact point of view, this hybrid college model seemed to be the most compelling in that you are getting the best of technology and personalized learning, competency based education, which really represents a fundamental paradigm shift in education. And then combining that with the human touch of in the community, one on one coaching, which is something that for me, when I was teaching, I took online courses and master's courses at Johns Hopkins. I struggled, I felt isolated, I felt disconnected, I. And so combining the affordability and flexibility of technology with the in person support seemed like a really compelling solution to me and that kind of led me to this work.

So you just mentioned another feature that I didn't say up front, which is the incredible affordability of these hybrid colleges. Not only are they getting great results, they're combining, as you said, the best of the technology with the in person supports and sort of this attitude around serving students. But the cost is dramatically lower than a traditional experience and one that oftentimes for a Pell Grant, someone can afford. I'm curious, as you define hybrid colleges, how. How do you define them and what are their distinguishing characteristics that make them perhaps different from other innovations we've seen out there in higher ed?

Yeah, I mean, hybrid college at its core combines these two basic components, which is FL flexible online competency based courses with wraparound in person coaching and support in the community. A lot of the hybrid colleges, a lot of this work has been driven by Southern New Hampshire University, which back in 2014 when they won the Next Generation Learning Challenge grant, built from the bottom up, the first competency based curriculum to be approved by the U.S. department of Education. And that was a fundamental reorientation of how we think about college and higher learning. In that under a traditional model, time is fixed and learning is variable. You have a certain number of courses that you take each semester, you take a test at the end that measures whether or not you've mastered the material and then you sort of move on regardless of whether or not you've completed full mastery. And we know that students learn at different paces and need different types of supports. And so companies competency based education kind of flips that on its head and allows learning to be constant and time to be variable so that each student can follow their own personalized path. And I think what SNHU did there really empowered a lot of this work as well as, as you just mentioned, driving a much more affordable tuition model in the United States. Obviously we have more than $1.6 trillion of student debt at this point. Many students are leaving college, particularly students of color and first generation students with high amounts of debt. And so this kind of model is much more flexible. It's built to meet the reality of working adults who have to balance school with many other personal and family obligations and allow students to pursue their own path to a degree. Then I think the second piece of it, which is just as critical is the in person coaching and support in the community. And that was really pioneered by DUA Education here in Boston, which was founded by a longtime Boston teacher named Bob Hilt, who was kind of frustrated seeing so many of his talented and passionate students, you know, do everything right in high school and thrive academically and then go on to college and struggle. Of course we know that just 10% of first generation low income students end up graduating college. Many more leave with debt, and that forecloses a lot of opportunities for folks. 70% of new jobs require a college degree. And so Bob felt like he knew it wasn't a problem with the students, it was a problem with a model that wasn't built for those students to succeed. And so he came across SNHU's Competency Based Program started off literally out of a Panera Bread, coaching a few of his former students through the SNHU platform. And seven years later, that's turned into more than a thousand students served and more than 400 students who've earned their bachelor or associate's degree through Duet education, which has been really transformative.

That's a stunning number. I'm smiling also because I hear you speaking and I feel like I'm watching myself with so many of your lines that you're using, which is awesome. But just because there's so much concurrence and sort of mind meld in what you're saying, I'm curious as you then, you were at Southern New Hampshire University, you then decided to study the Duet College model specifically in Boston, and hybrid colleges more generally. In your research and publication that you came out with recently, what have you learned about how these schools perform for the students that they're serving?

I think America in many ways has the greatest higher education system in the world that literally draws students globally to come study in the United States. But it has that the best system for some students, not all students. As I mentioned before, just 11% of first generation low income students graduate college. 60% of black students don't graduate college. And at many of our elite institutions, like Harvard, where I attended, for example, there are more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60. And it is a huge barrier to economic opportunity. And social mobility. It's a big reason why the United states is now 17th in the world in social mobility and why, you know, Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winning economist, says, if you want to live the American dream, move to Denmark. It's become a higher education system, which historically has been a key driver of mobility, dating back to things like the GI Bill and everything else, has become actually an impediment and in many cases a reinforcer of class privilege. Because our system is built to serve 18 year old, first time, full time, mostly white upper middle class students, when the reality is that the majority of college students today are either over the age of 25, our parents are working full time, or are the first in their families to attend college. And so when we. When I saw the results, and at first it was only internal data, and I had some conversations with folks at Duet and talked to students there and talked to folks at other hybrid colleges, I was just blown away by the impact. It's notoriously difficult to move the needle on graduation rates. And, you know, students face many challenges, especially working adults balancing school with other obligations. And I think Duet and snhu, that partnership has been able to be successful by kind of flipping the model on its head and really fundamentally transforming what education looks like. And the results speak for themselves. We're very excited about these results. Obviously, we had sort of had a sense internally what the results had looked like. But this is the first independently published working paper looking at hybrid college student outcomes. And, you know, the results are not causal. I think it's important to. There's more research that's needed, certainly, but just on a descriptive level, these are. Graduation rates for students enrolled at Duet are more than two times the statewide average. Students are graduating three times as fast as average nationally. Nationally, it's almost 5.9 years for the average student to get their associate degree. At duet, it's just 18 months. And this model has cut the cost of college in half. And if Duet were its own college, it would also be one of the first ever in Massachusetts to completely eliminate the black white college completion gap, which is such a rare thing to see in education. And so seeing these results at snhu, I was sort of constantly asking this. It's amazing that Duet has served now 1,000 students in Boston, that places like Rivet in the Bay Area and Peloton U and Austin are serving students in their communities effectively. But nationwide, there are programs. 36 million Americans with some college and no degree. Most don't happen to live in a top 10 metropolitan statistical area. Most don't have access to options that serve them well. And so why can't we expand this model to serve more students? And that's what I ended up leaving SNHU to do and to help found Trio.

So before we get into the founding of Trio, one other question, just to go deeper on those results, because those numbers are eye popping. The demographic that a school like a Duet is serving is pretty similar. No. To that which a community college.

Right.

Would serve on the face of it. Is that, is that right?

The average student at duet is 27. Two thirds of students are Pell eligible. 90% are students of color. A quarter more than a quarter are parents. And those statistics generally hold across the field of hybrid college. I think it's a population that's much more reflective of the diversity of today's college student and as you talk about in your book, has a fundamentally different job to be done. It's not a model for every student. Many students want four year coming of age experience and a leafy green and a quad and opportunity to participate in a fraternity or whatever. Many students have different jobs to be done, but particularly for working adults. So much of our focus on education right now remains, I think, behind the times in that we're focused on lots of amazing interventions for 18 year olds. But there are 3.7 million graduating high school seniors in America each year. There are 36 million, 10 times that number of adults with some college and no degree. And so I think what we need is an ecosystem of higher education options that can meet every student's needs. And community college is a great option for many students. I think for a lot of students that want a more affordable option, that want an in person option, community college can work well. One thing that can be a challenge in any traditional model community college, public or private, is the fixed nature of the class schedule. And I think one of the. We talked about some of the data. I think what initially drew my attention to the Duet model was some of the student stories and just talking to students who had been through this model. A student, Fred Mutsinsi, who had been came over from Rwanda, had a dream of starting a business and being an entrepreneur, knew that in America, to achieve the American dream, he needed a college degree, was in a community college for five years in Maine, was getting straight A's, but still hadn't earned his associate after five years because he had to take courses on nights and weekends, because he was working full time to support himself and ultimately ran out of money. He wasn't eligible for in state aid as a, as a refugee. So kind of purchased a bus ticket down to Boston in hopes of finding more opportunity there and ultimately wound up at Duet Education where he completed his associate degree in just six months and his bachelor's degree in a year and now is working at his dream job at Cambridge Associates and is participating in a program called Color Wave to empower more entrepreneurs of color to start their own VC backed businesses. We believe that there are hundreds, thousands, probably millions of students like Fred who have the skill and the will and the motivation to succeed. But right now the options just aren't there for them to find the path forward. And, and so our hope is to with trio is to scale this model in a way that those students can achieve their goals just the way that Fred has.

Yeah, it's just interesting hearing you say that because not only have this model reduced the absolute cost, but it's tackled perhaps the biggest poverty that a lot of these students have, which is time poverty. Right. Like they just don't have scarce time or easily malleable schedules that can allow for, you know, going to school full time or to fit into a fixed schedule. Or maybe they can, but that fixed schedule, as you said, means that they're going to complete over a much longer time horizon. They may exhaust their eligibility for certain funding streams, et cetera, et cetera. And so this model tackles all those things, it seems to me, and I'm just curious for your reaction to this before we get into the scale story you're under underway now. It seems to me that, you know, a lot of community colleges, and I wrote about this recently, will say, yeah, a lot of students, you know, don't complete with us, but it's okay because like it's, you know, a higher priority came into their lives and so they're making the right short term decision for them. And it's not a reflection on us. And on the one hand I'm sympathetic to that, but on the other hand it seems like. But if you change the assumptions underlying the model and allow someone to complete so much quicker, you can spare individuals like the, you know, the story you just told from having to make this choice that pits these two things against each other, of dropping out to, you know, take care of very urgent priorities or continuing in school that may, you know, cripple your financial situation. You sort of take away that trade off and allow people to make both the right decision for their long run while handling their immediate priorities in the moment. Do you see it that way or Am I? Or is there something more complex than the dynamic?

No, I think you're right. I think there's, there's important nuance here. You know, I agree with, to the extent that folks are saying it's not always a failure if someone doesn't complete. And for example, Duets wrestle with that. And we wrestle with that. If a student goes back to school to be able to get access to a better job or enrolls at a boot camp and gets that job and doesn't complete the degree, you know, according to statistics, you might count that as a failure, but ultimately that student achieved what they wanted from higher education. Unfortunately, obviously, that isn't necessarily the case in all the time. That may be the case in some cases, but for many students, debt without degree can be a very challenging bind for students to find themselves in. I think what we need is this broader ecosystem of options because for some students, they do want that face. Some students don't do well online. Some students may not like the project based learning format, although, you know, many students do. And so Duet partners with community colleges here in Boston and they'll tell students, hey, if this is your, if you're interested in a specific field or program, if you're interested in the face to face learning component, Duet may not be the right place for you. And so I think it's about laying out options so that students have the choice of what model is right for them. And there's the, you know, the fresh of the world where it allows you to go significantly faster, cheaper and move forward in your, in your career and get that job. There's also the flip side, which is the traditional structured credit hour, you know, schedule can be very unforgiving when obligations come up on a day to day basis, exactly as you said. So whether it's your kid getting sick or if you have a work schedule where you don't have fixed hours and you have to pick up extra time at work in additional college format, then that may mean you're getting Cs, Ds or Fs and ultimately dropping out. And one of the studies, one of the figures in this study, if folks take a look at this study that was just published with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and that I worked on with Professor Marty west and Kate Larned. One of the figures that I think is most interesting in the study, it shows the path to completion for duets. First 50 AA students, first 100 actually, I believe. And it shows that you have some students like Fred who sort of race ahead and are able to Be unbound from, you know, being slowed down by traditional structures. You have some students who race ahead and then pause for six months and don't face a penalty for doing so and are able to resume and complete their degree. And you have some students who, you know, follow a more traditional steady pipeline, all the pipeline all the way through. But I think it just reorients. And Paul LeBlanc book, I think his new book Students first, he talks about this really powerfully. It's this idea of putting students needs first, not scheduling off of the institution's needs or the sort of one size fits not approach, but giving students the option to pick what works for them best.

Love those points, literally all of them. So let's go where you've been pushing us. I wanted to spend a little time on the problem, but now the solution, which is, and I've been clamoring for more of these types of schools and someone to actually commit to scale. Founding Trio. That's your intention, right? You're going to try to create many, many more of these models to create more options and choices for students who live in not just Boston or Austin, Texas or San Francisco or Los Angeles, but across the country. Is that correct? And what's the basic theory of action?

That is exactly correct. And I think right now, like I said, it's amazing that some students have access to this model, most don't. And that's a particularly. The population of working adults is a particularly underserved population in today's higher education ecosystem. And I think that's where this hybrid college model works particularly well. When I was at snhu, as I said, I was kind of constantly asking why aren't there more of these hybrid college sites? And I think part of the answer was that a lot of the early hybrid college sites sprung up organically from folks like Bob who were teachers in the community, who saw students struggling, who were very focused in their own local communities, and rightly so, on delivering student, on delivering better options for students in their hometowns, whether it's Boston or Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, you know, Philadelphia. But what there wasn't was a scaled infrastructure and a pipeline and a backbone to support in a more systematic way the proactive launching of these sites. And so our hypothesis is that ultimately success has to be driven locally. That, you know, and Trio's philosophy is that we are working, you know, not for or on or to communities, but with communities. And that means a fellowship based approach where we identify leaders who are deeply, authentically, locally rooted, who've worked in Education, many who themselves are the first in their families to go to college, who have a passion for expanding access and then bringing them to duet, helping them train through a residency based fellowship, and then supporting them every step of the way in launching their new site. Managing everything from hr, fundraising, budgeting systems and operations, hiring so that you can start these sites in a more lean way with just a first founder. And they can be entirely focused on recruiting students, coaching students and making that site successful, ultimately spinning off to become their, their locally independent 501 C3s with, you know, long term sustainability and community rootedness. So I think that's the approach that we've hoped to take and we've seen some good success with that so far. Our first three sites, it's very in the early innings still. But our first three sites in Newark, Detroit and Camden are launching this year. Our first students just enrolled as of a couple weeks ago. And also it's very, it's an exciting moment, for sure. Yeah.

So wait, the first sites in Newark, you said Camden and Detroit and then. And so basically you found the local entrepreneur, if you will. And it sounds a little bit like the beginnings of a franchise model in some ways, in the sense that you're providing all that backend infrastructure, maybe the playbook and things of that nature. But if I understood you, and at some point you're going to step out of that day to day support role or will there be an ongoing relationship?

Definitely an ongoing relationship. Our goal is to build a high performing interconnected national network of hybrid college sites that draw support from one another, that draw resources and expertise, that test out new strategies and are able to scale those when successful across multiple sites, but also respecting that each community is different. And Newark is not Detroit, it's not Camden is not San Francisco. There's different needs, there's different higher education contexts, there's different workforce contexts, and ultimately that this model will only really be sustainable and scalable and successful in the long run if it's something that's driven bottom up inside the community and not top down from outside. And so we kind of start by going to different communities where the need is high, exposing folks's model and saying, does this sound like something that might benefit students in your community? Working with local elected officials, nonprofit leaders, education leaders, and ultimately going where folks say, you know, yes, we need this for our community, this fills a need. And then working with a local advisory board and local leader to be sort of the booster rocket to help these sites get off the ground and ultimately become Their own, you know, financially and otherwise sustainable local sites that will serve students in those communities for hopefully for years to come.

How do you identify the entrepreneurs and the cities that you want to work in?

So I'll pick an example. So Detroit, for example, which is one of our first sites. Detroit has one of the lowest bachelor's degree attainment rates of any major city in America, just 14%. There's huge, huge equity issues there. I think as I, as I mentioned earlier, Only nationally, only 28% of Black adults have college degrees, but 70% of new jobs require college degrees. And so when employers are filtering off of college graduation, they're filtering out black employees, working mothers, they're filtering out lots of folks. And so how can we build a way where students can. They don't have to make that impossible choice between working and earning, learning and earning and dropping out of school or dropping out of their job, but they can do both. So we came to Detroit in partnership with the Diploma Equity Project, led by a number of folks, including Doug Ross, who's a former advisor there to Governor Whitmer. And he's done a lot of work in education, both K12 and post secondary, as well as workforce development in Detroit and with their organization, the Diploma Equity Project, and also in partnership with the state of Michigan, which is helping fund the launch of the Detroit program, which is called Degree Forward. Degree Forward just enrolled its first two students as of last week in the pilot cohort. We're very excited about that and I think each community is different. So as I talked about, for example, when you think about what the measure of success is in Michigan, part of the measure of success is expanding to serve students in rural communities, not just in the city of Detroit, where there's high need, but also in rural communities across the state. One of the goals of the site there, Degree Forward, is to double the number of Detroit public schools graduates earning associate degrees. And then the last piece being economic mobility. And that's a core part of our story as well. Not just in Detroit, but nationally. It's not just about degrees for degrees sake, it's about degrees to give students the opportunity for financial security, for economic mobility, and for ultimately choice filled lives. And so one of the core goals of every site, including duet, is that 70% of graduates will be able to attain middle class jobs. And at Duet, the academic coaching and support is also paired. And at trio sites like Degree Forward, the academic coaching is also paired with career coaching. So from day one, you're both helping students complete their degree, but also helping Them identify. Okay, let's say you're working on an entry level job in retail, but you ultimately want to work in healthcare. Let's pursue that healthcare management degree while also securing a job working for a local hospital so that once you complete your degree, you can move up into an upwardly mobile career opportunity in that field. And the success has been impressive. Duet also Revit and Peloton have seen income increases for their graduates of between 15 to 20 thousand dollars per year for students that work with career services there, which I feel is incredibly impressive when you look at the landscape of workforce development and sort of education opportunities that are available right now, completely.

Are you guys. Is one of the services that you're providing helping measure and track those outcomes? Because that can be very difficult and costly, obviously, for individual sites to be able to measure.

Yeah, so I think that's exactly right. One of the things we're hoping to do is to provide sort of standardized metrics across different sites and also roundtables that site leaders can come together and talk about challenges they're facing or solutions that they found in their communities. So that we create this kind of national learning ecosystem in partnership, of course, with also the existing hybrid colleges who've been such pioneers in this space to help invent this model that we're now very aware that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants like Duet and Peloton and others who developed this field. And I think one piece is taking this model to scale. We've launched three sites this year. We're launching three sites again next year, contractually committed to launching five sites the year after that, with some support from a national funder that has yet to be publicly announced. And then in addition, we're trying to help move the field forward. So with a lot of the existing sites, they're mostly focused in their own communities. We have the ability to look across the whole ecosystem and, and also try to push the model in new and interesting directions and that we're calling it sort of Trio Labs, where we're testing out things like partnering with school districts to provide a pathway for paraprofessionals to be able to enter the classroom and diversify the teaching workforce. We're looking at partnering with high schools to provide early college as an option so students can use the competency based approach to get their degree. We're looking at employer partnerships, we're looking at all different types of approaches and then constantly. But this idea of being a learning network that's testing out new strategies, measuring the results and Scaling what works.

That's great. One other question on that front of how you might innovate. The model is Southern New Hampshire and the competency based program that they offer obviously is great for the degree programs that they have, but it's a limited slice of degrees that offer that competency based track. I remember Peloton in its early days offered a menu of providers that they worked with. That has certain challenges in terms of managing them. Are you thinking that you might help folks innovate to offer courses and programs from a variety of schools long term or will Southern New Hampshire be the school of record?

Yeah. So for now we're partnering only with Southern New Hampshire University. We did kind of one of our first efforts we undertook was sort of a due diligence review of the space. Obviously Competency based education and organizations like the Competency Based Education Network is a very growing space with, with a proliferation of new options. We're very encouraged by that. There are already institutions like WGU that are doing this work at scale and certainly many new entrants as well each year. I think Southern New Hampshire we felt had a couple of critical pieces. One was the spirit of partnership that Southern New Hampshire does this out of their mission driven work and that their willing to share revenue with local community partners to invest in developing these community based sites. And also just the level of rigor and work relevance of the curriculum we felt was very unique. But that being said, we're very much hopeful and expect to see a proliferation of new options, both of degree options as well as sub degree credentials and workforce credentials that will hopefully provide a broader array of options for learners. Because ultimately our allegiance more than anything is of course to learners and what and what students need. And so I think we're excited to see that field continue to grow and hopefully to help be a part of that success story too.

Yeah, it occurs to me as we, as we wrap up here together that one of the things that you might be able to do is that when you're an institution very quickly your loyalty ends up, despite the best of intentions, becoming to the preservation of the institution themselves as opposed to the students or the stakeholders for whom you originally set up to serve. Because of your structure, you may be able to avoid sort of that innovator's dilemma, if you will, by keeping a focus on the students themselves and continuing to evolve the new models that you open up. It occurs to me, last question as we wrap up is you mentioned some pretty ambitious scaling plans. Three sites this year, three sites next year, five after that what does the future look like? What do you Hope to see 10 years time when you reflect back on what you've started here?

I mean, I think we're hoping to be a part of systemic change in the American higher education system. And it's going to have to take, it's going to be more than just hybrid colleges. It's going to require employers thinking more creatively and better about where degree requirements aren't, aren't necessary. It's going to require things like boot camps, it's going to require sub degree credentials, it's going to require traditional four year institutions and other types of new models. But I think that hybrid college, given the outcomes that it already has achieved, has a big role to play here if it can scale nationally and serve more students. And ultimately, like I said, for us, our allegiance is to the learner and their goals and not even necessarily to the college degree itself, but to this idea of upward mobility and access and breaking down barriers that right now are preventing many talented and passionate individuals like Fred from being able to achieve their dreams and live choice filled lives. And I think right now, if we don't innovate, if we don't reform our higher education system, we do have this risk that it will continue to enmesh and deepen class divides. And I think there's a growing sense of we have widening economic inequality, we have reduced social mobility and a growing frustration with that as a country. And so I think we have to, anybody working in the education space has to sort of take a long hard look in the mirror and say, how do we reinvent our model? And not just looking to the past. Certainly the American higher education system has done many great things. But if you look back historically, even at programs like the GI Bill, many students of color, and particularly black students were excluded, were left out via redlining and segregation and many other intentional systemic ways to exclude learners. And so I think we need to be constantly drawing inspiration from the past, but also looking to what are these new models of the future that are going to help, you know, all students have the opportunities they deserve. Because I actually think that the future of our country does depend on it.

John, this is tremendously inspirational, where folks who want to follow the ongoing work, who maybe want to reach out because they know an entrepreneur in a city that would love to partner with you or something like that. Where can they follow your work?

Yeah, you can find us online@trionetwork.org we're certainly always looking for new entrepreneurs, looking to start sites in their communities. Organizations to partner with, whether it's schools, whether it's philanthropic or civic organizations. And we're also always eager to find ways to collaborate with, whether it's folks like Europe or jobs based providers or I think we're trying to be much more to break down silos in our workforce, education and K12 systems and maintain an open mind to all types of models with the learner at the center. So I do encourage folks to reach out and we'll be happy to chat.

Awesome. Well, John, keep up the great work. Super excited about what you're doing. Thanks for joining us on the Future of Education. And for all those watching listening, give us a thumbs up because I know you want to hear more from entrepreneurs like John who are doing such inspirational work. And we will be back next time on the Future of Education.

Thanks, Michael. It's been a pleasure.