Short, Affordable Alternatives to College

Michael I don't know about you, but I've been playing a lot with ChatGPT, the chatbot that has taken the world by storm in recent months. And once again, talk of artificial intelligence is surfacing predictions that robots will take over most jobs.

Jeff I am completely addicted as well, but it's also part of a narrative that we've heard over and over again. If history, I think, tells us anything about rapid technological change, it's that these changes will hit unskilled or underskilled workers first, often leaving them on the sidelines in the employment game. So today on Future youe, we're talking about what it will take to make short term workforce training viable for lower income learners who are often stuck in low wage jobs.

This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org subscribe to future youe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salinga. On this show we often talk about higher education in college in the traditional sense. The 19 million or so students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs at thousands of colleges, public and private, full or part time. But as we all know, there's a huge part of the working population, Michael, that don't follow that pathway and they tend to get ignored by the medium policymakers, even us, when we talk about higher ed.

Yeah, I mean, just for point of comparison, take that 19 million number and look at it with the more than 53 million people in the United States who are in low skilled, low wage jobs. They count for 44% of all workers in the US and they're in what are often considered dead end jobs, that is they provide little career mobility and frankly, those jobs are at risk of being automated. Now here's the thing though. To know about those 53 million people, nearly half of them did not complete high school or pursue any kind of post secondary education after graduating.

And at a time when colleges are seeing enrollments of traditional students drop off and with a big demographic cliff coming and the number of high school graduates in the US As I always say, adult students are the siren song of higher education, traditional colleges think this group of learners will fill seats and save their institutions. But if these students didn't enroll in a traditional college or university. Michael at the age of 18 or they end up dropping out of those institutions. What makes anyone think they'll enroll at 25 or 35 or return to college now?

I think that's right. And so on today's show, we're going to talk to the leaders of two organizations that have experience in providing on ramps to working adults who either didn't enroll in college after high school or stopped out of college before graduation. One of the organizations is Merit America. It's a nonprofit that helps adults with short term certification programs. It then works with professional coaches and employers to help get those students into high demand jobs, mostly in technology and data analytics.

And the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, which Paul Fain recently talked about on our Reporters Roundtable, offers recent high school graduates a one year full time program in software engineering. And what's interesting about its model is that it combines a liberal arts curriculum with hands on training, mixes the liberal arts with the practical arts.

And so Merit America and Marcy Lab School are both focused on this huge market of 53 million working adults without a college degree and quickly getting them training so that they can get a job. But they go about their mission in different ways. And we're going to hear more about their models today with Rebecca Tabor Stalen. She's the co founder and co CEO of Merit America, as well as Reuben Agbana, the Marcy Lab School's Co founder and Executive director. Rebecca and Ruben, welcome to Future youe.

Thanks so much for having us.

Thank you for having us.

So can each of you take us through your models? What do you actually do with the learners you recruit? And Rebecca, let's start with you on that.

So to put you in the shoes of a typical Merit America learner, imagine that you are driving for DoorDash by day, caring for your kids at night, earning $25,000 per year. You're hardworking, you've got tons of talent, but you don't have the time or money to go back to school or join a full time training program. You probably find Merit America on TikTok or from an email from DoorDash and you enroll without quitting your day job. Over the course of three to four months, you'll spend 20 hours a week in fully online learning, which is a combination of earning an industry recognized credential from one of our partners like Google and getting coached on professional skills, on sticking with the program, on everything you need to make a major career transition. You do this all alongside a community of peers with lots of events and connection opportunities. So that you realize you're not in it alone, even though it's hopefully working with your work schedule. Once you've earned that certificate, you join our job success phase, connect with our employer partners, get support in an individualized job search and hopefully within a few months you have landed a great new career that pays a livable wage with real upward mobility. Really, to put it more succinctly, you get coached, you get certified, you get a great new career. Or as a learner wrote in a LinkedIn post that I saw just a few days ago, Merit America helps to ignite your spark.

Well, and how about at the Marcy Lab School?

Ruben at the beautiful Rebecca yeah, the Marcy Lab School is serving a student who has recently graduated from high school and is looking for what they've seen throughout their lives as a traditional college experience. They're looking for something that may not be residential, but it has a place based component to it. They're looking for a major set of coursework that attract them towards a career, plus liberal studies that will give them an opportunity to have meaningful and rich conversations with peers that expands their mindset. They're looking for a pathway to a job that pays them really well. But most importantly, they're looking for a pathway that doesn't require them to take on a bunch of student loan debt. The students who attend the Marcy Lab School are students who otherwise would be attending a two or a four year university, likely a lesser selective college. They're attending the Marcy Lab School because they have a ton of drive, a ton of potential, but may not necessarily be admitted to one of the best colleges in this country, but deserve a pathway to a great career nonetheless. Our program is full time, it's 12 months long. Right now we have one academic major and it's computer science and software engineering and we pair that academic major with a leadership component that we call our Leadership Development Program that's a combination of race and identity development coursework, financial literacy, civic studies and all that comes together to form what we believe is a really cohesive post secondary experience designed to meet the needs of an 18 to a 24 year old who's looking for their main post secondary learning experience. On the back end of the program we have a partnerships team that goes out into the community in New York City and sources incredible technical career opportunities for our fellows. We work with companies like Spotify and Squarespace and the New York Times, companies like JP Morgan, WW and the list goes on to ensure that our fellows can interview and ultimately land jobs that Otherwise would require a four year college degree. We're a new organization, but really proud to say that on average, our grads earn about $106,000 per year within three to six months of graduating from the Marcy Lab School.

Wow, those are some numbers there. And you mentioned avoiding student debt. So I'm curious for both of you the cost side of this, how people pay for these programs. Ruben, why don't you jump first?

Yeah. Our program is fully funded by generous sponsors and institutions that are invested in one of two really important problems. One, the problem of higher education access. Institutions are supporting the Marcy Lab School because they want to invest in a model that will provide more access to high quality post secondary learning without, you know, the burden of student loan debt. And then two, we're supported by a number of institutions and individuals that are invested in the problem of diversity in the tech sector. We're located here in New York City where the tech economy is driving the larger economy. And we all see that. We want the products that are being built that touch the hands of millions of people to be built by folks who reflect the diversity of our beautiful city and our country. And right now that's not the case. And so people see the Marcy Lab School as a viable option to both provide more access in post secondary education and also diversify a really fast growing industry.

And Rebecca, how about at Merit America?

So when we set out to build Merit America, we heard that there were two major obstacles that were causing programs like ours to not really meet the needs of low wage workers and to not be able to scale sustainably and to not meet the needs of low wage workers, or the programs that required huge amounts of money upfront and or really onerous repayment terms that maybe if you had no other option, sounded good, but could require having a huge share of your income going to pay for a program after the fact. And on the flip side, where we heard of models that face scale trouble, it was they actually didn't have a source of earned revenue that could allow them to scale to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. So we said we're going to have a learner repayment model that depends on learner success and features some of the most learner friendly terms in the country. So the way it works, you pay nothing to go through Merit America. If you get a job over the salary threshold, you will pay a flat monthly fee about $95 a month for up to five years. So a little more than $1,000 a year for up to five years. Only when you are employed in a job making over the salary threshold. So it's not an income share agreement. It is a outcome based repayment loan product. And what we've heard from learners is that this model is so, so unlike anything they've seen before. It's so learner friendly that one of our biggest issues right now is if you Google Merit America, you'll see Reddit threads saying, is Merit America a scam? It sounds too good to be true. And one of the reasons it is too good to be true is we do have philanthropic partners who help subsidize the cost and we have employer partners who pay a fee when they hire our graduates. So we do have other sources of revenue that allow it to be as learner friendly as it is.

So it's interesting. Both of your models are different and they're obviously very different than traditional college. So I'm kind of curious. You're obviously recruiting many different kinds of learners, but what are you hearing from those students about why your models work for them when perhaps traditional colleges didn't? Because I'll tell you that most of our listeners work at traditional colleges and universities and they're probably thinking, well, why don't we have these students, right? So what's the difference? Why didn't traditional colleges work for these students? Either they never got on the on ramp at all, or they did and maybe just didn't finish. Rebecca, what are you hearing from your students?

So I'll tell you one specific thing we heard from one specific learner, which is, I hate the term college dropout because I didn't drop out of college. I tried college. I assessed what it was offering and I made the educated decision that the time and money I would spend there was not going to be the fastest, most effective and most efficient way to get me to where I want to go. And so when you actually zoom out a little bit and hear so why are individuals making that decision? We hear the challenges that they're facing. With higher ed as it is today, today really come down to the big three. Access, quality and cost. So access. It's really hard to complete a four year degree, even a two year degree, if you have to work, if you got to care for your kids. The structure as it exists now is really not set up for someone balancing work, family and other priorities. It's a setup for people who can immerse themselves in full time learning in terms of cost. We hear that, we all know the cost of higher education has expanded, exploded, and individuals are being faced with Taking out enormous amounts of debt in order to afford a college degree. And in terms of quality, one of the biggest things we hear from our learners is I, in theory liked the idea of a broad based education, but I wasn't actually certain that four years studying this major was going to get me into the career I was looking for. And there is very limited data out there to really assess if I spend this much time and money, what am I going to get out in terms of a career? We don't have that ROI calculation publicly available for people to make that decision. So what we've built at Merit America to really address all those needs and what we see other players in the space doing is programs that are fast, they don't take multiple years to complete. They're focused on in demand careers. You see a clear through line from what you're learning to the job you're going to get. They are flexible, so you can complete them while you work, while you care for your family, but they're also supported so you have the support you need to get ahead. And as we just talked about, they're financed based on success. They don't require that huge investment upfront. You pay only if and when you are successful.

And Ruben, what are you hearing from your students in terms of why kind of quote unquote, the traditional college model didn't work?

Yeah, in many ways. My experience as a teacher prior to founding Marcy Lab School was the grounding force behind our program design. I worked in high schools, even middle schools in New York City and Brooklyn. In most of the schools that I worked in, pretty much had a college for all philosophy. And I saw that so many of my most promising high potential students would go off to college each year and then fail to find success for one reason or another. A lot of it did have to do with access, costs, et cetera. But many students would end up going to colleges that ultimately didn't have the resources to support them. Their graduation rates and their employment rates on the back end supported that fact. I think one of the things that's so unsettling about the narrative around college persistence and completion in this country is that most of the burden is placed on the backs of students. We often say things like our students weren't college ready. We don't often apply that same level of rigor when analyzing whether a college is ready to support our students. When I thought about what was missing from the college experiences of the students who left my care as a high school dean or principal, a teacher, and went off to College. There are a few things that stood out. One, community. Our students were often going off to college campuses where they felt anonymous. They would come back after a semester or two and say, I don't have a single professor who knows my name. I haven't found a peer group that makes me feel like I'm a part of something here. There's a lack of like, rigor and relevance. They'll say, I'm, you know, a year or two in my major coursework, my general ed studies. I still don't have a direction. I feel just as aimless as I was when I was in high school. I don't know how this work that I'm doing right now is going to translate to a career that allows me to change my life. And three, they didn't have the support. It pained me to hear about the classroom experiences of my students after they left our care in high school. As a leader in a high performing high school, we cared deeply about pedagogy, data assessments, what was the day to day life of a student in our high school walls, we believe that a teacher operating at a really, really high level, using data and high quality teaching practices could change life of a student. And then they went off to college and, and it was just okay that they might have been in a room with 200 other students with one professor lecturing from a legal pad. And so we thought if we could provide them inherently with a sense of community, a rigorous curriculum that felt relevant to their career aspirations, and then enough support for them to meet a really, really high bar, then they could achieve at the same level as their peers who had more resources than them.

Yeah. So Ruben, I like those first two because I often talk about belonging and purpose is really missing in higher ed today. And then the third you mentioned is support. And for both of you, both of your organizations really provide a lot of wraparound support services. The coaching, the mentoring, the job placement. It seems like that's the thing that is often missing at traditional colleges and universities. They really see these as student services, maybe with a little mix of academic services, but to them it's the content. Right? It's what the professors do in the classroom that's most important. And all these other things are secondary. And I think it's what you were saying earlier, we talked about often about college ready students, but are colleges really ready for these students? So is that really kind of the difference maker with both of your programs are that you really see that these, what some people in higher ed might refer to as other services as kind of critical to the, to the foundation of what you're doing.

Rebecca I think that's right. So we say coaching at Merit America, it's our, it's our bread and butter, it's our secret sauce, it's, it's all the food related metaphors. It's really what we are doing that makes merit successful and different than other options out there. And I think to build on what Ruben shared, we really build on the research and what we all know, that the best learning experiences happen because of an individual in your life who is helping you, guiding you, making sense of what you are learning. And so our ratio, our support services, our coach to learner ratio, looks much more like an elementary school teacher to learner ratio than your typical college professor ratio and certainly not your typical college support staff ratio, which can be thousands of learners to one person. And the funny thing is, most learners would say they chose Merit America to get an industry recognized credential and this seemed like a good way to get it with support, with a friendly repayment model. But what actually made the difference, what helped them make the transition from a low wage job to an upwardly mobile career, is the deep professional development and support of a coach that many of them have not had that experience with for years, decades even.

Ruben, I want to turn to you because something that you do that you, and you mentioned it in terms of the liberal arts curriculum, right? You mentioned civics education, for example, or race and identity work. Because one of the criticisms, I think a lot of the pathways that other programs that are outside of the traditional college paradigm often get is that they say, well, they give short shrift to things that you get in the liberal arts like learning how to learn and the foundational skills that employers say they want. You know, critical thinking, problem solving, writing and so forth. So I, I just love you. To amplify a little bit on your view of the importance of the liberal arts and how you make sure that that content is relevant to your learners.

Great question, Michael. I would say a couple of things. One, I do think we oversimplify this conversation about critical thinking skills, for example, in higher education versus job training programs or skills based learning programs. I would say someone who's working towards an industry recognized credential in a hybrid program with coaching, they're getting just as much of an opportunity to learn how to learn as their peers who are studying Macbeth in a liberal arts classroom. I think that we just have a bias towards certain types of learning and may not necessarily acknowledge that there are many ways to give students access to critical thinking, 21st century skills, et cetera. The other thing I would say is that we often undervalue the ways that life experience will provide you access to critical thinking, leadership and personal development. That person who is driving for doordash or working customer service or retail is getting a world of an education and the types of things that you can only hope to achieve in a classroom, in a seminar style classroom. So just kind of want to lift up the ways that I see like life experience and kind of tangible experiences and great teachers of those things. Our program is designed for folks who are coming directly out of high school. And so we're going to assume that they have less life experience than their peers who have worked some before. They're looking to go back to school. And so we believe that this liberal arts kind of civic studies education is our way of infusing a wealth of critical life experiences into our academic model. It would feel negligent of us to prepare someone to start a job in a community in a setting that is so different from where they're coming from. Without giving them access to these conversations, we're going to assume that they're coming straight from high school. And success in the Marcy Lab school means leaving high school, spending a year with us, and then potentially going into an office space or a virtual office space that looks nothing like what they've seen before. And so we have a responsibility to both give them really strong and empowering mental models about the world they're living in, how it came to be, and their role in changing. Just so happens that we're teaching a really empowered skill. Building software gives you an opportunity to create products that influence real people's lives. We don't see it as an add on. We see it as core to have conversations about climate change, have conversations about mass incarceration, because technology touches all of these things. And then the last thing I'll add is that community is such a big part of what we do. And so giving young people an opportunity to read about, discuss and write about, like big existential topics that don't have clear solutions is also like a great way of building community.

So speaking of community, we mentioned at the top how big this community is, if you think about it in terms of like the overall market or at least how big the need is. Right. There are some 53 million people in the US who are in low skilled, low wage jobs. You're both serving hundreds, thousands over time. Right. Of individuals. But Rebecca, you mentioned the problem of scale, right. In this field that it was sort of easy to figure out how the boutique programs get their start. But then to scale to the frankly millions we need to serve has been more challenging. I'd love you, Rebecca, to lay out the challenges to ramping up that others who maybe want to enter this market or, you know, colleges listening and saying, gee, we should serve this market more thoughtfully, what should they be aware of in terms of the challenges to scale?

Well, before we get too daunted by the challenge ahead, let's remember that 100 years ago, actually, pop quiz. 100 years ago, how many people in America had a college degree or more percentage wise?

Significantly less, probably, probably low teens, so 5%.

And how many had a high school degree or more? Under 50%, about 15%. So we have over the last century been able to build a scalable secondary system and a scalable post secondary system. So it is not at all impossible. What we think needs to be done to tackle this problem at scale is really on the one hand, have scalable providers doing great work and on the other to have a policy environment and a funding environment that is conducive to and supportive to high quality, impactful program scaling. In terms of having scalable providers. I think the biggest thing that has been helpful from us was that from the very beginning we said we need to design something that could scale. If it's not something we could do for 100,000 learners, it's not something we're going to do for our first 15. And I have a very funny video when we were just at the three person team doing our first 15 person pilot scheduling these squad sessions for our first group of learners. The squads are where you get that community, the coaching a huge part of the Merit in America program. And the first way we did it is we had everyone individually send us their schedules to find a time that worked. And I've got this three person team saying this is not going to scale as we printed out all the schedules and figured out what would work. Thankfully, tools like Calendly have helped with that issue. But I think the idea was from the beginning to really think about, well, what are the barriers? A barrier is often needing to get buildings everywhere. So we built a fully remote program. A barrier is sustainable economics. So we have a sustainable economic model that combines learner repayment, philanthropy and some level of employer funding. It's having ratios that are sustainable at scale. So even though we have this best in class ratio of 30 to 40 learners with one coach at a time, one coach works with three groups of learners a year. They work with about 100 learners a year. So to reach 100,000 people a year, we only need 1,000 coaches. That's a number that we feel very confident we could hit knowing that we get over 5,000 applicants every time we post a coach role these days. So it really just involved thinking ahead of what could this look like at massive scale and what are the building blocks we need to prove out and develop early on.

Yeah, our view on scaling is the way to solve a massive problem is to have a massive number of really effective players. Our view is that we solve this problem for the millions of young adults who are graduating high school without access to a high quality college experience by seeding an ecosystem of people who can learn from what the Marcy Lab school does really, really well. We never want to get to 100,000 learners and we think that if we were to get to 100,000 learners, we probably would serve a lot of them really, really poorly. We might just not be best suited to serve X career path in X region that we don't have unique expertise in. But we do hope that we can be a source of wisdom, support and infrastructure to the leaders that are in the Midwest or in the Deep south looking to service career pathways that we might not be uniquely suited to serve. I think we've seen that in higher education too, that we haven't necessarily seen too many individual players get to 100,000 students and maintain really strong outcomes. In traditional colleges, I think Rebecca is building something that is inherently scalable, serving a model, a segment of students who have been traditionally left out of the traditional post secondary system. But in colleges at large, we've seen that choice matters and we want to be one choice that can serve a lot of people really well.

So there are a lot of changes in the job market right now. So let's talk about two of them that really impact these models. The first is the half life of skills. The nature of jobs are kind of changing faster now than they were as recently as five years ago. And we're also seeing a rash of layoffs in the tech industry from Microsoft or Google. So how do you kind of change your curriculum fast enough to keep up and at the same time remain focused on high demand fields when the definition of what's in demand could be changing?

Ruben, it's a great question. I think we under emphasize the importance of learning on the job. A really strong first job can be the foundation for a very long lasting career. I don't think anyone expects the skills that they learned Even at a top really competitive college, to be the skills that last them a lifetime. Our goal, our North Star is partnering with companies that give our students an opportunity to step into their career and their first job, position them to add value to teams that are solving complex problems. And we believe that those first few resume bullets will be the ones that set up their next few. And the question of skills changing quickly that guides our philosophy for our technical and non technical curriculum. We want to be serving students by preparing them for in demand skills, but we know that those things will change. And what are the mindsets and the foundations that will likely last past when different frameworks or programming languages come in and out of style. We noticed that many of our most coveted employer partners, our highest paying roles, they interview in such a way where they kind of preface kind of preference flexibility and openness in learning. They'll interview our fellows for coding jobs, but be coding language agnostic. Sometimes they'll interview them for a coding job and you're not actually allowed to use code. You'll use ideas in pseudocode to communicate with your interviewer. And so the question that we're always asking is what are those skills that have staying power? What are those skills that will allow students learning to be transferable? And that's a bit of a art in a science. But we believe that by staying further away from the kind of flashy skills that are in demand and trendy, paying attention to what has lasted for a long time, we can set students up to have a bit more staying power in their careers.

And Rebecca, how about in terms of merit America, how do you kind of keep up with changes in the job market both in terms of demand but also skills.

So just to echo Ruben, our approach is that so much of what we do is help folks realize the skills they already have. Low wage does not mean low skilled. And to develop those metacognitive skills that are most important in building an enduring career. It's learning how to learn. It's knowing how and when to search for resources, to lean on others, to collaborate. All of those things that last I looked, have been around for the last 100 years and we'll still be here for the next 100. We do recognize that there are specific technical skills that make it more or less likely for someone making a major job transition to be able to get a new career. It's almost the floor. Do you have the basic skill we need such that we can then pay attention to all of the other skills you bring to the table? And with that, what we do is we really almost see the Merit America model, like a house with furniture that we can swap in and out. So the house is the structure by which we help someone make a major career transition from low wage work to an upwardly mobile career. But whether that industry recognized certificate and the specific skills they're getting is it ux, Java? That's where we remain flexible based on what our research using tools like Lightcast, formerly known as Burning Glass help us figure out what are the best areas for us to focus our career tracks on. We work with partners like Google to identify those areas and we're constantly updating the curriculum and track offerings. Just this week I was on a call and we were saying it's going to take us three to five months to launch a new track. And then a partner was saying well actually I think we need it even sooner. We're like well if we condense these phases we could probably get it launched in two or three months. So we are constantly thinking how we can expedite that process to really match the demand of the economy while at the same time knowing that what makes our learners different and what helps them succeed are those lifetime skills.

Rebecca, I love the way you just phrased that is it's not low skilled workers. So I want to focus on the low income workers specifically and sort of this wicked problem. And a bit of a lightning round question as we end this session for today which is, you know, some of these individuals have had some college, there's others who have had none. Again, we're talking about tens of millions of people. If each of you got to be the federal, not just like an official but the czar for a day, what's one lever you would pull to make a dent, a meaningful impact with this population?

Well, as a former Governor's education policy advisor, I love this question and have thought about it a lot. So very simply I would take Title 4 funding and make it much more accessible to non traditional programs. It not being about whether you're an accredited higher ed institution, but instead are you a program that is delivering high quality post secondary outcomes at a reasonable cost. So let's look much more at the ROI and align our funding system to high ROI programs and not let funding go to the low ROI programs. And I've got to put one more bonus one in there which is I would also immediately sign an executive order that all job descriptions remove the bachelor degree requirement. As our board member Byron Auguste with opportunity at work said the other day, having a college degree is good. Not having A college degree should not mean that you cannot have a livable wage and a upwardly mobile career. And so we need to realize the rampant degree discrimination that's going on that several employers and even governors have stepped up to eliminate. And I would love to to see that happen at the federal hiring level as well.

I love both of those.

Ruben Ditto everything Rebecca said. My executive order is that the time to a degree for all programs must be cut in half. Colleges, you must do what you will to ensure that the outcomes don't change. Marcy Lab School works because we are a cheap program if measured by the cost it takes to train a student over the course of a year. Multiply that by four years and we get really expensive. The idea is that in many ways our underfunded community colleges are underfunded state colleges. If the money that we would spend on a student over the course of four years, in reality, we often take six years to get a four year degree. If you condense that in one, one really high impact year, you give that student all the supports, all that funding that would have gone over the course of six years, What Ferrari of a year could they have in one year and how quickly could they get to their end outcome? Yeah, cut the time to degree all of them in half. You must use that money to ensure they get to the same outcome in half the time.

Well, for the future Ferraris of degrees. Ruben, Rebecca, thanks for joining us.

Thank you all for having us.

Thanks so much.

This episode of Future youe Is is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners. Specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners and rural community members. For more information visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org

all right,

Jeff, I confess those were two of my favorite guests that we've had in the program. I'm really glad that we got to spotlight their programs as exemplars of some of the innovations that I was talking about in my rant a few episodes back on the edition we did around college costs.

Yeah, Michael, I love the intermediary function that merit plays. You know, it's not a school per se, it's not an employer per se, it's not the government and all three of Those entities have really tried to play this role of reducing the friction in the pathway between education and work. And to be honest, it hasn't worked. And that's why we have nearly 17 million people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are not enrolled in schooling of any kind. 44% of Americans in that group. So this problem will only get worse in the future, not better. And because Merit America plays this intermediary role, it can pick winners in terms of programs, industries and employers, which often government can't. It can put resources toward wraparound services like coaching and small peer learning. That is really often beyond kind of the principal profit making role of corporations to do in their job training programs. And with Marcy Lab, I really like their small model, which hopefully can scale over time because it builds connections, the belonging and purpose that students who leave higher education say they lack. And it also gives them feedback on their learning. One thing, Michael, about the students today is that they want feedback. Heck, so do all of us. Please start sending those suggestions into me and Michael and give us feedback about this podcast. We all want it. I was talking to a student recently at a pretty selective liberal arts college who told me that they went the whole fall semester in two of the five classes they were taking. They handed in papers, they took tests, and you know what?

They never got them back.

They never got any feedback back throughout a whole semester to improve. And I think the model of Marcy Lab is designed in some ways like a small liberal arts college. But it sounds like Rubin is committed to providing that transparency and feedback which is critical to generations raised on instant feedback on social media. So they know how to improve and it keeps them connected, it keeps them involved, and in the end it keeps them retained. So what grabs you about these programs, Michael?

Well, first I'll just say feedback, I think, is the coin of the realm. That's how you spark active learning. So I love that you picked up on that. I think the question for me is, where do I start? Jeff I'll tie it directly into the conversation that we had a few weeks ago though, about college costs. Because what's interesting, I think, about these models is that, but even though they aren't government supported, at least today, in essence they are operating with a subsidy just like traditional public colleges. Their subsidy at the moment just happens to be from philanthropies. But with those subsidies, they've, they've taken them and they have structured their programs completely differently from a traditional college. They've redesigned from scratch so that, yes, they have all those wraparound supports, but they're doing it in a way that's much lower cost and it seems to be higher efficacy with this population and than a traditional college. In my mind, it's because they're not bolting these things on top of a legacy model, but rather rethinking that model completely. It's a pure play, in other words. I also love that it's shorter programs, more supports, more relevance, better pedagogy and instructional design. It's really like the whole enchilada without the things that people, you might have said in a college that these are the core, like departments, majors, and so forth, but from, for these institutions, those are extraneous to the students that they're serving. And so I love that they've used the subsidy to create a very different financing model like Merit America. After you leave the program, it's a $95 flat fee per month for five years once you're above that income threshold. That's groundbreaking stuff, Jeff. And, and I think, you know, for traditional college leaders, here's what they can take away from this. They shouldn't just say, well, we could never do that. I, I'd love them to instead ask how could we launch new programs outside our core governance models and departmental structures that take those subsidies and restructure completely to build around student success through the program and into the job market. And Jeff, I, I imagine you must have loved on that end what Ruben had to say about the liberal arts, although I'll note that they come at it a little bit differently, I think, from the way a liberal arts college program would do it. Like you and Burning Glass, for example, have noted that if you just took the traditional liberal arts curriculum and you added some digital or technical skills to it on the fringe, you'd help people be a lot more valuable in the job market. Rubin sort of flipped that a little bit, right? He's saying, let's create something integrated from the get go that values people's life experiences, builds these liberal arts skills and questions into the job ready, relevant curriculum as well. Jeff?

Yeah, Michael, I think integration is important. And too often the easy way out is the one that I've suggested as a, as a bolt on give a certificate, for example, in digital visualization, to a history major. And here's why. I like Rubin's model because it focuses on how students actually learn. In a traditional course based degree program, students might study a concept in the fourth week of a semester, but not use it until two semesters later, by which time they probably have forgotten what they've learned, or students have no idea how a theory is applied in the outside world as they are learning about it. So they quickly lose interest like any of us, by learning the liberal arts, while working on digital skills, you use what you know and you know why you use it. And I think, as the data from Burning Glass always reminds us, the skills of the future are a mixture of business skills, things like project management, soft skills like problem solving and communication, and digital skills. And there are very few majors that provide all three in the way that graduates need them to succeed. And so that's what I really like about the design of Marcy Lab.

It's a good set of thoughts, Jeff. I have a few more, but for time's sake, I just want to know two things. And first, in reflecting on the conversation, I actually don't think it's just the coaching and wraparound supports that make these models work. And it goes to what you were just talking about. But I think it's an important point because I think if a college just adds, you know, the people and the coaches and stuff like that around their models, I don't know that they'll get the same roi. Like, I think it goes to the point that, you know, we've seen a lot of business model innovation in higher ed, but not a lot of learning model innovation, perhaps like we have in K12. And what I love about what Merit America and Marcy Lab are doing is they've. They've really integrated a whole new approach around this. Like, and instead of asking if students are college ready, in effect, they get to ask, are the schools student ready? And I love that question. And so Rebecca reframed the decision by a student to drop out as actually a responsible decision. And as you know, in my book Choosing College, I told a similar story about a student who, you know, who's trying a school realized that it was not the right service at that time to help him make progress. And so he made the financially responsible decision to leave. And I think the takeaway for me is we don't need to label that. Rather than pejoratively call it a college dropout, we can say, no, you tried it. The service didn't meet your needs, so you, in effect, fired it to look for something that allowed you to make progress, and it just isn't college. And that's not necessarily a story of failure, but it could be a story of success. And then on the other side of the equation, I think it points to where I was going up front, which is colleges need a very different model to support these individuals success if they want to serve them. And that means attending to community. You know, you told you always talk about belonging, right? It means having rigor and relevance, showing how it will translate to changing a student's life. And you always talk about purpose in that equation. But it also means having that no excuses mindset that we see in some K12 schools but but not so much in higher ed. This notion that like we're not going to let you fail, we're going to have better pedagogy, we're going to have better assessments, we're going to take that data and give you feedback. Right. We're going to fit this into your life and, and your schedule and show why it meets your priorities and definition of progress and we can do it quickly. Colleges for the most part don't do a lot of this. Like even if they have relevant content and lectures, let's, let's be honest, the pedagogy is often not very good. Like the Media talks about MOOCs as putting great instruction online for anyone, but they're sort of assuming that lectures are the best way to learn, which is just crazy. And I just love that hybrid colleges or these programs like Merit America and Marcy Lab School are taking the business model innovations that make this affordable, but pairing it with that no excuses and value mindset to really focus on the outcome themselves. And I, I think that's a total game changer. And I guess the last part of that is that I, I think it, you know, when we asked Rebecca about her policy prescriptions, both of which I loved, I think you notice maybe that like one of them was what Stig. Leslie, I was touting that I was talking about in the college episode Rant like, you know, let anyone in and focus on the outcomes. Right?

Huh.

It probably takes repeating that idea about 20 times for it to take hold. Michael.

So we'll just keep repeating it. We'll just keep repeating it. But. Right. She's basically saying like let's folks in create a minimum bar on the return on investment. It could be a sliding scale depending on the field you know, the program is in. And based on market conditions, like social work degrees would be different from say business degrees. But basically the programs have to get economic results, I would say for the students. And if they do, I don't personally care if it's got the tr the trappings of traditional accreditation or whatever. And if they don't, it's like they should. It's not that they shouldn't be eligible for federal financing. I to me, this would bring a lot of different types of institutions in the market that I think would improve the value and the affordability. But we can leave it there for now and turn to one of our favorite segments on the show, which is our Course Hero question. Of course, Course Hero is sponsoring questions from audience members and people in higher ed for us. And this one comes from Sherene Walker at Excelsior Community College. Shereen asks how can we keep at risk students focused and attending? And I love this question. It seems right up the alley of what we've talked about today. So what would be your answer, Jeff?

So, Michael, I think there's a couple of things. I think cohort based communities, I've been looking a lot at why athletic teams at Division 3 do so well academically on many campuses is some of the things that we've been talking about today. It's small, it's team based. There's a coach that keeps you going, right? You want to keep going because of that. Second is some of this stuff again we've been talking about today, the wraparound service services, giving people Metro cards, gas money, child care, career coaching, so that they're focused on the learning and not having to worry about all the other things in their lives. And then I think the third piece is probably the most important. And what you just said a little bit ago really struck me, right? Kind of this no excuses mindset that we see in K through 12, but not much in higher ed. And I think that this idea of a student centered university, a student centered college, has been starting to take hold in higher ed. But it's still this idea that people come to higher ed and some people make it and some people don't and it's their problem, not our problem. And as you say In K through 12, that's not accepted. And so I think that we need to change that mindset in higher ed. And maybe that's the hardest thing that we need to do in higher ed. But those are the three pieces, I think, keeping high risk or at risk students focused in attending. And Sherene, thank you for your question. And with that, that will do it for us on this episode of Future youe. A thank you to Ascendium for sponsoring this episode and a thank you to Ruben of the Marcy Lab School and Rebecca from Merit America for joining us. And we'll see you next time.