Verto Education's Path To Reinventing The Freshman Year

Welcome to the future of education. Really excited for all of you joining today, either live or later on. But today, going to have a conversation with Mitch Gordon, the founder of Virto Education and the president there. And Virto Education is one of these, I would say, organizations coming up to really help colleges rethink and reinvent themselves right now and help students create a very different set of experiences. So, first, welcome to the show, Mitchell.

Thanks. Great to be here.

And I'm excited because the first time I got to hear you speak was pre Pandemic. We were in Washington, D.C. at a GSV conference, and you were speaking about reinvention of college. You were on the panel with some other folks who have strong opinions about what college does well or not. And I remember thinking, gosh, this guy's making some really good points that don't get said enough. And so why don't we jump in, since this is the first time we're connecting one on one. I'd love to hear your background and sort of how you came to the higher ed space in general.

Sure. Yeah. I think. Well, I've been interested in education my entire life. I think I had as many things for many of us, childhood puts a lot of imprints on you. And I had a mixed kind of interesting education as a kid, which I think committed me in my adult life to trying to make positive change in higher ed. And then I've been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years starting a few companies in higher education, Virto. The most, my most recent one that I'm dedicating way too much time to these days, but it doesn't feel like work. It feels really good, is really focused on what higher ed's going to look like five, ten years from now. And I think the larger view that I have and that I wake up every day really thinking about is how do we actually offer a quality education to all students from all types of backgrounds? I think that we need. It's more and more relevant than ever now that we need that and our society will benefit if we actually do a better job of educating all our citizens. We'll all be safer. We'll all lead better lives if we could educate all of our citizens.

So before we get into Virto, I'm just curious if we back up, like, what's your diagnosis of where higher ed falls short against that, you know, against creating that experience for all students?

Yeah, I think a couple quick thoughts on that. I mean, I listen to future you quite a lot, actually, with you and Jeff So it's fun to talk to you on a lot of different levels. I know that you both disagree a little bit. Jeff's more on the camp of not as many schools are going to shut down. And you think more. Well, I'm squarely in your camp. I think it really.

I'll let him know later on today.

Please do it. Really? Really. To me the question is not if, but when. You know, over the next five to 10 years, I think we're just going to see a lot of disruption in higher ed. And I think the question of whether or not that's a good thing is an open question. I mean, if we end up with, if schools close down, but we end up with a more affordable system that provides better access and access to jobs and a better life. And I think that's a good thing, even if schools close down along the way. But we're really going to have to, as a society, make some hard choices about what we want our education system to look like.

Yeah. And do you think it's like the problems that plague it right now, are they fundamentally affordability in nature, Are they actually fundamentally the experience itself that higher ed offers, or is there some mixture in your mind?

It's complicated. It's a real mixture. But here's a thought experiment that I like to do for myself that I think is really telling. And it's not one we talk about, I think, in this way. Let's look at Harvard as an example. People beat up on them a lot, sometimes unfairly, sometimes fairly. But let's do a little bit of that right now. Let's say that Harvard really does provide the best education in the world, which they would say that they do. Right. And so why limit that? If Harvard truly offers the best four year education in the world, why would we just limit that to a couple thousand students a year as a nonprofit institution? Why wouldn't we want that education to go to as many students as possible? And especially with the issues and legacy that we have at a school like Harvard. And so I think we can live in that world. I think we could live in a world where if Harvard is the best education, which is debatable by the way, but we don't even really debate that, then let's provide that to all of our students, all of our citizens. And that's kind of the path that I'm most interested in, is how do we level that playing field.

That makes a ton of sense. So let's jump into Virto then. For folks tuning in. You can check it out online and recommend you do so. Tell us what you've created there and sort of the impetus, if you will, for doing so.

Yeah, it's a lot of what I just mentioned. So really looked at the higher ed system, which is we need a lot more than half hour, hour, whatever we are in here to dive into the depths of the financing of higher education and how it all works. But one chunk that I felt really passionately about is that first year experience. I mean, when you're 18 years old, who can remember when you're 18 years old, I can barely remember it, but a little bit is it's such a formative time in our lives and I know there's something you've written a lot about, but we need high impact experiences. We need experiences that develop things like grit and resilience and character. And some of those things now have become buzzwords, but they're really not. I mean, we know it when we see it. Someone who's 22 years old, who has that kind of character that's ready for the working world and the resilience and grit and things that serve us both and our empathy, compassion, things that we more of in our society right now and that we're not always doing the best job of educating our young people with. And so for a lot of reasons that is a very interesting topic to me is how do we provide those type of high impact experiences to our young people? And so I looked at the model very deeply, spent a lot of time looking at the model of higher ed and I thought, well, what if we could take the first year of college, make it credit bearing, provide really interesting experiences, mostly abroad. Most of our programs are abroad. We have domestic ones as well, do it incredibly affordably. And then here's a really key part of our model that no one's ever done before is a really key part of our innovation is sign partnerships with college. Where that first year, that really incredible experience that I think we put together at Virta is credit bearing and a direct path to college. Right. And so the whole admissions flow actually flows through Virta. So we have now 45 partner colleges where our first year counts as the first year of college. And then students stay right on path to college and arrive on campus as second semester freshmen or first semester sophomores right on pace to graduate. And we also really are hopeful that we're going to have a positive impact on graduation rates, which is another big issue.

So you all curate that experience yourself, basically pick the destinations. In normal times we'll get to how you've perhaps had to pivot in a moment, but you curate what that's going to look like, what they're going to do abroad. Is it a mix of courses, internships? What does that experience look like? I guess in brief first.

Yeah. So I'll give a couple examples. Let's use Costa Rica and Hawaii. Two of our semester, Costa Rica and Hawaii. We have, we have locations also in New Zealand and Australia, London and Madrid. Let's use Costa Rica and Hawaii. So students will spend either a semester or a year with us, either the first semester of college or their whole first year of college. And they'll do their gen ed core curriculum, you know, their English 101, their Philosophy 101, History 101, their 101 coursework. But they do it in a really interesting way. And there's a few components about what we do that are really different. Number one is that there's service learning built in to the. To all of our semesters as well. So. And experiential education. So in the morning they might be in the classroom with their professor, and in the afternoon they're actually taking them to a local project. So, for example, working on a local irrigation project in Costa Rica. We want them to really also engage with locals. And this is something that made a big impact on my life personally is I think when you learn to see the world through another culture's eyes, it kind of changes everything for you. You learn that your cultural perspective is just one perspective. I think it can really be the beginning of a lot of empathy and understanding and curiosity about the world. So we're really having them engage with locals as well. The other thing that I think is really relevant to that is the faculty are actually traveling with them. So one thing I say a lot is our students have more contact hours with faculty than any other students in the world because the faculty is actually traveling with them. Not only are they teaching them and then going on the service learning experiential projects with them, they're also eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with them on the weekends. We're taking them on camping trips and hiking trips and whitewater rafting trips and doing things where they're really getting to know the local country a bit. And I. And the last thing I'll say about that is it's a great filter for faculty because when we tell the faculty that they're going to be spending that much time with the students, you get very extreme reactions. One is, heck no, you're crazy. I don't want to spend that much time with. I want to teach them for two hours a day and that's it.

And then be done. Yep.

And then. But then when you also get. Which is the kind of people that we want at Virto are the kind of faculty that say, this is an amazing model. I got into higher ed because I want to develop deep, meaningful relationships with students and make a big impact on their lives. And this is the model I've dreamt of. I want to be a part of this.

So are those faculty that teaching the courses, are they from your partner universities, or are they faculty that you've somehow brought into the fold?

That we've brought into the fold. But we very much welcome applications from our partner schools, and we get a lot of those. But we are, I'll say, we are extremely careful about who we hire from a faculty perspective. I mean, we really want faculty who want to have deep engagement with the students and, you know, they're traveling with them, they're another country for the semester of the year. They're doing both semesters with us. So we have a pretty high bar for the type of faculty that we want. And like I said before, there's an automatic filter there, given. Given the requirements of the job.

Totally. So. So. But they're, They're. They're under your employee. In other words, they're your courses that you've created and cultivated. They're not. And we'll get. We'll go there in a second. They're not the partner institutions courses per se. Instead, the partner institutions have basically said, we will grant credit. There's an articulation agreement, in essence, for the experience you're providing. Is that right?

Yes. Now we're getting into some of the foundational systems.

Yeah, let's get into it.

Yeah, let's get into the model. So how that works is that we have a partnership, an accreditation partnership, school of record partnership with two schools, Portland State University and Richard Bland College of William and Mary. And so all of our students get a transcript from one of those two schools. And so all of our curriculum, we're not an accredited college, at least not yet. So all of our curriculum was also accredited by those schools. All of our faculty, our adjunct faculty at Portland State to become the adjunct faculty at Portland State.

Gotcha.

And then we've articulated all that coursework to any of our partner schools. So if a partner school comes on board, we articulate that coursework with them.

Very cool. So. So. And it's incredibly affordable. Like you're sending students all around the world. And the price point is how. Yeah, how affordable is it? Give us some numbers.

So between. Well, really between 2,000 and 25,000 per semester, it's a wide range, so different. So I'll dig in a little bit more into.

Okay, break it that down a little bit.

Yeah, break that down a little bit. So you know, we have actually taking a big zoom back is actually a really interesting time that we're talking right now because you may have read the op ed in the New York Times today about how aid is now going to wealthy students even more than to students who really need it. Martin Kurzweil and Josh Weiners. I just read that this morning actually. And with Virto, we were especially created and we put a real stake in the ground early on to not do that. I mean we are really focused on access and affordability. The whole team, I think the thing we're most passionate about for myself, one of the things I care about the most. And so we put a stake in the ground that we wanted to make Virto affordable for all students. And so there's a bunch of different ways we can get into how we've done that. But just kind of like the first layer of how we do that is any student who's Pell eligible. And actually we expanded that to the last couple of months to any family that had lost a job due to coronavirus. We thought that was the right thing to do. Gets an Automatic Grant from $10,000 grant for our Costa Rica semester. That brings it from 15,000 to 5,000. Now, as you know, Pell eligible students are generally eligible for $3,000 per semester of federal aid, depending on their Pell level of eligibility. So that's why if a student is eligible for full Pell, which most students are not, but the 5,000, we scholarship them from 15 to 5 and then if they're full Pell eligible, it could be all the way down to 2. We're also over time want to raise our own endowment so we can make this affordable for anybody. Something one of the things I'm working on, so I think it's one of the things I'm most proud of is this focus and will always be our focus to provide the highest quality possible first year of college at a really affordable level.

No, that's incredible. And so then back up one more step. Let's take it from the student perspective. Now, are they applying to. Let's name. So you said you have basically this articulation agreement through Portland State and the College of William and Mary, I think you said, and then. But then you have partner institutions like the University of Oregon and all these. I mean, you have some very big names that are partners with Virto. Do you? So does the student apply to University of Oregon, and then they say they can opt for your program? Are they coming to you first? How does that flow work?

So generally, they're coming to us first. Yeah. We have 45 partner colleges now, and as you mentioned, some really big names really be gaining a lot of momentum. I expect we'll have 60 plus in the next couple months.

Wow.

So think of us. I'll talk about the whole application flow of how that works.

Perfect.

So when a student applies to Virto, and just as some context on our numbers, this year, we'll have 8,000 plus applications this year in our third full year. So that basically means we're the size and 500 students matriculated this fall, looks like.

Wow.

And so that basically means in our third full year, we're the size of a liberal arts school, which is something, you know, we're really proud of.

That's phenomenal. Yeah.

We've worked incredibly hard. I think, you know, if you talk to students and parents and high school counselors, they really feel like we started a movement with virtual, and that's personally how I feel, a movement to do higher ed a little bit differently. So, okay, so our application flow, how it works. When a student applies to Virto, we have our own version of the common app. Not the big C common app, but our own version of a common application. And they can check the box for any of the schools that we work with that they'd like to get an admission decision from. So let's say they check the box for University of Oregon, William and Mary, Tennessee, Bucknell, Grinnell. Usually what we say to this, do we really want to make sure that they want a decision from those schools? We don't want to waste anybody's time. And then we send that application to the partner school to make an admission decision on the student's application. It's a full. Their full application. So they do not need to apply to the college directly. Our application is their application. And then the college and Virto issue a joint admission decision so that there's no guarantee of acceptance, of course. But if they're accepted, it's a joint acceptance that says, congratulations, you've been accepted to the regular, very exciting letter. Admissions letter that students get it now says, congratulations, you've been accepted by the University of Oregon. And Virto education. You'll spend your first semester or a year of college with virto education and then matriculate to, you know, College of William Mary Tennessee, University of Vermont Temple, any, any of our partner schools that they've been admitted to.

That's incredible. So, and basically these students now, as I understand it, they're getting. So they're getting the courses right. So that that counts for credit. They're also getting the service learning experience in a different culture. They're learning not just about that culture, but about themselves through that and having a clear sort of perspective defining moment. Is that sort of the. It seems like that's one of the impetuses behind this, which again, you foreshadowed this in your own social media. About my book Choosing College. One of our big takeaways is that we've just. The first year sort of blind march through gen ed courses is hopelessly out of touch with what an 18 year old needs, which is really to discover who they are and their passions and purpose and things of that nature. Is that part of the logic of why you're putting that study abroad service learning on the first year as opposed to say the typical junior year? Is there something else that.

Oh, Michael, that was incredibly well put. I mean, I actually have all sorts of personal flashbacks to being 18 myself and things that would have really been helpful to me. I think my wider perspective here is societies traditionally have had these coming of age, formative, transitive moments that we have and our society has kind of lost that in a lot of ways. Right. I mean we've kind of. Now, if we, if we reflect on the last 50 to 100 years, we've gotten to a point where we're now overprotecting our kids much more than we used to. There's lots of studies that show that we're protecting our children much more than we used to as far as the number of individual experiences that they have with a bit of freedom in their early years. Right. For some very good reasons. But it's just where we are and then we drop them off of College at 18 and we expect them to succeed. And I think it's for the first, when they really, for a lot of students, the first time they've ever been really fully independent and of course we're having some emotional issues and students struggling and having lots of issues. And so I think this is really the key thing that feels like my life mission in a lot of ways that we can create a coming of age formative year for students that incorporates the college Curriculum. What's really freshman year about? It's about learning who you are. It's about deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life. I mean, it's a really important year. And so what we're doing is they're getting that core curriculum and they're doing it incredibly well, but they're also finding is who they are. We're doing a Writing 101 course where they're getting some very deep reflection on who they are as a human being and they're interacting with other people and we're challenging them in interesting ways. And I've spent a lot of time with our students and seen them abroad. And actually last this past fall, we do a capstone at the end of the day. And afterwards some of the kids were going, who's the old guy crying in the back? That was me getting emotional about seeing the impact on these students for their first college, which is really, honestly incredible. And that's ultimately what I think higher ed should be all about. One last thing I'll note here, we also take them through a non credit bearing life skills curriculum. And in that life skills curriculum, we're teaching them things like interview skills, how to create a resume, how to deal with challenging emotional situations and relationships, how to create a LinkedIn account, you know, taking them through some personality tests. What do you want your major to be? We're doing everything we can to prepare them to succeed when they arrive on campus.

That's awesome. So I have three topics I want to make sure we get to before sort of we all disappear into pumpkins. But if people do have questions, please obviously write in the the three topics I want to get into is one, you sort of alluded to the fact that maybe over time you all might become a college. And I just want to learn a little bit more about that. Second, I want to dive into what is, you know, now that we're in COVID 19, what does this look like for you? I'm assuming it's not the traditional study abroad that you've been doing the previous couple years. And then the third issue is sort of the value proposition from the perspective of your partner colleges themselves. So let's start with the first one there. Just more foreshadowing this for folks. So you sort of alluded to the fact that at some point maybe you all would actually become an accredited college itself. Or maybe I'm reading too much into something you said earlier. Which one is it?

I think it's a possibility. There's nothing that is immediately pending for us or that we're looking at to get our own accreditation. But I think our core mission is to make higher education affordable and accessible for all students. And if that would help us along the way and that mission in serving students in future the way that we want to serve students, we would look at it. But I don't anticipate it's something that we'll do in the short term.

Gotcha. Okay, so then the second question then is what does the experience look like now? How much have you had to reinvent as Covid is hit and travel is not as possible as it was?

Well, you might be surprised to hear that all of our semesters are still on track actually to happen this fall. And there's a bunch of reasons why. But we came out with a scenario plan as soon as Covid hit. I think we were the first higher education institution to come out with a scenario plan of exactly what the fall would look like. And some of that still we're all, I think every one of us, all human beings kind of figuring out what the fall is going to look like, including obviously all the colleges. But the locations that we're in, I mean, unequivocally are safer than the US Right now as far as rates of infection. Right. So, for example, parents tell me all the time I'd rather have my son or daughter in New Zealand or in Costa Rica this fall rather than on a college campus in Manhattan, for example. I mean, I think inarguably safer. The question is really whether or not we'll be able to fly to all those locations. Right now we think we will, but we're moving forward. And so that's kind of the larger picture. The other thing is that is our Hawaii semester. So our Hawaii semester for parents and students who just really want to stay in the U.S. no matter what, which I understand that's become really popular. And Hawaii has very low rates of infection. We could still do a lot of the experiential education outdoor fun activities that are a really important part of what we want to do too. So Hawaii has also become really popular for students and parents. That's kind of a high level overview of where we are in our planning now.

Super interesting. I confess that as we're debating homeschooling our children for next year, Hawaii looks like a very good destination for a couple months as part. As part of that experience. So if we are, we'll try to connect with you some the students that you have over there. But so I guess the last question from my Perspective is talk to us a little bit about the value proposition from the perspective of the colleges that have been bold enough to partner with you and sort of what are they getting out of it?

Well, they're getting a few things, I think. I think the number one thing which is present on all colleges minds nowadays and you, you've talked a lot, a lot about this on, on your podcast, of course, is more students. Right. And, and so we're a great, so number one, a great funnel of transfer students. Which colleges often have more room for, you know, second semester freshmen or first semester sophomores than they do incoming freshmen for a wide variety of reasons. So more students. But it's not just more students, it's the kind of students that we're sending them. The partner colleges that we have, I think really believe in our mission and the students that arrive on campus are, I mean they're arriving with this incredible experience and maturity and character that they can contribute to the campus culture. And colleges care about that. They want students who are going to be active and involved in student groups and contribute to the, they really want to curate their campus experience. And virto students come with such a wealth of experience that they want those students on campus. And we've already seen that. We've had great, amazing feedback from our partner colleges about the students who've already arrived on campus and you know, the level of life experience and maturity that they've arrived with.

That's incredible. I mean that's what I, as you know in my last piece for Forbes was pushing for more of these sorts of pathways because just as you said, this coming of age experience I believe is incredibly important, not just right now, but in general. And I our research suggests it would dramatically bolster the success rates in higher education, which for those that don't know, are incredibly lackluster with roughly 40% of students failing to graduate from a four year school within six years. Abominable rates. And I think a program like yours could really start to reverse that.

Yeah, I loved that article, I think only a couple days ago that came out so highly recommend it to anyone watching right now. I mean it's a thoughtful piece and you hit on a lot of the things we talked about today, most notably affordability. We have to create affordable options for students to have access to these type of high impact, really growth giving experiences. I mean I think I get really passionate about this topic. But what is higher education? Ultimately it's to help us create a more informed citizen to engage in our democracy and be able to understand critical issues and have good critical thinking skills. And these types of life experiences are absolutely critical to our human experience and becoming more full humans able to show up in the ways we need to in the world. That's why I feel so committed to helping bring these experiences to as many students as possible.

Well, Mitch, I think that's a perfect way to end this conversation, but I'm putting up there again virto education in your website so that people can check it out. I strongly encourage you to do that. I think what you've put in place really is a model that can start to cause a seismic shift in how higher ed works. So thanks for what you're doing for students. Thanks for what you're doing for the world, frankly, and keep up the good work.

Thanks, Michael. That means a lot to me and it's really good to talk to you. I appreciate the time.

Yeah, likewise. I learned a lot. So appreciate you all tuning in and we'll be back next time.

Thanks everyone.