What’s the impact of the current federal higher ed. regulation regime on online education? 

That’s the question I addressed in my conversation with education technology consultant and industry analyst Phil Hill. We discussed the current administration’s effort to gut inter-state accreditation reciprocity agreements and its impacts on online universities serving students across state lines. We also discuss the Department’s third-party servicer regulations, gainful employment measures, and the importance of finding a bipartisan path forward. This is the first of two conversations exploring the impact of the current regulations and policy proposals in higher education. Don’t miss my conversation with Preston Cooper next week.

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Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through that today, we have a terrific guest, Phil Hill. For those of you that tune into my other podcast Future U., you will know Phil because he's been a guest before, but he is an education technology consultant. He's an industry analyst extraordinaire at Phil Hill and Associates. He writes the terrific newsletter and blog “On Ed Tech.” That's the name. It's “On Ed Tech.” Please subscribe. It is an absolute must-read to understand not just the major trends in Ed Tech, but also higher education more generally. I learn so much every time I read it and every time I talk to him. Phil, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I can't wait to learn from you this time.

Phil Hill :

Well, thank you very much, and with that intro, I think we should wrap up the show. Just leave it at that.

Michael Horn:

It's all downhill for you from here, right?

Phil Hill:

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Is the Department of Ed. Targeting Online Education?

Michael Horn:

No, in all seriousness though, I think we're going to learn a lot. And obviously for those that know you were on our Future U. show. You anchored our 101 deep dive on OPMs—online program management companies—and the impact that they're having on higher education more generally. Now we're in a moment where OPMs are perhaps struggling and we may get more into that. You've argued persuasively, I think that revenue sharing and OPMs are perhaps not dead. Even more provocatively, and where I want to go right now, you and your colleague, Glenda Morgan have written that this current Department of Education under the Biden administration is trying to target online education more generally. In other words, this isn't just about OPMs. This isn't even just about for-profit universities. This is about online learning period. That's striking because roughly 54% of students, as of fall of 2022, 54% of students are taking at least one online course. And that's to say nothing of the broader world outside of accredited higher ed, where adults tune in regularly to learn from YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, you name it. So, I would love to know just what's behind this assertion that this Department of Education is targeting online education?

Phil Hill:

Sure. Before I do that, I will say it's sort of amusing starting out with this framing because Morgan, she goes by her last name. She wrote a post recently, two months ago called Online is the Target that encapsulated this idea. At the time she wrote it, there was a little bit of me saying, okay, so you're finally catching up and realizing some basics. But you're a great writer, so let's see what you come up with. So I initially had sort of a dismissive tone to it, but then she put out the article and it's called Online is the Target. You'll see it if you search it online. And it was profound. Sometimes I get so deep in the weeds and finding out what's happening that her post really helped me step back and say, wow, this really is completely obvious that the regulatory activity is not just saying online education at nonprofit institutions getting hit as unintended consequences, but it actually is the target itself.

And what we're seeing this year is making it crystal clear. So I love talking about that because I think it's so significant. It affects so much more than the OPM market. It obviously goes well past the for-profit industry. But I mean, I guess just to get started, what's being apparent, what's apparent now and was a parent of Oregon a couple months ago is the fact that if you look at the regulatory activity last year, so much of it was around gainful employment, which targets mostly for-profit schools, but also certificates seeking programs at nonprofits, TPS, guidance expansion, third party servicer and bundled services, things that were explicitly going after for-profits or OPMs. If you look at what's happening today, now you're getting into things such as we want to gut the state authorization reciprocity agreement, and let's just go into that for a little bit of detail and help explain it.

Think of it as a driver's license that imagine if you had to drive across country and you needed to make sure that if you're going the route that I'm about to go, by the way, I need to get, yeah, I have a driver's license from Arizona, but I also have to have permission to drive in Nebraska and Kentucky and elsewhere. Well, it would be very painful and it would really prevent mobility and the ability to actually drive around the country freely. So we have reciprocity with driver's licenses so that my Arizona license goes anywhere in the us. This is happening for online education through a reciprocity agreement. The Obama administration said, you have to get authorized in each state where your students reside even if you're online. Well, that is chaotic, particularly for schools with a smaller online presence. The reciprocity agreement was an agreement between states that made it realistic for online programs to actually do that.

Like Southern New Hampshire that has hundreds of thousands of students, trust me, they have an army of compliance officers. They're getting authorized, they're following it. But your everyday university that has a few online things, they're the ones who really need reciprocity. Well, we have an agreement and it's really helping in the market, the current set of negotiated rulemaking that's happening right now. The Department of Ed very clearly wants to gut the reciprocity agreement and say, no, you have to go back to the way we were before and actually get authorized in every single state. Well, now if you have a small program, that means there's a lot of online stuff that you're either going to not do the online program or you're going to say, we can't enroll students from these states. We just can't. It's unrealistic. And the primary institutions that are going to get hit are going to be nonprofit institutions with smaller online programs. So that's one specific example that really flavors what we're seeing and why. The argument is it's online education itself that's being targeted as a problematic practice or something deserving of much more scrutiny than campus based education. So I don't know if I directly answered your question.

Impact of Regulations on Small Colleges

Michael Horn:

It's really interesting around state reciprocity and the regulatory burden that we'll create for colleges and universities. And look, you're right, obviously like a Southern New Hampshire University, 250,000 students are so unenrolled, they've got lots of money, lots of people that they can throw at this to make sure that they are registered properly in each and every state and make sure students can continue to enroll and so forth. But you mentioned the private college, and I'd just love to pick at that for a moment to understand it better because we know that for the most part, most students who enroll online, they're doing so 50 to 75 miles from where they live. So for that small college that has an online program, how many students are they really enrolling out of state? Isn't that more of those national players, the Arizona states, the Western governors universities, the Southern New Hampshires? Aren't those the ones that are really enrolling students from state to state and therefore can handle this? Or is this going to impact small colleges for other reasons?

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Phil Hill:

Sure. And just to clarify, I don't think it's just small colleges. I think it's even large colleges and universities with small online programs. And I mean, you're bringing up a great point. The majority of students reside within 50 to 75 miles of their online program. So what's likely to happen is they will for the first time, certainly naturally, really for the first time, they're going to have to pay attention to it. So they're going to have to figure out what's going to happen. They're going to have to say, well, where do you reside and can we register in this state and get authorized in this state? And so what's most likely going to happen is they will have to say, if I'm in Illinois and I have a smaller program, Illinois, we're here, we're authorized. I'm only going to allow students from Wisconsin and Indiana and Iowa, Iowa commonly known as Western Chicago to be within this program. And outside of that, we cannot allow students to come in. So I think that's going to inhibit their growth. That's going to reduce choices for students, and it's probably also going to add costs. You have bureaucratic burden, so it'll be more difficult to create new online programs. That's my guess of what the impact will be.

Third-Party Servicer Regulations 

Michael Horn:

No, that's really helpful. Thank you. And it's interesting, obviously because that increases regulatory burden on colleges and universities. And then there's been this other provision that the department has done through third party servicer regulations, and you were really the one that raised the alarm bell on this, but to remind folks, the Department of Education was expected to regulate revenue sharing agreements to really go after OPMs, and they instead went much farther. Essentially, they took a reg that had applied to vendors that were handling financial aid money and so forth and said, now we're going to ask colleges to make sure that any vendor you're working with in instruction and student support and information systems and on and on, we're going to make sure that they have audits, that they're put through a whole host of restrictions and so forth. Big expansion of federal power, big expansion of bureaucracy and regulation. And as I said, you raised the alarm on this, the administration stepped back from it, and now you said you don't expect something further until April of ‘24. So shortly after this comes out. I'm just curious, is this still your point of view and what do you expect them to do?

Phil Hill:

Well, I've changed my mind on the projections of where it is, but just to step back, one thing I would say that's a little bit different there, there was a clear target in that case that was very much crafted as a mechanism for the Department of Ed to regulate the OPM companies particularly, or mostly those who do rev share agreements. And it just happened to have unintended consequences across the market,

Michael Horn:

Collateral damage. And they didn't care.

Phil Hill:

Well, yeah, they didn't care. But how deliberate was that? Because when you say regulatory burden, it's not just like, okay, we have regulations. You have to go through a lot of pain. There's a power dynamic going involved. There's a thing of we want to be the arbiters of what's allowable and what's not allowable across the board. So there's a deliberate, we want to shift the power from states to the federal government that I think has some deliberate things. I think what was unintended were the negative consequences were people haven't thought it through. The big through line, I would say between all of these is the Department of Education and the activists, most of them funded or partially funded by the Arnold Ventures Foundation. It's a consumer protection mindset. Their fundamental axiomatic belief is that most bad things that are happening are because of bad actors and therefore to help students, we need to find those bad actors and reign them in. And so everything is seen through that lens, that's through line, that's going throughout there. And so at the time with TPS, it was, well, if we're noble because we're reigning in rev share the fact that we have a little collateral damage, oh, no big deal. I don't think they realized how big the collateral damage was until there was such a public outcry on, do you realize what's happening? I really don't think they understood that fully.

Michael Horn:

That's super interesting.

Phil Hill:

But it's always that there's a consumer protection mindset. And then as I said, the big changes this year, it's become so much more apparent that part of the definition of bad actor includes not all online programs, but online programs are so susceptible to bad actors that we need to target that area because that's where most bad things happen. So that's the true line is the consumer protection mindset.

Michael Horn:

And so the assumptions seems to be, if I'm following you correctly, that if you're online, you're probably doing something predatory, right? You've got a bad actor here, and so you need a set of, in essence regulations that's going to in effect get in the way before we hurt students, right? It's going to block, and we're not doing this by looking at outcomes or looking at the programs. We're really looking to regulate the inner workings of how you register with states, how you enter into your contracts with different private providers, all the sort of micromanaging and effect of how you actually set up the operations themselves.

Phil Hill:

Yes, and I would add to that, go back to the reciprocity. What the effect of gutting reciprocity does is it enables individual state and the attorneys general in those states to take legal action to help do this. So that's another very big side of how this administration handles regulation. It's sort of a multi-front campaign, and so they want to enable states to take action such as the state of California taking action on Ashford University. And so that's what they want to maximize is the opportunity not just for the federal government, but for the states to actually take action. There's part I didn't answer before. Back in the fall, I was predicting that they pulled back TPS guidance, as you said, I was predicting at the time that they wouldn't do it this year because of the election because it's so unpopular. I was wrong. They are pretty much going for broke on so many new regulations. They're not taking a let's be cautious during an election year approach. So the soonest we'll get new TPS guidance will be April, and that's based on court documents where they had to state to a judge where their plans were. Of course, it's possible they'll keep kicking the can down the road and it won't actually come out, but it could come out as soon as April or May of this year, a revised set of TPS guidance.

Michael Horn:

Maybe you don't know, but do you expect that it's going to be more narrowly confined find to focus on the OPMs through the third party service regulations, or might they walk back completely and say, Hey, we're going to go after the dear colleague bundled services 2011 letter that really made rev share legal, if you will. Obviously OPMs had been around before then, but this in effect gave them safe harbor. What's your expectation of what they'll actually do here?

Phil Hill:

Well, first of all, to their credit, they pulled back on some of the things that were ridiculous, such as if you follow make everybody, most of EdTech follow third party servicer guidelines. You have the auditing, which you mentioned, but you also have the thing of no foreign companies, no non-US companies.

Michael Horn:

Which seemed to violate treaties.

Phil Hill:

Oh yeah. Yes. And so they pulled back on that. So it's not going to have that type of arrangement. It's going to be they explicitly wrote stuff that would make the LMS companies be liable for this. I expect that if they get new guidance, it will target not just OPM, anybody who's doing revshare and who's doing marketing and student recruitment support of a school, I think that's going to be the scope of what they come out with if they do it. Now, the bundled services exception, which enables rev share OPMs, that's tied to it, but it won't be directly addressed by the guidance where it's tied, is politically, and I realize I got to be careful how I'm saying this, but it's consistent with what I'm seeing, but there's a little bit of a coordinated campaign. There needs to be an answer because at this point, they have not added regulations against OPMs.

They tried it with TPS guidance, they had to pull it back. Bundled services exception. They keep talking about it, but they haven't released it. Well, if I'm on Senator Warren's staff, I've been pressuring the Department of Ed take action on OPMs. You have to say, as of today, they haven't. And so I think that one or the other is going to have to be done just for the political pressure reasons this year. And so part of the forecasting, it's figuring out which is more likely or both. I think it would be difficult for the Department of Ed to just do what I originally predicted back in November, which is kick the can until after the election. I don't think they could do that. So the tie in is political, not regulatory, really.

Gainful Employment Measures 

Michael Horn:

These politics are so interesting because as you said, you would expect them to not do something in a presidential election year, but because of senators in their own party, the pressure from them, there's more interest in them doing something and so forth. And that consumer protection mindset, I get it. It's to sort of catch the bad actors by micromanaging in some sense inputs. But then they've got this other element that they've done that feels more outcome oriented, at least on the surface. And that's gainful employment, which has actually gone through this is like its fourth revision I think in the last 12 or so years. And now the department has added two elements. In essence as I understand it. The first is this earning premium. Basically our graduated students, are they earning more than high school graduates in a particular state? And then they have the FVT, the financial value transparency, which again, as I understand it applies to all programs regardless of tax status or type and basically would create a disclosure for programs that are failing gainful employment regs. I would love to know what's going on here In your mind, you've been critical of these regulations as I understand that as well. So why,

Phil Hill:

And I'll try to explain, at least start out with sort of what I think they're trying to achieve and sort of the rationale behind it. So gainful employment was much narrower back during the Obama administration. They had two rounds for different reasons. Court cases drove them to do it, but that only said it was for-profit, any degree program or certificate program or certificate programs, career programs at nonprofit schools. When they added that got defeated and in a lawsuit. And then by 2019 it was rescinded, it got reintroduced with the two scope items you just mentioned the earnings premium and the FVT. To their credit, one of the big complaints about gainful employment is why are you attacking just for profits? That's not fair. If we're going to hold people accountable, why don't we do it across the board? Financial value transparency applies to, well, it applies to every degree seeking program in the us, whatever school you are, if your program in any way accepts federal financial aid, you have to report the data and it's going to be publicized.

So that's why they call it transparency. And it's across the board, it's equal opportunity now. It's got a provision in there about if you fail it after two years, you have to force students to sign an acknowledgement that, Hey, I'm signing up for a failing program before they get awarded any financial aid. So that's going to harm enrollment. So I think the rationale there is pretty clear we need to hold everybody accountable. So on the surface, that's a very good argument. I think the biggest problem with that is the people behind it assume the data is much further along and much more accurate and consistent than it actually is, and they're not taking into account edge cases, poor data and stuff like that. And so we're going to have a lot of unintended consequence. The earnings premium, and I just saw the Department of Ed official describe this on a recent webinar with the Association of Institutional Researchers, sorry, and the department ed guy described it.

He said, we realize there are programs that where students come out with low debt, but we think they're still poorly performing programs because the earnings of students coming out is not that high. So we want to also go after them even if they have low debt for students coming out. That's the impetus behind the earnings premium expansion, the core gainable employment that's closer to what it was back in the Obama administration. But these two new pieces, I think that's the, well, I've heard it come from the department that's the rationale for them to do both of those expansions.

Michael Horn:

I just love you to double click on that because so is the real issue that the data is not what you expect to see and sort of what's the problem with that?

Phil Hill:

Let me describe the concern. Overusing bad data assumptions first, the concern is, and the reason that I care about this and so many people I know care about it, is if you trace the logic through and whether you believe that there's systematic discrimination in the US or not between male and female, let's go with that. Females on average make lower wages than males. That's in the data. So forget your politics, it's data. Well, if you aggregate your comparison of here's what a typical high school graduate would make and you ignore some simple demographics such as race area of the state and stuff like that, then you end up making it more difficult in this case for females because their baseline doesn't account for the fact that they tend to make less than males. So you might have a female where their earnings would be higher by taking this program, but they get penalized because that's not accounted for in the way they define the data for the rules.

And there's a myriad examples of that, the net effect, and I've heard people say this in conferences. You know what the safest play is? Just admit white males. That is the safest way to stay clean with the new regulations. Now we know that's not what the Department of Education wants, but as you trace it through, that's going to be the impact. And Morgan wrote about this with law schools and it was a similar type thing. A lot of those, because law schools tend to have very high tuition and debt, a lot of them will fail these regulations and force students to sign this acknowledgement. You're going to a failing program, and we've talked to numerous people, there's going to be pressure to play it safe, which means it's going to harm disadvantaged groups. So that's what I mean. And there are many different examples in there on where the, but it's almost not just poor data, but poor assumptions about that data and what it can do. That's the reason that I and many other people have been critical of what's happening.

Finding Bipartisan Middleground

Michael Horn:

It's really interesting. So your standpoint in essence isn't that we don't need measures focused on outcomes over inputs, but really that what would be your approach forward?

Phil Hill:

Well, I mean there's a little bit of a leading question there. Outcomes is obviously a key thing. Don't just say what theoretically might happen. Actually find out where students are getting harmed and that's where you focus your regulations and then don't make up things saying, well, they have low debt, but let me add somebody else something else just so I can catch something. I think that I would be cautious, I would be less aggressive in how far you advance regulations at each stage so that you can get the data and then you get buy-in and then you can move it forward. Here's the ironic thing. Most people I know, and most people such as myself who are very critical of what the Department of Ed is doing, we actually share the same goals. We would like to see student debt reduced. We would like to see opportunities for multiple students, whether it's schools or whoever.

If there is bad behavior, we would like to see that address by regulation and not just let it slip through the cracks. So there's actually a lot of agreement on goals, and I think there's a possibility to get there. Now, here's an ironic mark. It just came out I think today, if not yesterday. There was an OP-ed by one of the executives from Arnold Ventures, who's one of the main sources behind these moves recommending calling. I think it was a real clear politics that was published Kelly Ree. But she was saying, here's the opportunity for the Biden administration to work across the aisle, find the areas where we agree and actually make things happen. And so they called out. So for example, here's an interesting fact. The save act, which is being advanced by Republicans in the house, there is some interesting commonality. They believe in collecting data on programs and making it public and holding colleges accountable for it.

Well, there's a huge amount of overlap between that and what we're doing with financial value transparency. So if I were in charge of the Department of Ed, I would actually follow what Kelly Re's op-Ed said today, and I would say, Hey, let's find the overlap of what you're pushing with financial value, transparency. We're not going to, neither side's going to get both things, but let's advance the ball and do it in a way that listens to feedback. When people say watch out, there's unintended consequences. So I would be boring. I would be more cautious of my approach.

Michael Horn:

I gotcha. So it's more of a let's take measured steps forward, get the research, get the data, iterate, learn, move forward. There's some room for bipartisanship there and sort of this incremental approach as opposed to big foul strokes that may have unintended consequences.

Phil Hill:

And I agree, they're definitely a poster child or I call them a bellwether if you want to see what's going to hit other companies look at 2U, good and bad. One thing to clarify, their current pain is very much driven by the financial markets. The end of effectively zero interest rates that mark the 2010s, and they amassed way too much debt without the ability to pay for it. I actually have been doing deeper research. I haven't written my next post, but here's the key. They are saying we have enough liquidity to make it through this crisis. It's not a liquidity problem. They have cash, they're operating, it's fine. It's a maturity problem. Their debt matures in January of 2025, and they could not pay for that without refinancing. So the nature of the crisis is the status quo leads to bankruptcy. Now, bankruptcy doesn't mean out of business.

We can't support programs. We saw this with Cengage a decade ago when they went bankrupts longer than that, bankruptcy means we're going to restructure, we're going to have to work with debt holders, see how much they get. It's going to be a multi-year legal process, and it's part of a turnaround. Now, what 2U wants to do is say, no, we want to actually refinance that debt fairly soon so that the crisis is over. The problem is it's a very difficult market to do that in because of interest rates and multiple reasons. So they're attempting a turnaround. So what I expect over the next year is either they are able to find a way to refinance their debt, and you'll read all about it. They'll make it very public. They'll pull a rabbit out of the hat, or they'll do an excellent job depending on how you want to describe it, or they're going to go bankrupt.

And if they're going to go bankrupt, they will be still operating, but they're going to be restructuring the company in that. Now, I suspect strongly, and I've said in my articles, one of the ways to do this is you sell parts off. And I don't think they can sell the edX. It's too integrated into their strategy of lowering marketing costs as a platform. Yeah, boot camps, what they bought with trilogy boot camps are facing some really hard times, which might mean you can't get much money if you sold that off, but it also means, well, let's stop losing money from them. I don't know. If I were running things, that's the part I would look at, but you are likely to see part of restructuring. It's not just layoffs. It will be, let's sell this part of the business and focus. And so I think that's part of what you're going to see moving forward.

But you've got to watch it because if it's going to get dangerous, if they get into the fall time and haven't refinanced yet, because even if they're able to, now schools only have a couple months runway until their partner might go bankrupt, doesn't mean they're going out of business, but there's a risk management and a risk profile that institutions can take. So that's the thing to watch this year, refinance or bankruptcy. And then the big question either way, how does that impact how well they are working with schools? And so the question then wouldn't be for me, it would be go to their university partners and ask them, how's your program doing? Are you getting service? That's going to be the key question this year. Now what's going? But I think it's crucial to note it's that financial market that's driving this chaos, this financial crisis that they're in right now. So there's so much happening in higher ed changing it, and that's another element that's out there. It's not all regulation, it's not all enrollment. It's also the financial markets as well.

Thoughts on OPMs 

Michael Horn:

Alright, well before we wrap up here, we have just a couple more minutes. I think let's just finish with some thoughts on OPMs because you've written a lot about 2U and the challenges that they are currently facing. Talk to me about what's going on there with 2U and what do you expect to happen to them?

Phil Hill:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are multiple that gets back to where this company, for better or worse, so often is the poster child or the bellwether. So they might be going through it in a public way this year, and it's interesting to watch, but part of the reason it's interesting to watch is it tells us a lot about what other ed tech companies are going through. So you is so much a bellwether showing how there are multiple mega trends that are impacting higher education right now. It's regulation, it's enrollment, it's financial markets, it's the loss of confidence in higher ed and the real challenges, higher ed universities, colleges, but also the ed tech ecosystem. They've got to deal with all that. So the changes that we're seeing right now, those are sort of the macro trends or mega trends that are driving so much of it. So it keeps your job and my job interesting this year.

Michael Horn:

Well, Phil, if 2U is a bellwether for OPMs and maybe online education more generally, I think you can be our bellwether for all of this, helping us navigate and figure out these times. So just really appreciate you joining us on the future of education to help us think through a lot of important issues impacting what higher education is going to look like in the future.

Phil Hill:

Well, thank you. I really enjoyed our talk as usual.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As mentioned last week, Diane Tavenner, Stacey Childress, and I recorded two episodes reacting to the three-part podcast that a16z venture capitalists Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz recorded on higher education. In this second episode, we reacted to the venture capitalists’ proposed solutions for higher education. This was also a juicy conversation, and we look forward to your thoughts!

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Diane Tavenner:

Hey, Michael. Hey, Stacey.

Stacey Childress:

Hello.

Diane Tavenner:

Well, we are doing something for the first time here on Class Disrupted. We are recording a two-part podcast. And so here we are in part two. We've got the amazing Stacey Childress with us for this experiment, and she's hanging in there. She came back for number two. So, as a reminder, here is what we're up to. The three of us all listen to a very lengthy multi-part podcast by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, very successful and respected VCs and entrepreneurs. And their podcast broke down the problems with higher education and the solutions as they sort of saw them and proposed them. And then also had a third session on questions from X, Twitter, whatever you want to call that thing. So lots of people told us we had to listen to what they were saying, and we did. And then, quite frankly, we really felt compelled to join in this really important discussion. We were super grateful they were having it. We felt like we could add some things. And so in our last episode, we tackled the problem that they had laid out in their first episode. So we did that in our first and really broke down what they got right, what they missed, what some things we had some quibbles with. And today we want to flip to their solution. So, kind of mirroring their approach.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And suffice to say, I think we had a lot we liked in the problems that they identified, some nuance that we tried to add to their conversation to set us up, I think, for a more productive set of solutions. And again, the disclosure that we're all on the board of Minerva University, and we kind of think that we might be an interesting solution to some of the problems that they posed. But with that as sort of prelude, I think let's just jump right in. They offered a bunch of solutions as they went down the bundle of their twelve. They talked a lot about how you could unbundle and rebundle a lot. I thought that was an insightful framing as you think about solutions to these operations and these real valuable functions that places play. So, Diane, where would you like to dive in?

The benefits of centering teaching

Diane Tavenner:

Well, for me, Michael, the solution episode is where things really got spicy. And you know that really isn't a surprise. I often find that people are really good at breaking down and dissecting problems, but they often don't offer very satisfying or promising solutions, especially when you're talking about big, complex systems problems. And so I'm not surprised that I wasn't feeling satisfied in that episode. And in fact, I feel like I've made this complaint about a lot of the books that I've recommended on this podcast. So it's not that there's not value in there, but I definitely have some disappointment with the solutions that Marc and Ben proposed and that lots of other people propose, especially when you get into education. And so I guess where I want to start is, let's just go through some of them, and I pulled a bunch of them out and I'm curious what you all think about them. And so let me just start on the positive, what I agreed with, and we talked a lot about this in the first episode, so don't have to spend a lot of time here. But I actually agreed with their solution, that one of the things that colleges and universities need to do is focus on educating students and refocus, reignite their purpose around that. And in doing so, they should be able to reduce administrative overhead. And so they talked a lot about how in a number of universities, there are reports now that there are literally more administrative people than there are students, which kind of, to any person sounds insane. And I think we know that to actually be true know they have a perception of cost ballooning. Michael, you gave us some real nuance around that in the last episode, so we can take that or leave that. But this ballooning, this lack of focus, contributes to a lack of direct service to students, and we should just literally, dramatically reduce admin and in doing so, reduce cost. And so I'm curious what you guys think. The last thing I will just say quickly before I turn it to you is I do believe this is something we've done at Minerva. Minerva has prioritized student learning, the student experience. The three of us, as trustees know for a fact that the admin is quite lean and that cost structure is significantly leaner as well. So I do think we have at least one proof point that it can be done.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Stacey, why don't you jump in first? And this is the format we'll follow for people listening. Diane's going to go through her list. Stacey, and I will react bullet by bullet, so to speak. So go ahead, Stacey.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah. On this one about refocusing on students, I would say refocusing on the purpose of the time in the program, whether that's two years, three years, four years, because I think you could play with timing as an innovation potentially. But while we're here together, learning much more, focus on purpose and helping young people expand their opportunity set. To me, it can be an early function of a higher ed experience in your first year or two where you're able to get better, clearer insight into a path or multiple paths that you may or may not have come in thinking that's the path you're on. Now. For lots of kids, they just come right in and go, and that's fine, but lots of them don't. And so just like thinking about what's really the purpose of the first year, what's really the purpose of that bridge from first to second year, what are we trying to help make sure students get to the middle of their second year at end of their third semester, kind of knowing about themselves, knowing about what comes next and what needs to happen. Just really kind of think of that backwards mapping. If we're headed here, how would we think about what needs to happen from the beginning to get there? And I just don't think that's happening anymore. So I liked the idea that it might be possible for institutions that want to really focus themselves on student development and acceleration to rethink the way the experience works without having to add a ton of costs and in fact, probably be able to reduce costs if they really streamlined around that purpose, therefore that value prop, therefore that experience that needs to be created and managed over time. So they didn't exactly suggest that. But I do think from a solution standpoint, I think there's real power there. And we said that with Minerva, we've got more of that mindset, but we were able to design it from the beginning that way. Or we weren't. I wasn't. I wasn't there at the very beginning, but not too long after. But that's the purpose at Minerva, and we're organized around it and can constantly get better at it, for sure. But we're organized around it. And I think it's a thing that existing institutions could move to. It doesn't seem impossible. It seems really hard, and it would take some time. But I think we have some examples of the improvement of some credentialing. I'm most familiar with it around master's programs, but I think that actually gives me a little bit of hope that you could think differently about the experience in ways that doesn't require you to blow up everything but does create opportunities to redesign at the kind of major/degree level. I don't know. I think it's possible and desirable.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, that's super interesting. I like also how you said it, Stacey, which is, regardless of what the universities do, they need to focus around a purpose. And so for some institutions, I will be delighted if they say it's research, because I think that's a very important societal function that's different from the one we've chosen at Minerva, which is fundamentally students. I think doing so on either end, I think, will reduce administrative overhead and cost bloat. I think you need that clarity. I will say the second add to you all that I think maybe, I don't know that it's a disagreement, but it follows from where you were going, Stacey, which is like, I don't think it's quite student centered. I think it's student purpose. And so, meaning, if we're backward mapping from, we want these individuals to go out into the employment world and society and be able to contribute, what does it. And I think it's a slight addendum to the student centered language only in the sense that you could argue that the opulent dining halls and residential palaces and so forth of colleges are very student centered in a weird kind of way. But I think it's because they've treated students as customers as opposed to clients. And my distinction there is simply, like, the customer is always right with a client, you kind of got to nudge them and help them because you're helping develop them. And so that's my one sort of maybe controversial nuance. But I think we should have teaching institutions, they shouldn't try to do research, and we should have far fewer research institutions. But I still want some of them.

Diane Tavenner:

I love that distinction, Michael. And it's so interesting how I think about this kind of as an insider and then a parent perspective, in that I actually, as a parent, see those sort of, let's call them resort style or luxury resort universities as detrimental to the development of people in the 18 to 25 range. And so I don't ever see that as a positive. But you're right. That's what some, especially elite families want. And that's like driving things. So super interesting. I will just say that Minerva is the opposite of that. As we both know, it really is designed to help develop young emerging adults and their skills. And it's really impressive on this front.

Michael Horn:

And they've done that backward mapping that Stacey just described in excruciating, incredible, awesome detail.

Stacey Childress:

Brilliant.

Diversification of purpose and opportunities

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Diane Tavenner:

Yep. Okay, so the second solution that I agree with, and here's where I'm really going to practice some grace, because I don't really think they said it the way that I would. But anyway, they seem to believe that it would be really healthy to have different universities and different departments within universities offering really different opportunities and appealing to different people and interests and passions and skills. I think they say that repeatedly, and I believe that that's really something they care about. And I 100% sign on to and agree with that. I'm super excited about that. Right now. We have one flavor and they're all vanilla. And how could we have some really different types of offerings? However, in that conversation, they got all caught up in DEI and politically hot topics. And so their discussion of it was kind of bumbly and in some cases came across as sort of biased and stereotypical. We unpacked that a lot on the last episode, so I'm not going to go back there. So instead, what I'm going to try to do is say what I think they would sign on to, given what I tried to hear through what they were talking about, which is what I would call the Todd Rose approach. And Michael and I have talked to Todd a couple times on the podcast, but basically, he really advocates for the end of average, which in his research and work suggests that what we're promoting in university admissions right now is everyone driving towards being on a very small number of measures, the same as everyone, only better. So it's like, we're all going to be good at these three things, and now I'm just going to try to get better than you versus recognizing that the world needs whatever, hundreds, thousands of different things and that different people bring those different... And we would be so much better served if we were cultivating all that diversity of talent and expertise and interest, and if we had a collective university system that was really enabling and doing that. And so I think they were trying to zoom out to that systems level and say, wouldn't that would be ideal? And I want to throw it to you all, because I do think this concept of like, imagine if students were applying to colleges not because of their ranking in U.S. News and World Reports or wherever we're getting it these days, but because it was really a good fit for them personally. I mean, that's the ideal that I think Ben and Marc would sign on to. I think society would benefit from, and I think it would, gosh, just be so much healthier for our young people and our country.

Michael Horn:

I love where you just landed, Diane, because to me, it took them a while to get there, which I think is what you're saying. But I think that was the underlying essence, which is that they were saying it's not just Math and English Language Arts that matter. If you're an awesome musician, there should be a way to show that. And then I think it would make it easier, frankly, for colleges to differentiate, which is the art of strategy. Colleges don't like differentiating right now, to your point, the opposite of strategy. That's part of the problem. But they had this, I think, somewhat bizarrely said, SAT should be infinitely scored. I kind of agree with it. Like, if you're really good at math, I'd love to see how high you can get. And I want lots of other performance measures that you could showcase your talents on to show who you are. And you're going to have this jagged profile at the end of the day. And I think that's. Again, I'm not sure that they said it that way, but I think that's what they fundamentally were driving at, and I'd love to see it. If you get out of the SAT as IQ test, I think you can make that leap a lot easier. And then it gets exciting, and I think, Stacey, and I'll throw it to you here, I think it also gets around in the longer run. This point you were raising in the last episode that we're actually not ready to leave the SAT, because when we do, it actually becomes worse and more biased toward people who have lots of wealth to develop essays and projects and go on saving the whales and blah, blah, blah. Like things that we're not sure were about that we're trying to optimize.

Stacey Childress:

For, as I used to say, not really my issue. I'm glad somebody cares about that. I do like the whales. It's not really my issue. Listen, I am all in on, as, you know, on jagged profiles, both as just a concept and as a common sense approach to how the world actually works. And again, I think that's a lot of what they got right, both in diagnosis and solutioning, or at least feeding into potential solutions, is there aren't enough choices. There are 4,000 institutions, but Diane, to your point, there are a handful or maybe four or five handfuls that are really kind of driving what good is supposed to look like, whether that's right or wrong, and then all the other ones trying to kind of look the best they can against that standard. I actually would be cautious about any one institution, no matter how large or small, how financially healthy or not. I'll be cautious about saying, do more programs, like, proliferate programs. Michael, like, you have spent some time both advising and teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Ed Education in the last few years. And I think one really smart thing they've done is fewer programs. You know, let's have fewer of these. And so you can make more sense out of what a degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education means at the end of it, because you didn't have, however, I mean, there were literally like 42 paths or something, and it's down in the teens now. It's like a big step forward. And so I wouldn't suggest more. I would suggest more in aggregate. Right. And so to your point, Diane, what opportunity does it create for institutions to find their place in the ecosystem on the few things they can just be world class in, even if they're a smaller institution kind of in the middle of the country, someplace in a charming town, but not a destination spot. But they get really good at a few paths and us developing ways at the system level to let kids know about those young people, know about those options, these different places that you might go. And then the jagged profile, like, if you can have some services emerge for matching jagged profiles to institutions where you don't have to be one particular profile to do well there. But if you kind of fall in these ways, this is a way to continue to develop on these criteria you want to work on or if you want to look, the guys on the podcast saw college as a way out of being a bus boy and doing dishes when they were 17 or 18. Right. And so I don't want my jagged profile to be steady state, mostly filled in with things I'm interested in as a teenager and bus boy. But I do want some sense of where I am at that age and where I might want to push in if I'm interested in some other things. I mean, I want sports. So how does the ecosystem develop in ways that allows for, I'll just call it the supply of opportunities to be there in a very vibrant and differentiated set of options and some way of finding those options with a little bit of intelligence as a student and as a family about my student’s jagged profile. Right. I don't want my jagged profile to be driven by some of my immutable characteristics, like race and gender and presumptions about what I might like or not like based on that. But, yeah, I'm different from you, Diane, and from you, Michael. We've had a lot of things in common and a lot of things that are different from one another. And we always have. Everyone does.

Certifying competence and personalizing through curriculum

Michael Horn:

Diane, can I, can I just one quick build off of that because it reminded me of two things. One, I loved it how the implication of what Stacey just said would solve the administrative overhead problem that you started with. Diane. I disagreed with their solution of just slash half the administration. You can't, as long as the bundle is what it is. And it's not a go back to operating like how you were in year 2000 because the world has changed. It's incredibly naive. And so that part of it, I think, where you just went with that, Stacey, is right. The other piece of this that just occurred to me is if you truly get good at the jagged profile piece, then a part I was in total agreement with Ben on was one of the biggest solutions, I think was starting the credentialing thing, if you will. That was actually certifying competence. And I think my conclusion, I've written a whole paper about this, about how we're never going to get to competency-based education unless there are these independent entities that are there to verify competency and mastery. And in practice, it's really hard to do. Like, we have all these one offs, right? Google, Microsoft, they don't stand in for the bundle. Once you get into the less rules based stuff, we get worse and worse at it. And so I guess I would just say if we solved it on the front end. Diane, I'm curious what you think, but we actually might build into something that could solve it on the back end. And that would actually lower the price, I think, of higher ed.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah. Like, I'm bursting with things right now. So I'm going to do three things all here at once. One, I want to just add on to this, I think, this is a really important conversation. So here's what I would offer as a counterintuitive solution to what we've just been talking about that I know is true in the K-12 sector. So people think that in order to offer more choice and more personalization, that you have to do it in big structural ways. You have to add, like, a new major. You have to add a new school of something. You have to add, add, add. It's not true. The way you actually do it and reduce at the same time is in how you're designing those programs to be significantly more personalized, significantly more differentiated. So you're actually solving the problem of the horrible pedagogy.

Stacey Childress:

Right.

Diane Tavenner:

And you're not expanding the structure of the university. Now, this is so nerdy. Like, if you don't design education and whatnot, you would never know that this is how you do this. But Minerva is a perfect example. They literally have five majors, five degrees. That's it. Name me another university that only has five degrees. They've just exploded. But within those degrees, the experience is so hands-on, so project based, so differentiated that you can. People are really matching up. And so I think, actually, the path forward on that.

Stacey Childress:

It's super fascinating. And it is counterintuitive, because you're solving the scale system problem at the unit level. Right. At the unit of the learner and the learner experience. And it actually doesn't add overhead. It helps trim. It's fascinating.

Diane Tavenner:

It's my favorite kind of solution, which is, I call the kitchen tool solution. I have a small kitchen. I'm a big cook. I can't have that many tools. They have to do multiple jobs. So I love it as a kitchen tool solution. Michael, you also took us. So there's some other things we agree with which we might get back to, but I'm going to take us into the disagree, because you sort of led us there to this fixing the outgoing credential problem, which, look, I think we all agree there's a lot of disruption happening in society right now about these credentials. Right. And it's really unclear where they are, because last time I checked, all the elite employers are still hiring people from Stanford and Harvard. So that's super real. But you led us into their solution, and this might have been one of the most mind boggling proposals. And it falls into a category that's very natural for people, is when they don't know what to do, they think you need to do something different. They go back to something versus forward. And what Ben and Marc did was go back to the concept that in order to fix the credentialing problem and the lack of, we should start grading on a curve again. And I almost lost it, you guys. I had to take a break at that moment because that is the dumbest idea I've heard in a really long time. It's a horrible idea.

Michael Horn:

Nice of you to bring the nuance, Diane.

Diane Tavenner:

Quite frankly, they broke it down why it was a horrible idea. So I'll leave that to them. What is a good idea, and that's what we all talk about and what the three of us are driving for is competency, mastery based assessment and learning. And it's what you're pointing to, Michael. First of all, I just want people to understand this is a real thing. It's true. It's possible. There are competency based assessments that are valid and are reliable. More and more coming available every day. And in fact, one of the big problems is a lot of institutions don't use them. So we would have way more of these in the market if people were actually using them. And I say this because I built a whole system that does competency based learning and assessments. And now we had Tim Knowles on the podcast earlier this year, like, this is Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and Learning and their partnership with ETS is all about this. So let us not believe that these things aren't possible and don't exist. They are and they do. And we as consumers have to start demanding them, buying them, using them, making them better.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I mean, here was the big irony, right, which was, I totally agree with everything you just said, Diane, and I agree with them that the incentives currently suck, right. In terms of why there's great inflation and their credentialing idea. That's where you can go, right? Like we're going to have a way to prove mastery and we're going to say, yes, you got it. No, you got to keep working. Or you as an individual can say, maybe this isn't my bag. And that's okay. At this level, I think to learn what you really want and you're not going to make claims of, I got a C on this because I showed up and I turned it in and what, 30% all those…I'm totally 1000%... I thought the irony was that the credentialing idea that Ben wants to invest in, I think is an answer to this. I will add, I do not think that existing institutions, I know that many hundreds of them, are saying that they are launching competency based programs. I do not believe that most of them are going to be competency based. I do not believe that they are able to untether from the credit hour and move fundamentally to learning for the reason you just said, Diane, they're not using these assessments. They're not fundamentally able to move to a world in which learning is the currency rather than time. And I think this is where you have to have a third party credentialer and a new ecosystem of the Western Governor's Universities, the Southern New Hampshire Universities, et cetera, filled around them. Stacey?

Stacey Childress:

Yeah. Yes. I'm not going to yet take the bait on the discrete grading curve thing. I'll come back to that. I'm going to stay right here.

Michael Horn:

You were at the Harvard Business School where you had to.

The role of employers in advancing competency-based grading

Stacey Childress:

I'm coming back to it. I'm coming back. I'm going to come back to it because I love this conversation or this thread. Supply can't continue to develop, proliferate, deepen, innovate without sufficient demand for the type of thing Is what you're saying, Diane. And so this assessment problem, it's more than an assessment problem, but it's an assessment infrastructure that supports a new learning model. That gets us to mastery based, competency based, enables us to do personalization more meaningfully. And this is where I think there was a miss on the solutions part, not about a specific solution, because I love the credentialing idea. We need a few of those. I think Ben and Marc pushing the onus of, or not the onus, but the point of leverage over to others to drive these reforms, I think, is short sighted because they have more power than maybe they acknowledged, and certainly as part of a business ecosystem in the country, have an enormous amount of power as employers to require something different of existing institutions and therefore open up opportunities for new institutions to emerge. New models to emerge. And they can do that, by the way they will and won't hire. And I know that's challenging because they need this flux of new talent every year, and they plan for it to be able to operate their models. But unless employers, it's a hypothesis, but I think unless employers really pressure the institutions that are currently credentialing students to do something different, it's not going to happen. Like, even the third party credentialer has a hard time taking off if the educational models actually don't prepare students well to demonstrate competency in the third party credentialing protocols. I think because it's a market challenge. Even though we're talking about higher ed and big chunk of it is nonprofit, it's still a market. And the output of the system is talent. There's a market for talent. Who's driving that market for talent? On the consumer, the buyer side is companies, and they're going to have to exert way more organized pressure than they do now. And I think it's absolutely doable. And look, there's a lot of one, I think I appreciate about just the podcast in general was they didn't really take the bait on super woke versus woke versus non woke. There were some allusions to it and stuff like that, which were fine. But there are employers making noises right now about who they will and won't hire based on current attitudes, behaviors, speech. And I don't love that, but I don't hate it. Okay. Employers can do that. Well, if they can do that, they can do this. They can do what we're talking about, which is a much longer term, more systemic way to really increase quality, overall quality of learning, quality of the signaling, quality of the incoming talent pool. And so like, yeah, businesses, let's get organized around hiring and not hiring based on some things that actually really matter fundamentally for the health of the economy, for human flourishing, et cetera, et cetera.

Unbundling the role of the professor 

Diane Tavenner:

This point about the power of the employers is in the section in my mind of what they sort of overlooked or their blind spot. And I think it comes to people, we often forget the power that we have. I'd love to come back to that a little bit on another example, but I want to stick here because one of their other solutions was to fix grade inflation. And this was like a solution that was so that they could make the credential more valuable and the value proposition. So it was sort of this adjacent solution to what we've been talking about. I will say they got into this whole conversation about adjunct professors versus tenure professors and all of this stuff about whatever. It was a little bit confusing. Here's what I would say about…I feel like fixing great inflation kind of misses the point here. I think the actual solution that they would be looking for and want is unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed, because that's actually the problem that's at the root of the issue. We see this in K-12 teachers have too many hats they have to wear. They're supposed to teach the kids, they're supposed to coach them, they're supposed to mentor them, they're supposed to counsel them, and they have to evaluate their work performance, and they have to recommend those. Mackle and I have talked about this for years. Those roles are in conflict. There's an inherent conflict in there. We're asking these people to play these two roles and then getting mad at them when they are trying to promote kids that they are deeply invested in and care about. And so I would say for that and many, many reasons, they love unbundling. I think they should drop down a level and say, like, how do we unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed? We've sort of failed miserably so far at doing this in K-12, but maybe it's more possible at higher ed. And I think this speaks to your idea of Michael, like, disaggregating the research piece. I just think there's so much opportunity on unbundling the role of professors.

Michael Horn:

Well, and I won't ding them for not knowing this, but this is exactly what Western Governor's University has done. They have unbundled the role of the faculty member. They have five different roles for faculty members. Life coach, course coach, instructional designer, I’m missing one, and assessment. And they're all separate. And it's one of the reasons I wonder, Western Governor's University has set up WGU labs. Might all of the expertise that they have developed in assessing competency, because they are a competency based institution, be something that they can spin out so other people can start building toward it and start to do this even more? Diane, I think it's a great. I'm totally with you.

Stacey Childress:

Totally.

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Evaluating tutoring as an alternative

Diane Tavenner:

Let me grab another one that I disagreed with, because once I get this one off my chest, then I think I'll feel okay. Which is one of their solutions was, and they sort of said it a little bit, like off the cuff, tongue in cheek a little. But we're pretty serious about it was like, look, if universities are charging $70,000 a year in tuition, if that's the price tag of a university, you could literally hire a full-time tutor. It would tutor your young person, know Socrates and Aristotle and sort of in that old one to one tutoring model. And they spent a lot of time talking about a study that we all know very, very well, a study done by Ben Bloom that showed the power of one to one tutoring. It's true. It's a real study we all care about. And I think they really lost a lot of nuance around that study and what it actually showed. And for me, a couple of things that were problematic on just the very technical side. You can't hire a tutor for $70,000 a year that is going to be Aristotle like, that is insane. And as business people, that's crazy. Please. So that business model doesn't work. And the second thing that really baffled me in the solution was their complete failure to think about scale here. We can't even find enough teachers in America. How in the world do we think we're going to scale one to one tutoring, even if we had the resources to do that? It makes no sense now. They were talking about, like, combos of AI, et cetera. Fine. I would say tutoring is not a solution to the problem of higher ed. It's certainly something we should be thinking about working on using as a tool in our tool belt, but it's not a solution.

Michael Horn:

I'll just say plus one. Go ahead, Stacey.

Stacey Childress:

Listen, I literally thought I'd gotten in a time machine and gone back to 2010 when we all started kind of professionally, really moving in the same direction when Bloom's study was the hot topic and kind of the talisman. This is the model for personalized learning. The two sigma problem is Bloom showed it's possible with mastery based one to one tutoring, which is a thing. Mastery based tutoring, like, it's a very specific model of pedagogy, which is a thing they miss, I think missed. So the two sigma problem is, how do we do this at scale? And they made a very good point. We all know what it's like. We all know the impact that one great teacher can have. And it's just a devilish problem to try to make a million great teachers, right? That's the challenge on the human front. And Michael, I know you and I share a perspective on this, like, Bloom's methodology, like, overstates effect size by. It took me a while to get there on my path over the last 14 or 15 years, but effect size is overstated. Algorithmic approaches to trying to get the technology to mimic that type of tutoring just really hasn't panned out. Lots have tried again. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropy and venture capital into that problem or goal. AI might put us on different footing there. You could really imagine something more akin in some domains to a mastery based model of individual support for young people that could approximate maybe some of the results. I don't know about you, Michael, but I'm skeptical of the two sigma, the 98th percentile result, moving kids at the 50th percentile reliably to the 98th percentile at scale. I think I'd take half that. If I could get 50% to 75th percentile in a reliable and affordable way, I think I'd be all in on that. What I don't think is that it is a single solution. It's always been my problem with this conversation about tutoring, which is it a thing that we're going to do on the side because other things aren't working. And so therefore, let's do one on one tutoring and that works for some kids and not others. And yeah, now we need 15 million great mastery based tutors who can each support three kids instead of just 3 million teachers that we already don't know how to do. So it starts to get at that challenge. But what I will say is what always continues to motivate me about the Bloom insight, whatever the effect size is, whatever the model is, whatever the scalability challenges are, it's twofold. One is isn't that really what we want education to be, regardless of how we actually operationalize it, whether it's Aristotle and Socrates today, but really some version of ChatGPT probably not going to happen, maybe not even all that desirable or through some other I'll just use the word bundle, even though I don't mean it in the way they were talking about some other basket of experiences that allow for the personalization you were talking about earlier, Diane, which technology can help and support, but isn't a point solution for it. I guess that's the thing to break out of, like when you see, well, one to one tutoring, and no matter what, it reliably shows this. And if we could just do that. I did think that listen, it was a cheeky aside that they made kind of as a joke, and it did make me laugh. But here's I mean, I do think this is a good push when we do get to the moment that there are as many administrators and faculty as there are students. And this is true in some institutions that the three of us know, love and give a lot of credit for helping us accelerate toward the wonderful lives we're leading. Now you start to say, can we really not afford it? Yeah, because maybe we can afford it. We're just not spending on it. And maybe the model isn't really one to one, but maybe it is one to one in terms of headcount. And then you've got this unbundling idea, Diane, that you were proposing and that I know Michael has talked a lot about unbundling the role of the instructor, the professor. So then you still have the same number of people, and maybe the cost model stays similar, but it's worth it. It's way more effective. It's way more productive because for the same amount of money, you're getting a 75th percentile result instead of a 50th percentile result. If we could just use the inspiration of the blue model, not say, let's try to replicate it exactly, but what might it push us to re-examine about the current structure and what might be possible if we weren't so wedded to the operational model that we have.

Diane Tavenner:

We could go.

Michael Horn:

I'm just nodding. I think this is a good point. I will say the irony I thought was they said nothing in education scales except for the Benjamin Bloom thing. And it was like, anyway, I've gone through my list.

Stacey Childress:

The problem is that it doesn't scale.

Startup competitors in higher ed

Diane Tavenner:

Let me just say quickly, because I think we're going to all be in agreement on this. As VCs, it was interesting that they were surprisingly skeptical of startup competitors. So competitors in the space that could be universities, if you will, new startup competitors. And they cited their major skepticism around what they call the accreditation cartel, which is not surprising because VCs kind of don't like regulated industries. For good reason, I think. I just would say quickly, I think they missed Minerva here. Minerva is literally a startup against the space that they're talking about. So we should just say that out loud. I would also say that…

Stacey Childress:

They did mention it.

Diane Tavenner:

They did mention it.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah. They didn't talk…

Diane Tavenner:

In a separate place. I just want us to know there are some really key people doing some work on accreditation that, if it's successful, I think will matter a lot. So we should just know that that's happening. And if folks are interested in that, I think there's people doing that, number one. Number two, who knows if it will pass in our federal legislation. But there's some work around enabling Pell grants. So these are grants for low income students to do shorter term credentials, which could get really interesting around different types of competitors.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, but I would agree with them here because I think as it stands right now, to launch Minerva took like $100 million to launch UATX took some godly sum of money. College, Unbound, Reach University, Quantic School of Business and Technology. They're almost the exceptions that prove the rule at present. And I think supply is so limited that that partially explains why costs have gone up writ large over the last many decades. And it is really hard to start something outside the system like the short term Pell you just referenced that is locked to accredited institutions. It is like a whole set of institutions aren't going to be able to use it. And so it is really hard to start something outside the system because you're competing with something that does get a subsidy and you don't. We at Minerva were accredited, but we've chosen not to accept that subsidy to this point. I think that's been the right decision, but I'm just saying it's created barriers to entry such that I think all the coding boot camps and apprenticeships and other promising sort of stabs at this have struggled. And so I actually thought their point was right. And I'll just name it like if Stig Lesley, our friend, colleague, his postsecondary commission accreditor does get through, I do think it changes the game. And that's probably where you're going with this, Diane. But I think at status quo, Ben and Marc nailed this I would say.

Diane Tavenner:

Don't disagree. And certainly my experience for 20 years in the K-12 environment as a charter school operator and is consistent with the rightful fears there. And as I look about at what sort of, even if initially wasn't blocked, what's kind of washed away over the time, it's a real fear.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah. I wonder, just kind of on this startup as kind of some version of a bundle, which is, I think what they're saying, right. It's like a competitive institution that has some version of the bundle. I wonder, Michael, is there some pseudo non consumption at a big enough scale happening in the Marketplace? So some of these kids we talked about, or some of these types of student profiles that we talked about earlier, that the current setup just does not work for and creates this enormous debt load and stuff. Maybe if you're not, Minerva's charter is to compete with elite institutions, as are some of these others we've referenced. But maybe there's more opportunity, if you really got clear about a student profile or two that is currently not being served at all or being served so badly that it puts them as worse than underserved, like negatively served, that there may be some opening for. Because maybe that kind of place, I guess the finances are still an issue, but what kind of credential does it need if it's got good partnerships with some set of employers or a couple of industries, for instance.

Michael Horn:

Maybe this is a cool place for us to wrap because I think to that point, Stacey, this goes back to the quote at the very beginning of the first episode that Ben led with on the quote unquote scam. What I might say is you got sort of two options here. One, you have an employer driven model, which looks a lot like apprenticeships, which Diane and I have gotten very excited about as an alternative. And it's learner centered, but it's actually employer centered as well. And that to me is the two things that actually I would anchor on in the new system, and I think it would get those incentives right, to your point. And number two, I think the other option is we're seeing players fill the non consumption. They're the Western Governor's Universities. They are the Southern New Hampshire Universities.

Stacey Childress:

Good point.

Michael Horn:

And then my co-host on my other podcast, Future U, says, well, why aren't more people pouring into this ginormous adult learning opportunity? And I think the reason is because we've said for profit, you can't play. And capital, as you know, likes to go where there will be a return. But number two, the incentives really suck for for-profit right now because they're incentivized to enroll. And we've seen that movie play out. And so that's the other piece of this, which is I would love to see the accredited players have skin in the game so that if your students don't get good paying jobs and are going to default on debt, that they have some penalty for that. Then you could open up the capital markets and then start to scale some different looking players against this because we'd be focused on the outcomes at the end of the day.

Media recommendations 

Diane Tavenner:

I love that, Michael. I agree. It's a really good place to wrap. We could continue talking about this for a really long time. I suspect 3 hours were offline. Maybe we should turn to, we didn't do this on the first episode, but we should do it here because we were listening to that podcast, Stacey. We always do what are you watching, listening to, reading, hopefully outside of, quote, business.

Stacey Childress:

Well, one thing I'm watching and listening to is spring training. So baseball's back. We're in full swing of spring training in Florida and Arizona, and so I'm drawing attention to there. But then I'm also listening to a novel called the Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese, which I had not…I know it's been around a while, but I am totally into... It's like one of those multigenerational stories that I love. It spans 70 years, from 1900 to 1977. The author is actually the Vice Chair of Medicine at Stanford Medical School. So he's a doctor and writes fiction. And so there's like a ton of amazing stuff about the evolution of medical practice during those years. I'm loving. I'm on like chapter 19 of 87, and I'm so glad that there's that much left of it. That's how much I'm loving it. Yeah. So I totally recommend it. If you haven't read it, that's awesome.

Michael Horn:

Diane, what about you?

Diane Tavenner:

Well, I have read it and love, love it. So that's an awesome one. So folks who've been listening know that I'm on my way to visit my son in Scotland here pretty soon, and we've got an upcoming trip. And so in my quest to continue to learn about that area, I'm actually reading Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations and David Hume's A Treaty on Human Nature. Please do not laugh at me. Sometimes it's important to read the primary sources I tried to mean. So when we were talking Aristotle and Socrates and stuff, I had to laugh a little and the human nature and the growth mindset. But I think what's more interesting is at the same time, I'm playing with a new AI application, like I know we all are, that supports sort of learning journeys for people like me who aren't trying to get a credential but are trying to learn. And I'm having a conversation with it about these readings, and it's giving me projects and quizzes and all sorts of ways to learn and interact with the material. It's pretty fascinating. How about you, Michael?

Michael Horn:

That's awesome. I have a few different directions I could go because I'm still on the tennis kick to parallel Stacey's baseball, but that's not where I'm going. Last night...So this is someone could figure out when we're recording these episodes. But last night we went to the Somerville movie theater, which is one of these old-fashioned movie theaters, to hear an author speak. Her name is Kelly Yang. She lives in the LA area. She's originally from China. She immigrated here when she was like five or six or something like that. And she's written many children's books, and my kids had read them, one or two of them. We left with like eight of them. She has a YA novel as well, but the one that I was reading was finally seen, which was what they had read. I'm literally like every chapter, I'm like sobbing. Now, that was not their reaction, but it works on many levels, I guess, is the point. And then her new book that she is launching, and that's why everyone filled a theater last night is called finally heard, which is the sequel to finally seen. And evidently it's about the perils of social media through the story of an immigrant family. And so it's all about how to be happy and extraordinary, which, as she said last night, can often compete against each other in our lives. I've been reading so much John Haidt that I was so thrilled that a children's book author would tackle this topic in a really fun, enjoyable narrative. I'm excited to read it once I finish the first book. But with that said, a huge thank you to our friend Stacey. Thank you for joining us, Stacey.

Stacey Childress:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Horn:

I will add a huge thank you to Marc and Ben for devoting so much time and thought to the challenges in higher ed, sparking our two reactions. And I hope that they'll listen to this, and I hope that they will take it in the spirit in which we are offered, which is really building on the foundation that they have laid for a really critical conversation for society, because, as they said, universities have all these warts, and they do all these important things at the same time. And we can hold both of that in our head at the same time. And just a last thank you to all of our listeners for staying with us on this longer journey than usual. But we hope we'll see you next time on Class Disrupted. 

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At the beginning of the year, venture capitalists Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz of a16z published three episodes diagnosing the problems with higher education, offering solutions, and then answering questions. Six hours of audio on higher education is no small undertaking! Diane Tavenner and I were intrigued with the takes and wanted to react to them, deepen some of the analysis, and suggest some places where we felt they didn’t get things quite right. To help us, we welcomed Stacey Childress, Senior Advisor on Education at McKinsey, to the podcast for two episodes. In this first episode, we reacted to Marc and Ben’s diagnosis of the problems with higher education. Can’t wait to hear your reactions!

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Diane Tavenner:

Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn:

Hey, Diane. 

Introducing the two-part series

Diane Tavenner:

Michael, we've both been listening to another podcast, and it's causing us all sorts of emotions. I have to admit, I laughed out loud at a few of the texts you sent me because we were both on a bit of a roller coaster while listening to the three-part, six-hour series of the Ben and Marc show on the topic of higher education. For those who don't know, we suspect it might be a lot of people who listen to class disrupted and are kind of from our education world, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen are currently very successful venture capitalists at a firm called a16z. They founded that firm and lead it. They were both really successful entrepreneurs, they each come from software and technology backgrounds. Their firm has a really successful podcast, and then the two of them get together and chat about hot topics on this other Ben and Marc show. From what we can tell, this is a really popular show, especially among young entrepreneurs and folks in Silicon Valley. So they recorded these episodes about higher ed in January, almost immediately, we both started hearing from all sorts of people that we had to listen. And so we did. Things haven't been the same since. No, in all seriousness, there are at least two big opportunities that I think their conversation presents. Michael, I think you have some perspectives here as well. The first one is, for me at least, to practice what we've been trying to promote on our podcast for five seasons, and what I think we both deeply believe in, which is third-way solutions. Which implies that we don't fall victim to polarized positions and taking sides, but rather we really mine for nuance and extend grace to people in an effort to find win versus win-lose solutions. Especially to problems that we really care about. So that's the first one, and that's a thing I want to practice today. And then the second is simply to bring things we care about to a much larger audience and a more diverse audience. We can fall victim to only talking to ourselves in education. And I think we are both just honestly thrilled that Marc and Ben are talking about something we care very deeply about, and that tons of people who follow them are really engaged with the topic and thinking about how to rethink higher ed to better serve students in society. So that's just a huge opportunity.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Look, I think you framed this well, Diane. I like the approach and the excitement that we have and that anyone would dedicate 6 hours to higher education, to education in general, coming from the backgrounds that they both do. I think that's a net-net positive. So, taking all that, we're going to do a response, in effect, to these 6 hours, and we're going to do it in two parts. So today's episode is going to focus on the first part of the podcast that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Marc and Ben, if we may, released.  They dissected the problems facing higher education from what they called a systems point of view, and we'll talk more about what that means. We're going to now try to stay away from what they got into in the second podcast, which is when they started to go deep into solutions to what they saw as the problems. And yes, if you're listening, you're probably guessing it. We're going to do this in two parts. So the second episode for us will be mirroring their second episode, where they started to get into solutions. I don't think we'll get into the Q&A third episode that they did too much ourselves. We're going to do our best to be systematic. But I'll also say up front, they had nearly 4 hours of content in just these two shows. We are not trying to replicate that part of the performance, but we will try to bring the same level of nuance at least that we attempt to do in all of our other shows.

Welcoming Stacey 

Diane Tavenner:

Michael, I really appreciate the caveat, because they covered a lot of ground, and so we'll do our best to make our conversation accessible and meaningful, even if you haven't listened to Marc and Ben. At the same time, we also want to build on what they laid down if you have heard them. So hopefully, for those of us nerds in education, we're going to try to differentiate as best we can here. It's a pretty big task, and so we decided we needed some expert help. Michael and fortunately we have a very good friend who's the perfect person to help us think critically about the problems that higher ed today and the way its present form presents and to unpack solutions. So I personally am so excited to introduce our guest, Stacey Childress. Many of you will know Stacey, but for those who don't, Stacey has a very long list of experiences and accomplishments. So I won't go into all of them, but I will share a few that are relevant to the discussion today.

So let's start with the fact that early in her career, Stacey was a classroom teacher. She's also spent about a decade as a software entrepreneur, founder, and leader. So right there, she's bridging two worlds that are critical today. She then became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School, where she studied entrepreneurial activity in public education. She wrote three books, tons of case studies, and articles. She was a very popular teacher who won awards from her students and the dean. If any of you have ever run into one of her students, you know how popular she is. She's followed that up as the CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund and Eridaf, which is a whole new research entity that they help to incubate and spin out. And just more importantly, Stacey's one of the smartest people I know, period and in education. She sees the big picture and can break it down like no one else. Everything I told you takes a backseat to the fact that, in my view, she does what she does because she cares so deeply about kids, and that's what drives everything. I’ve had the privilege of working with Stacey on lots of things for many years and have experienced firsthand how her heart drives her work to make things better for young people. So welcome, my friend. We are so grateful that you've joined us for this, what we think is a really important conversation.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Diana and Michael, for inviting me. It's great to be here and really looking forward to the conversation.

Michael Horn:

Never say that till you're done with us, Stacey. 

Stacey Childress:

Thank you?

Michael Horn:

Well I should say I was one of those students, so I'll add that. In addition to having known each other for years, and being friends, we should also just disclose, I suppose is the right word, that we all serve on the board of directors with each other. It's not just any board of directors. It's the board of directors of a new university, Minerva University, that I suspect we may end up concluding in the second episode tackles some of the problems that Marc and Ben outlined in their podcasts. I just want that to be transparent front and center, because we're not only going to come to this conversation as three individuals with expertise in education but also as three trustees who are wearing that hat, and are trying to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of higher education. So with that outline, with that out of the way, if you will let's dive in. In the first question, which I think is a pretty fundamental one, because in the first podcast, and Diane you helped pull this out. They lead in with Ben saying a very provocative line, and the quote is this. “We as a society are running a scam and ripping off a huge percentage of our young people with the clear expectation that they are going to get a higher quality job and being able to pay for college. But that is absolutely not the case.” So that sort of sets the tone for how they are tackling the problems facing higher ed. Diane, maybe I'll have you kick us off here rather than throw Stacey into the deep end. I'd love your take on Ben's first hot take if you will, but then maybe also frame it as a general gut reaction, perhaps, to their first show, where they delve into and diagnose the problems as they see it with higher ed.

Reactions to Ben and Marc’s framing of higher ed’s problems 

Diane Tavenner:

Michael, I think it's a really interesting place to start. It's literally where they start, and it's like a fascinating place for us to enter the conversation. Let me start by saying I wouldn't use the word scam because it implies ill intent. Being one of the people who's sort of in the system that is behind that comment, I know that I don't have ill intent. I know that most of the people I know don't have ill intent. So I wouldn't use the word scam. And at the very same time, I do think the evidence points to the truth of Ben's statement. Honestly, for me, that sums up the tension I feel in this opening teaser statement and throughout the entire 6 hours of the podcast.So this quote really does a good job representing it. I directionally agree with so much of what they talk about. I think they really capture so much of the feeling and the thinking and the conversation. I'm really challenged by how they say a lot of things because they can seem, and I don't think I'm being overly sensitive here. I think they can seem at times careless with their language and what they're saying and biased. We're all biased, obviously, but I think that really comes through. And so they're kind of how challenges me. What I would say is they get a few really important things very wrong. Given how many people listen and learn from them, that feels like, in the best case scenario, a missed opportunity and in the worst case, a setback for addressing a problem that I think we agree on and it seems like we all want to fix. So I'm thrilled that we're having this conversation and so many people are engaged because we need the entire country to feel compelled to transform education in America. And hopefully that gives a sense of like when we talked about a roller coaster in the opening. That's the feeling of the roller coaster of emotion I had while I was listening. Then I would just note one other really important element of their conversation, which is for the vast majority of the podcast, they're talking about elite universities and elite students and learners. While they don't say it explicitly, well they do a couple of times, but for the most part they don't. It's really important to note that what they're describing is really about highly selective schools. It's not a surprise. It's what they know. It's what they've been through. It's the people they know. But I think we all have to hold on and remember that there are 4,000 ish colleges and universities in America, and only a very small number of them are highly selective or even selective. So this focus on the elites is important because it's indicative of how our country thinks about higher ed and talks about higher ed. It's one of the big problems we have, because what ends up happening is a small number of elite institutions end up driving much of what happens in K-12 all the way through higher ed. It's really the tail wagging the dog and I think they embodied that in their conversation. So it's very real, but it's also something we need to be aware of.

Michael Horn:

Great way to set the table. We're not always going to agree on this, but I think this is like framing a lot of the mood of this. Stacey, let me invite you in here and sort of your reactions to the podcast. Also on Diane’s thoughts and that quote that they lead off with.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, well, let me say I enjoyed all 6 hours of the podcast. I had a little less of the roller coaster feeling you guys are describing, but maybe because I wasn't in a text thread with friends who were listening at the same time. Like you guys, I did have areas I really agreed with and areas I was puzzled by and agreed with less. But listen, I liked it so much, I stretched it into 8 hours. I mean, talk about nerd because I went back and listened to the second episode twice. Here's why. I have enormous respect for what Marc and Ben have created in the world, both as entrepreneurs. I mean, the way we experience the web today is in large part because of the foundation they laid back with mosaic and then Netscape. And just the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs that they've helped create new things through their venture capital firm. So I was super jazzed to listen to their ideas for solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities that kind of match the problem statements they came up with. And you know me, that's what gets me excited. What can we do? What are those opportunities, especially entrepreneurial opportunities? I agreed with a lot of what they said in both of those episodes, first and second, and liked a lot of it. But I think they had some misses. Diane, you mentioned you felt like there were some things they missed. As I thought about it, I came to this idea that some of the misses might have a common cause or problem, which is, not surprisingly, they were often painting with a very broad brush. So a very broad, correct, but broad problem statement. So when you jump to solutions from that, it can be hard. So I thought their conversation would have benefited from some more, I'll just call it granularity. So I'll give you my big example of that, which is this value prop idea, Michael, that you started us with here. Ben's quote, which is value prop's broken. College is more expensive than ever. Students are taking on more debt than ever because it's widely available and super cheap. And then all the other bad things that happen. Value props broken, okay, that's in the popular consciousness right now. There's kind of general agreement on that. Also the value prop is actually not broken for some students. It's actually still working for a pretty significant segment of students, and it's not working for lots of different segments of students. So I think the more interesting question is who is it not working for and why? And therefore, what? So one example of who it's not working for. Students who aren't quite sure what they want to do, they go to the college that they match with, overmatch, under match, or it's just right. Then they end up in some degree plan that they didn't really think through and didn't get a lot of help with. They rack up all the debt for all the semesters, and then they end up with this degree. They may have learned some stuff, but the degree doesn't have any value in the job Marcet or not much value. So they end up wandering around underemployed, not earning what they should. That is a problem. It's a pretty significant segment of students for whom that's true. Well, that's a problem that kind of suggests all kinds of interesting potential solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities or institutional reforms, however you want to look at it. That doesn't really work in broad strokes, but would work for that segment. Another segment is students who go to college for a semester or three or five, they're taking on debt all along the way, and then life happens. For whatever set of reasons, and it's different for different kids, they don't finish. So they've got 20% of the debt, or 50% of the debt, or maybe 80% of the debt of the whole thing, and they've got nothing. In fact, they might have less than nothing, because at a very critical moment in their transition from adolescence to adulthood, they didn't make the most of a very significant opportunity. They started something and didn't finish. And maybe it's not fair, but life's not fair, and that's now something that has happened. So that's a different set of problems. You could start to think about solutions… So to say, value props are broken, let's think of solutions. Provocative, interesting, whatever. But if we really want to make progress, we really want to get traction and have some actual product Marcet fit for things we might create, having a better understanding is, I think, super important. I think that was a bit of a miss. Let me say one more quick thing, because we may or may not come back to this. There was this thing that kept building for me through the first couple of episodes, and again, I was loving it. I was driving through most of it. I had a couple of long car trips. So if I make steering wheel motions while I'm telling these stories, that's why. I got the sense maybe halfway through the second episode, it kind of crystallized for me. I wasn't sure if Ben and Marc have a developmental view of human beings. In particular young people, or more of a fixed view of well, they are as we find them so now what. Versus, especially for kids, there was a stretch where they, I'm going to paraphrase, it was kind of like, all right, people are different. Yeah, that's true. Young people are different from one another and that difference is largely shaped by when you're 16, 17, 18 it's largely shaped by your experiences up to that point. Kind of your family, your community, the culture you're part of and I mean that's just who you are. So now that you're coming to college, why would we make you be an engineer if what you're really immersed in is music? I was really all in with kids are different, they're coming from different places, they have different interests and skills when they approach the doorway, the threshold of college. So now what do we do with that and how might we make things better? Then it was like, don't make musicians engineers. I mean, again, I'm being provocative myself here but it made me wonder. I think there was plenty of evidence throughout, that they actually do take a developmental view of people and of themselves. There was just enough of these comments and anecdotes and that really matters. It's an assumption worth examining. Maybe you don't really hold it, but if there's some version of it that you're used to operating on and then you start entering solutions and potential entrepreneurial opportunities, boy, that could go sideways pretty quickly. So I think that showed up a few times but that's my example of it.

Michael Horn:

Those are great, Stacey. I think already you’re bringing some nuance to the conversation. It's interesting. I think I'm probably closer to you than Diane, maybe on my reactions to this. We're going to try to hold on to the solutions one. That was where I had more of a struggle and I started texting Diane more. There's some errors that I want to get into. I felt like I was more on the bandwagon with the growth developmental view versus a sort of fixed view. I agree that is something that sits there throughout the couple episodes. I felt like Diane's right that some of the things that they expressed, and we're going to get into this more, were not the best way to express it. They had this underlying view of human difference and leaning into your unique value that is very Todd Rose that I liked. And I think this is what Diane's speaking about, is that it spoke against, all the value of college is maybe in who gets admitted which is more about the elite schools and not the rest of it. So I guess where I came in… That gets into the nuance you just painted, Stacey, about different schools get different outcomes. Different students get different outcomes and so forth. I guess from my perspective, starting with Ben's quote, I heard the frustration in his voice. I think it's indicative of the mood of the country. I think there's a lot of reasons to be upset at it because the incentives fundamentally underlying federal policy and spending have not been around the outcomes. They've been around just getting the students in the seats. I think you hear so much anger and frustration, like, why are we spending so much effort to forgive student debt. Why didn't it work? But I think the other side of this is, If you still graduate from college, on average, not for everyone but on average, this is a good value proposition. Like it's all for most individuals. So that's sort of point 1. Point 2 is roughly 38% of students don't graduate from college within six years. You take on debt and you don't graduate. That is a very crummy value proposition.They don't get the value. As we're recording this, there was just a big spread in the Wall Street Journal about this over the weekend. There's a huge number who are underemployed when they graduate from college. What they mean by that is they take a job that does not require the degree that they just earned. There's considerable evidence that if your first job is one that does not require the degree, by job number five, you're still in a track that does not. That's not, okay. So that is where I think Ben's quote is right on. And we don't want to confuse the point that if you're a low income student and you get into an elite college or university, you better go. I will say the other one, and this is a sympathy one from me for them.I think it's really freaking hard to talk about higher ed in a coherent way. Look, I'm the disruptive guy, you know? Your office was next to Clay Christensen, Stacey. He got painted with this brush all the time. Everyone thinks that we have decided that all colleges and universities are going to disappear five years ago, and it didn't, therefore, we were wrong. As you all know, I don't think Harvard and Yale and Stanford are going anywhere. I do think a lot of schools are going somewhere. We're recording this on a day where Cambridge College just announced it's merging with Bay Path University in Massachusetts. It's just the latest, frankly, in England. So both of these things can be true.It is really hard though. In my writing about higher ed, I struggle with this all the time. To talk about which segment am I talking about right now. So I'm empathetic to that. I'll just throw out a few stats because I think it might be interesting to folks. 59 colleges in the country out of roughly 4000 admit fewer than 25% of students. That's it. When we're talking about selective schools, that's it. I will defend Marc and Ben on this a little bit. I don't think they're only talking about elite higher ed because Marc’s alma mater, University of Illinois, I think is like 59% selectivity. So it's a little bit broader. But I think what they are fundamentally talking about is the roughly slightly under 30% of students today who we would have called traditional back in the day. What I mean by that is that they're residential, they're full time, they're aged 18 to 24, they're not holding a job while they're in college. That's a shrinking part of the pie. And they sort of make that point, but then they don't fully wrestle, I think, with what that means. So it's not just elite exclusive, but really more that residential, quote unquote traditional experience. I'll say the other thing is, and we'll get more into this, I do think they're also talking largely about research based universities. We talk about how that's important. They're not really talking about community colleges or online schools or schools that focus over teaching. I think you nailed it, Stacey. This is why it's important to get below the average because your solutions will be very different depending on what segment you're talking about. Maybe I'll pause there for a second before I ask the next question I have in case you all want to… alright no.

Diane Tavenner:

No, Diane's like, okay, I think we should get into it. It's great. I actually think collectively everything the three of us have said really sets the experience that I was having in listening. And I'm excited to talk about how they framed the problem, which I think is really interesting.

The roles of higher education institutions

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Michael Horn:

Yeah. So let's do that. Because at the outset of the show, and to frame that problem or problems, Marc posits that there are twelve core functions of a university. And I want to list them here because this was the framing for their diagnosis. And I thought there were some novel parts of this from my perspective. Number one, he had credentialing agency. So the degrees. Number two, the courses, the education that you take. Number three, they called it the research bureau. Number four, the policy think tank. Five, moral instruction. We'll talk more about that, I suspect. Six, they had the social reformer, which I don't think actually would have been something that maybe people would have pointed to a decade ago. But with the current news around Deni and a lot of the fervor over that topic at the moment, this is very big. I think right now, the 7th one they had was immigration agency. And so just to explain it for folks, basically the notion that higher ed is an attractor of international students, many of whom pay full freight and help make the business models work for these places. Number eight, they had sports league. Number nine, they had the hedge fund, which referred to the endowments. And I'm just going to caveat this up front, very few institutions have big endowments. Okay.

Diane Tavenner:

And they did acknowledge that later on.

Michael Horn:

But, yeah, number ten, they had adult daycare, which points to the residential point that they were talking about, that segment. Number eleven, they had the dating site, which also points to the residential piece of this. And then twelve, they had the lobbying firm, which I think referred to the fact that government funding actually sits underneath a lot of the higher ed business model in ways that I don't think are widely appreciated. And so it was an interesting set of points. So I think the question here is, in your view, if those are the twelve areas that they outlined, what would you have taken out? What would you add? What nuance would you add? What they get right. And for this one, Stacey, let's start with you.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, well, listen, I like that they took a systemic approach like that, and that they took an operational approach. They call those operational areas or areas of operation. And I do think it helped in a good way, kind of categorize the complexity of these institutions. And I'll give them a little bit of praise for that because that doesn't just stay at the surface level and treat everything as kind of a black box. Like, let's break it out. What are these different roles or operational functions that happen in universities? And you asked what would we may take out or add to the twelve. Surprisingly, I wouldn't take out any of them. People who know me know I hate long lists. Like, I make fun of them. If a top ten list is good. Some people think a top 72 list is good, and so then you just say everything you can think of. And so I can be really hard on long lists, but I actually tried to break this one and felt like it was pretty good. You might be able to consolidate a couple of them, but in general it's a good list. But what I found myself doing, especially during the first episode, the problem identification and analysis was twelve is still a lot. So how might we prioritize these? And if we were to prioritize them based on what, to what end? And so I was like hungry for a pull up that was about purpose or maybe purposes, creating what value for whom? And then can you kind of bundle into some prioritization groupings, the different functions, but in general, I liked them all a lot. I know we'll get into this purpose question and whether you prioritize the student or some other actors, and can you design around that? But before we started thinking about how to talk about it, my in the moment reaction to the list was, I think this is good. Also. I think this is good, but I don't know which one would I put on the top three, because you cannot prioritize at the same level of attention and resources. Twelve things. And so I was thinking about that in terms of what I, well, before I say what I might add, you kind of called out the moral instruction and social reformer, Michael, and my reaction to those good. When they was listing them off. Oh, good, yes, let's talk about those. And then when we got to their discussion of them in the first episode, I felt like their categorization was super thin, maybe is the right word to describe it, like moral instruction. Just again, from a developmental standpoint, the years of 14 or 15 through age, 25 or 26, is like prime time for developing moral reasoning. And we can like that or not like that, but it's actually true. So if you've got tens of thousands of young people being adult, babysat on college campuses and you're not attending to moral reasoning, at least I think that's a big miss and quite frankly, kind of impossible. So if you're not doing it on purpose, it's happening. And so I heard their critique of what is happening and agree with it. I think random professors trying to impose their personal moral framework on young people. So advocacy disguised as teaching, I don't like it. I worked hard not to do it in any context, especially in the university context. It's hard to never do it, but I worked hard at not doing it. And so as an alternative to wild, wild west and what seems to be sort of what a default dogma and groupthink that ends up emerging. I'd rather a purposeful consideration of what might moral instruction mean if it weren't imposing a set of values, if it were instead attending to what we know kind of our inputs into healthy moral reasoning as we enter kind of mid adulthood. And then social reformer, we will talk about the DEI. I thought it was, again, shallow, or I don't mean shallow like dumb or craven, but like thin to only talk about DEI in that category. Because I do think. I think we have pretty some. We have agreement on this call. I think we have pretty broad agreement in society that education, including higher education, can be a real engine for social mobility for young people. And in that way it is engaging in a type of social reform which is the class structures as we have them, or it's at least possible for them to be permeable, right? And that education, like, it's the story of my life. None of my grandparents finished high school. None of them. My parents finished high school, but they did not go to college. But they made sure my sisters and I all could and kind of the rest is history. There are clear, accelerant benefit to the higher education I and my sisters and now my nieces are receiving. And that's kind of a social reform of sorts. And I think it's important to think through where that's working and not working. And as a design question, what might we do similar and different to what we're doing? And we got mired in the DEI conversation, which I do hope we talk about, because I do want to unpack it. But anyway, so thin categories, I would add major regional employer. I think sometimes we miss or forget that for a lot of these institutions, including the large and not so large state systems and other kinds of private colleges, just because of where they end up locating, they end up being one of the largest sources of middle and working class jobs in geographic regions, like they're a hub of the local economy. And when you start to talk about we're cutting at 20% or 50% and we're going after administrative costs, it's probably not the director level people that are getting cut. It's like the assistance, the administrative assistants and folks who work in the operations plant and that kind of thing. And so it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't take on administrative costs. I agree you should, but I think not acknowledging that in addition to all the other roles it plays in most communities where these institutions exist, they are a major, if not the largest employer. So that was the thing. I would probably add and think through the implications of great set of points.

Michael Horn:

Diane, why don't you jump in?

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, I love that last point. And reminder about the regional employer. I didn't think about it until Stacey brought it up, and it's profound in terms of communities that these institutions are in. I just want to underline, highlight, exclamation point, what Stacey said about the moral instructor piece being fairly limited or thin. I think that maybe came because they drew on the universities, as many of them being originally founded as religious institutions, which seems really sort of somewhat disconnected from where we are today. It feels like there were some big gaps there in historical development and yes, about human development, the age range, et cetera. I was thinking about the language choice of social reform, and another way you could frame that whole category is just like, are we promoting and supporting the american dream? And that's going to appeal to some people in our polarized society, like social reform, some like the american dream. It's two sides of the same coin, in my view. In terms of my thoughts about the list, similar to Stacey, well, I had never thought about those particular buckets. And so it was provocative in a really thoughtful way. I was doing this side by side comparison of how I would think about k twelve institutions and higher ed and what's the difference? And do those buckets line up or not? That's probably a different episode, but it helped me kind of think through them. Plus, I was layering in our experience at Minerva, which is really interesting because Minerva is a modern university, very young, designed to address a lot of what Marc and Ben are talking about. And so many of these buckets are really absent from Minerva's operations. And the focus truly is on students, and I will know to steal sort of their punchline. I do think Marc and Ben make a compelling case that universities should, they believe universities should be focusing first and foremost on students, which I think is at least totally aligned with how I think we see the world anyway. So I was using those sort of experiences as I was thinking about their list, and again, couldn't poke a lot of holes in it and didn't really want to leave anything out. I did think adult daycare was interesting because we talk a lot about it in k twelve. We call it custodial care, but I hadn't made the direct connection to higher Ed, and maybe it's their sort of provocative title or naming of it that really makes us think that way. But it made me realize and think about the dramatically different experiences 18 year olds are having in our country when they go to a residential, sort of country club style four year college experience versus those who are literally going directly into work. Many of them will meet at home with families taking on huge responsibilities. And so there's just these really polar, disparate experiences, which is fascinating to me and connects back, I think, to what Stacey's talking about of like, we really need to segment and think about who's not being served more than this broad brush approach. And then I would know. They didn't spend a lot of time on the dating site element of it. I didn't get the sense that they personally dated a lot. So maybe that was it. But I will just say, and sadly, I think my experience is not that different from a lot of people, but I was raised to go to college by my mother to find a husband. And I'm old, but I'm not that old. And so that's just, I think, very real and prevalent. Yeah, interesting category. The one I would think about adding is what about something along the lines of like, Marceting, brand management and development, winning elite ranks and awards? It seems to me that universities are spending an extraordinary amount of time and resource on.

Stacey Childress:

So that's the only thing like reputation building and management. Yeah. That's interesting.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Super provocative one, Diane, because when I think about that, I think of it as an outgrowth of some of these functions, but you're right, it's taken on its own life. Indeed, the story of northeastern university becoming a top 25 university is manipulating the US news world rankings like an outward, cynical, completely straightforward way to become a top 25 university.

Diane Tavenner:

Well, and my alma mater, University of Southern California, is maybe one of the first that really did employed enrollment management to this end, et cetera.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's a really good point. I will say, stacy, also, to your point about how there was sort of a lack of prioritization of the twelve, I think to some degree it actually wove into Marc and Ben's point, which is that there's so many different stakeholders here that that's why it's really hard to manage these institutions. I do happen to think that there is one of these that sort of rises above the others on these campuses, but we'll get into that in a moment. I will say, overall, I like how they pulled this apart. I've always thought and written about it somewhat differently. Mine has been that colleges and universities are essentially running three incompatible business models. And I suspect I'll get into the implications of that later. But the three I've always listed in the bundle are, number one, research, which I would view is what I call a solution shop business. Basically, we throw a bunch of stuff at a problem. We have lots of experts working on it. We don't know if there's going to be an outcome here or not. Some of it pays off, some of it doesn't. Right? But we hope so. Okay. The second is what I call the teaching. And they treat, colleges and universities treat this as a value adding process business. We ship in this class of students, I deliver the content, I ship them out the other side. And yeah, I'll leave it there for the moment. And then the third is what I call the social network, which is really a facilitated network business. It's people who participate in the network not for its own sake, but because they're getting some other value out of it. And my sense is that this is the one that Marc and Ben missed the biggest because, and I think it's a huge one because yes, they have the dating site and the credentialing function, but those emerge from the college's role in building social capital. And colleges are the original social network. I mean, Facebook started out by replacing the print Facebook on the Harvard college campus. And to me, a lot of these things, it's not just the social capital in your class or with the four years that are co living with you at that point. It's really across years. It's really why elite higher ed, in my judgment, the value is their exclusivity because you're part of the tribe. Human beings as social, we like tribes, we like comparisons. And so I think that's the big one that I would say I felt was missing from the list, even if it glimmers of, it sort of appeared.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, I think that makes sense, Michael? Yeah. We can unpack some of the aspects of that social network that might come into play as you're thinking about solutioning towards better outcomes on some of these other dimensions, I think is really interesting idea. And I like your three buckets a lot. They're a little more manageable for me.

Michael Horn:

I think in threes, right. Is that better or worse?

Stacey Childress:

Right.

Where they got it right

Michael Horn:

But broadly, it sounds like we don't hate their list. We think that they got with some nuance that broadly speaking, it's pretty provocative and makes some sense. And I guess of that they diagnosed problems in each of those twelve. What in your views did they get right? And before we do the wrong, let's start with the right. Stacey, what would you give them the check Marc on.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, I mean, I've alluded to probably most of these already, so I'll just tick them off. Like the value prop analysis that we talked about. Like, I'm not sure they're 100% right on all of the components of what's driving the problem there, but that actually doesn't matter. I think that they're right that for many segments of students, way too many. It's just not working. The promise doesn't live. The outcome doesn't live up to the know. I think they got right know just kind of appreciated both their take. Know some of your take, Michael, on the structural, like the economic structure of the field that's driving so many of these problems and how interdependent the different variables are and how difficult they are to disentangle and address independently. And I think they got that right. And of course that drives part of the value prop problem, but is a problem of its own. And I felt like they just kind of nailed that analysis as it relates to relatively well resourced schools. I think they missed, as we were talking about already some this other big segment of schools, the credentialing signaling function. Like, I'm glad they spent some time on that. There's some signaling about attending, as I referred to earlier, most of the signaling is on getting in and then also finishing. Unless you're Marc Zuckerberg, right? Unless you're Bill Gates or Marc Zuckerberg, where quitting is sort of your badge, like for everybody else, it's the getting in signal. And then I got through it. Signal that's so important. And Michael, as you I think so, pointed out so well a couple seconds ago, it's the first job, and more like it matters a lot for first job and second job, third job, fifth job. But it matters for a lot of other things that the signal is not just about fitness or readiness for a particular entry level position. It's also about who you belong with. And I think in that sense, there's enormous power and huge challenge that we ascribe so much signal or so much value to that signal. And it's real, it's shorthand for lots of stuff. And I have personally benefited from it. I am aware of the benefits of this signal, of where I got my graduate degree right, and it's enormous. While there were some things I disagreed with or a couple of things I disagreed with and some things that made me wonder and think hard about, which is good, I actually agreed with a lot of their DEI analysis, which may be a surprise to you guys and maybe a surprise to some listeners. So let me say why? What I think they got really right, and I think Ben really carried the ball, know, carried the torch here. The discussion about diversity, equity and inclusion needs to be grounded in some sort of purpose and outcome that we are aiming toward. And in this domain, our organizations, any organization, and in higher ed institutions, it's got to be anchored in talent. What is the talent we're trying to track to pursue? What opportunity or what opportunity sets? And how do we think about our channels into pools of talent that might not be naturally historically or naturally connected to us already? And how do we dig those channels, cultivate them, maintain them and make them matter? How do we create a climate and a culture of learning and community and dissent and learning where people want to be, people from different backgrounds that get to the threshold can find their way to thriving in our community? It doesn't happen by accident. And I think, as they well pointed out, that sometimes if you're only going for the box, checking in terms of characteristics and you're not doing the hard work of what happens when everybody gets together, that's a real problem. And I think we find ourselves in a moment where that's happening in many places. You got to do the hard work of removing any implicit or explicit bias that might, your admissions processes for students and your hiring processes for faculty might be laden with these biases that you just are unexamined and can be tweaked to make it more possible if you've got the great pipeline to see what you want on the other end of it without having to engineer quotas, right? I just think they're absolutely right about that. So let me just kind of sum it up and say when DEI programs, most of them are probably started with. I think we're starting with good intentions, maybe not all. I think most of them probably are. But when the design process makes its way into a self perpetuating bureaucracy that's in charge of it, that then has as its main function, because it's what bureaucracies are good at, compliance and control box checking, policing. That's where it goes wrong. And I think too many places are demonstrating what it looks like when it goes wrong. Not every place. I think Ben gave a great example of how they thought about a DEI strategy. They didn't call it that, but a talent strategy that prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion, even if they didn't use those terms to build the firm they've built. And that's a great example. Three of us have examples, too that we could name, and I won't. But it can go very wrong and in many places has, and I do not fault them in any way for being, I'll just say what courageous enough to actually have that conversation and say, here's what they see happening in some places. Now, again, I have some disagreements with the way they approached some of the conversation and where they ended up on a couple of things. We can talk about that later. But I thought that analysis of not in general Nadei program is inevitably going to get there. But, man, it sure can get there if you're not really clear about what you're doing and why. So I'll stop preaching.

Michael Horn:

No, that's a great set of thoughts, Diane.

Diane Tavenner:

Well, I will just say I really like Stacey's points and wish to be associated with them. I will just add to what I thought were big and important points that they made again and again that I really think are at the heart of the problem, the first being, and you alluded to this, Stacey, but the purpose focus of universities is currently so many of them not, I mean, really the rule versus the exception, quite frankly, is to not be focused on educating young adults and preparing them to launch into successful careers. And we talk constantly about the importance of k twelve having institutions having clear purpose. And our bias is that they must be educating young people to successfully prepare and launch into an early adulthood. And here's the next level. And they're not focused on that. And so I think that they just really hammered this point over and over and over again. And I really think it was at the foundation of what they were talking about and doing that feels really key to me and I really appreciate them for it. I think what they got to is universities have far too many competing purposes and they have far too many constituents in a very elaborate bundle of what they're doing that's evolved over time. And so to me, that was the big macro takeaway there in terms of the problem definition. I agree with it at the high. Well, let me just say, as you know, Michael, this season I've been reflecting a lot on the simplicity of running a company versus the school system. And I would say this is the perspective, obviously, that Ben and Marc bring. That is their experience and their expertise. And it really is very true to know businesses are more focused, they have fewer priorities, they focus their constituents, and we do not do that in education for good reasons and lots of things. But there's a real contrast there.

Michael Horn:

So those are my key that all lands for me. Stacey. I'll just quickly say maybe you're surprised. The de nine points you just made all lands with me as well. And I was largely sympathetic on the way that, again, there's some places where you want to set it that way. But I was largely feeling like, yeah, you got the big headlines and currents. Right. This is what I've been experiencing on the Harvard campus the last semester and a half. As a faculty member, I'll say, as a jewish faculty. So I think that was right. And, Diane, I also agree with you. They, I think, correctly say student ain't the central focus. Right. And that there's many stakeholders and the right one isn't being prioritized. I'll have a hot take of how to frame that. That'll be a little bit different from student centered later. So you all can yell at me then. But at the moment, I would argue it's largely the media. Sorry, the faculty, which I think is consistent with their view. And then they have some head nods to the media driving that a little bit as well. I'll quickly run down them research. They talk deeply about the replication crisis and that it's probably worse than we realize with a lot of fraud going on. That's consistent with what I'm hearing as well. Most of the research that gets produced isn't read. Much of it isn't useful. That's consistent with what I see. I agree with them. The incentives, I think, are really bad in the academy around this at the moment, around the publisher, parish incentives and tenure, and the federal government role in all this is stuff that I'd heard a little bit about. But actually, what they brought to it was somewhat new to me and made some sense. It was interesting, in any event, credentialing and know again the value of the admissions for lead, higher ed. And the piece of paper saying you graduate. Yeah, I agree with what you said there, Stacey. Sports league. This isn't true for every institution, obviously, but I do agree with Ben that for those places that are running big sports operations, it is corrupt and immoral at this point. And I have a major problem with it as well. And I like college sports, but I think we got to make some changes. Hedge fund. I appreciated the nuance that they brought to this one. It wasn't one of these, but look at the endowments. They should be able to afford everything. They were properly nuanced. The operating budgets of these places are huge. If you were allowed to spend every single dollar, you would wind through that endowment really quickly. Number one. Number two, most of the dollars are dedicated to certain causes or faculty positions or whatever else, and you can't just sort of spend it on area of greatest need. Immigration agency. I never, ever would have phrased it the way that they did, but I don't think that they were wrong on it. And then just last one, the growth of costs because of the bundle and the administrative overhead, being a big driver of it, in my judgment, they got this fundamentally right as well. Obviously, DEI is a portion of that. But I think fundamentally, when you run such a complex operation with pieces that don't necessarily go together to manage those pieces and be successful, administrative overhead rises. That's not just in colleges and universities.

Stacey Childress:

Right.

Points of disagreement

Michael Horn:

That's everywhere. Right. The more product lines you have, administrative overhead rises. And so I think that's driving a lot of this. I thought it resonated. I might have been, well, we can talk about solutions later to that. Okay. But I'll leave it there and say if that's what they got right, let's get to the juicy stuff of maybe the important nuance that perhaps got lost or what they got wrong. We've already alluded to some of this, so we don't. But where would you want to take this?

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, let me name a couple of things. Michael, like you said, we've already sort of referenced, or at least I have. I think we all have some of the things. You know, Diane, you said a few minutes ago this thing about what we would love for the purpose of universities to be right is getting kids that next phase of launching towards successful adulthood, human flourishing. Right. Young people who are ready to thrive throughout their lives, live a good life, take care of their families, all of that. And they got that right. But there was this weird, maybe that's too. For Jordan, there was a strange thing, again, breadcrumbs throughout the first episode, a little bit in the second, where the assumptions seem to be that all too often, colleges are forcing kids into career and life paths that they don't want to be on. And I just don't think there's nearly enough forethought and. And structure and focus on helping kids pick anything totally. Well, let's be clear.

Diane Tavenner:

I'm starting a new company because we're just not doing this.

Stacey Childress:

Right anywhere. Right. There's like this side trip about Russia or Soviet Union create leading, kind of getting to gender parity in. Scientists and engineers were both same number or same proportion of men and women, which solved a problem that we still struggle with for people who care about that. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. Let's see where they go with this and where they ended up going with it was. It probably kept a lot of women from doing the things they would have preferred to be doing rather than being a scientist or an engineer. And I was like, I mean, maybe, I don't know.

It could be. I kind of laughed and felt weird and all of that. But I guess the general point is, even though they did say got right, should be more focused on centered around students. What I felt they got wrong, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, was over crediting the institutions for having some mechanism for helping kids move across paths that they might be interested in, so much so that they might be forcing them into pick ones that they were going to make a lot of money and hate.

Diane Tavenner:

I totally agree with you. I mean, higher Ed is, in my view, highly disconnected from careers and employment. And so it was very bizarre. Similarly interesting to me. And I think one place that they got wrong and one place that I was feeling a lot of emotion as they were talking was they seem to really like IQ tests, and they seem to think that the SAT is essentially an IQ test. And they find the move away from such tests really problematic in terms of the admissions process for colleges and universities, which we established at the top of that episode, is actually a very few number of them that are using those things to select. But here's what I would say. I just think there was a ton of nuance that was lost in their conversation. So let me just share a couple of things. For starters, the SAT isn't equivalent to an IQ test, at least in its current form, and just even at a superficial level, because you can study for it and you can literally raise and improve your scores with practice. And so by definition, it's not an IQ test for that reason. And this is a really critical nuance for folks like us, because we see very clearly how much the financial status of your parents gets conflated with the intelligence or giftedness. When people fail to recognize that this is a test, it's not a pure identifier of the smart kids, which it felt like Ben and Marc really seemed to want and think it is and was in this kind of nostalgic way, like identifying these unidentified, brilliant people out there. And not to say that we haven't all heard a story of that. Right? So they exist. I just don't think it's a systematic thing. I would also just add that the creators of the IQ tests, as I understand their positions and whatnot, and those who work on them, and honestly we just finished talking with Scott Barry Kaufman recently about this. They express real danger in using it as a screener for employment opportunities and things like that. And in fact, this is exactly what SBK was talking about. He's like, I went in to study these tests because I thought they were evil and discovered that they're not evil because there are real correlations and things that he didn't expect. But you have to be so thoughtful of how you're using them and take real care with them. And I felt like that was lost in kind of how they were sort of wistfully wanting to use them. And I will also just add that Marc and Ben seemed to be less than impressed with the actual education happening in universities. And so they talked a lot about the value being the selection on the front end, and then employers four years later using the signaling credential. I forget, what was the word that Marc kept like, that you completed? It wasn't persistence, but it was something like that.

Stacey Childress:

Conscientiousness, maybe.

Diane Tavenner:

It's true. It's true. But I was misty, like, wait, what's.

Stacey Childress:

Happening for in between adult daycare?

Diane Tavenner:

Right? And then they said this funny thing where they're like, we really need the colleges to do this. Or they implied this because we, as employers, can't give IQ tests because it's illegal. And so we need you to sort of screen for us. I was like, that was bizarre. I just feel like there was a lot wrong and confusing in that entire line of the conversation, which took up more space than I would have thought it would have taken up. And this is where I'm going to loop back to the points you all were making earlier about what I would call growth mindset. And do they believe that humans developed or is intelligence fixed? We're actually going back to some of the early philosophers that they've cited, and at some point, we'll get into one to one tutoring and how they were thinking we should be like Aristotle and Socrates. But I think it's a perfect example of.

I don't know exactly where they stand on growth mindset. It wasn't clear to me, because a lot of the things they said sort of represented a fixed mindset view of humans. But then they have these real growth mindset parts. And so that's probably very know. Humans are. We're not one or the other. We flow in and out of those two states. Yeah, let me just leave that there.

Michael Horn:

Let's pause on the sat thing for a moment. Stacey, I think you have some thoughts on that. And then, Diane, maybe let's circle back rest of your.

Stacey Childress:

Like, I'm conflicted in this SAT conversation. Not like formally conflicted, but I feel conflicted. Not just in this conversation, like in any conversation about SAT or ACT or standardized tests of any kind, when we talk about them as a threshold marker of readiness. Look, I don't think those tests are perfect. In fact, they're way not perfect. Right. They're far from it. For all the reasons you said, Diane, and I won't repeat them all.

I'm also a big fan of all the new forms of assessment that are coming into being and use. We can call modern forms of assessment that are more focused on what you're learning, like how you're progressing along a set of competencies, maybe from novice to mastery, or however you think about it, and kind of embedded in a learning environment rather than stop and take a test. I'm a big fan, as you guys know, of all of those. I have invested in lots of them that didn't pan out and some that are still in the works. And so I might be about to lose my badge of personalized, competency based forward thinking, but I just think we have to be realistic about what we're asking, what we're hoping for. When we ask a constituency like top tier employers like Marc and Ben are, and they represent lots of them, right, in their companies and in their colleagues at other venture capital firms and similar professional services firms, they have long seen those kinds of instruments as an indicator of something. Now, to your point, Diane, kind of agree they're not quite getting the nuance sense of what they do and don't tell you, but at least it was something that seemed independent in third party. And if we're saying you're wrong about those, don't even use those.

We don't really have the thing to replace it with yet. Let me say it differently. We don't have the ecosystem to replace it with yet. We've got a lot of really interesting things happening, some things that are actually way far along, but none of which are totally market ready for broad, scalable, valid use that are also already adopted at scale. And so the alternative to don't use this thing that's wildly imperfect, but that you like, instead use nothing for a while while we figure this other stuff out. I actually think that's what they're really. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit. I think that's what they're really expressing as a frustration, not, I have to have an IQ test or give me the SAT because it does all the things it does and it's an IQ test.

I think they're saying, I need something like, if you're taking those away, you got to give me something that validates what the threshold level of skills, abilities, competencies, ability to learn, ability to grow are, which I think is a little ironic since we're wondering about their growth mindset, belief. But so that's like, I'm not for or against standardized testing in the broadest sense. I have real challenges with them. And I also just from a change management standpoint, especially at the sector level or at the societal level, we can't just say, those don't work, stop using them. We'll get back to you in five or ten years and tens of billions of dollars later in investment when we have the things that replace it. So I think that my sense is that's part of what we were hearing from them. I don't know. Yeah.

Diane Tavenner:

What do you think about this, Michael? And I'm just going to say that they've had an impact on us because we're over the hour, Marc. I don't think we've ever recorded an episode that's over an hour.

Michael Horn:

No, I know. I've been watching that. So for those who are listening when.

Stacey Childress:

We keep this, if you're still listening.

Michael Horn:

You'Re still listening, we apologize. But on the SAT point, I don't want to get into the solution piece of it because I think there's an interesting strand here you could follow. But I will say my biggest frustration with the problems episode was where Diane was as well on the IQ point. But I will say what I found interesting about it and why I was so excited to keep listening is I think it's a very interesting window into how employers and companies are thinking. Totally is one of those places where interpretation can become reality. Right. If this is how they interpret the world, it could be right or wrong. But if they walk away from it because it doesn't matter now, I think they would argue back at us and say, well, high school grades are not helping people distinguish anyone because of grade inflation and et cetera, et cetera, I think they're right on that. I think there needs to be some objective measure to Stacey's point, third party measure. And I don't think the reason companies are dropping degree requirements has anything at all to do with the fact that colleges are walking away from the SAT. Those are totally independent phenomenon. And as we'll talk about, yes, employers are turning away from degrees on the front end, but they are still actually, in fact, hiring based on them, because HR managers are different from ceos. And they never got fired hiring IBM, and they never got fired for hiring someone with a. Like, the PR release on the companies is very different from the reality how people are still. I guess that's the other piece about it that I'd say. One other thing I'd love to point out before we start to wrap on this episode, which is they talked a lot about the increase in tuition, well, outpacing inflation. I don't actually think that's the story, because if you look at the last 15 years, if you look at list tuition, they're right. But if you look at net tuition, meaning after discounts and scholarships, it's not correct. Like, it's actually relatively flat over the last 15 years. And what I think is really going on is that spending, so, like, the cost structure of these places that is going up and up and up. It's why there was a whole decade of launching overpriced online master's degrees that made huge profit to basically hold up the other parts of the bundle. And then everyone of my higher ed friends say, michael, online is not lower cost. You're wrong on disruption. I'm like, no, because it's in a business model that's failing. Right. I think that was a very big thing that they missed, is that it's not tuition, it's the costs. And the reason the costs are going under is because of the are going up. Like this is one, the bundle, but two, it's because they're also trying to improve the. So, you know, when Stanford adds the high class dining facility, or actually I should say it the other way, right? Stacey, when Harvard Business School adds Spangler, Stanford Business School better respond, right? And so when one place adds the student success function or the DEI support or whatever, it is like, hey, the diversification of students, we got to support them. You better bet other places better respond. So it's the fact that these places have negative economies of scale. The administrative overhead keeps going up because of the bundle, it's expensive to manage and that they are trying to improve in their current paradigm of improvement, which we've all say we're not sure that they're improving against the right things, but that's sort of what's driving the fundamental cost structure that I think is out of whack is what I would say.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, makes sense. That makes sense a lot. I think we've covered a lot of ground, maybe as we do our listeners a favor and start to wrap here. I think one thing that really I spent a lot of time thinking about afterwards is with my, you know, educational systems leader hat on. One of the, my, one of my very first early board members, like Silicon Valley person said to me was like, look, if you are not as an organization or company or an entity growing, you're dying. Like there's only two states. You're growing or you're dying. And so one of the questions I kept thinking about is, what does it mean to grow as a university if you aren't increasing the number of students you serve? And maybe their argument is that all the universities should constantly be increasing the number of students they serve. And I think we would all engage around a conversation like that potentially. But if that's not real and true, how do you stay in growth mode without growing the number of kids you're serving? And so I wonder is that what has happened over universities, which are some of the oldest institutions in our society, fairly young society, but nonetheless, some of the oldest ones. And is that why they are such complex bundles with so many constituents, is because that was how they were growing, so they wouldn't.

Michael Horn:

No, I think that's really interesting. I think it points Diane to, again, a bunch of the colleges, elite colleges over the last 15 years have added to their class. Yale added 200 students per class. It cost half a billion dollars to do in capex.

Diane Tavenner:

Wow.

Michael Horn:

These places have negative economies of scale. And so I think you're right. That pours over into administration. It pours into research. I'll make the provocative statement. I'm glad that there's some institutions that are research first, but I think they should advertise themselves as such and not try to be all things to all people on the other part of the spectrum.

Diane Tavenner:

That's probably a good lead into because you've led us towards solutions. So let's wrap here and then.

Michael Horn:

Perfect place to stop anyone with what we've been reading or watching because you know what we've been listening to. And so we're going to stop there. And Stacey, thank you for joining us on this first.

Diane Tavenner:

Absolutely.

Michael Horn:

Stay tuned. Don't go far. We're going to have you back on our next episode. Thank you all for bearing with us and engaging with us on this episode of Class Disrupted. 

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I’ll admit it. This was a pinch-me moment. Getting to interview Guy Raz—host of the top podcasts “How I Built This” and “Wow in the World” and one of the pioneers of podcasting? Count me in.

This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers. 

We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!

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Michael Horn:

Welcome to The Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about those topics today, I'm really thrilled we have Guy Raz, who is widely considered one of the pioneers of podcasting. Many of you are, I'm sure, familiar with his podcasts, whether it's, How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, TED Radio Hour, many more, we're going to get into all of that. Guy's also a bestselling author, and he's the co-founder of two media companies, including Built It Productions and the kids and family studio, Tinkercast, which we're going to talk about today on the show. Guy, just thank you so much for being here. I confess I'm fanboy-ing a little bit at the moment, but I'm just thrilled that you're here.

Guy Raz:

Michael, thank you for having me on and for being a fan. That's why I do what I do because, and we can talk about this a bit later, but every show, whether it's How I Built This, or Wow in the World, or The Great Creators, is I make it in the hopes that people get joy from it and value from it. So, when I meet somebody who says they're a fan, by all means, please. I mean, it means a lot to me, and I really love it and appreciate it, because most of the time, most of the week I am in this studio behind this microphone isolated from the world. I don't actually physically interact with people who are fans very often. So, thank you for saying that. 

Guy’s Journey to Podcasting 

Michael Horn:

You generally get to ask the questions, so this is a little bit of a role reversal. But I want to start there on the personal side, where you just gave us that quick entry into... Because as I said, you host a lot of podcasts. I don't think I can keep count, I don't know if you can. But I'd love you just to tell your story, because I actually don't think a lot of people hear that around how you got your start in podcasting, the shows that you're hosting now, and selfishly how you stay on top of all the work it takes to do these podcasts so well with this level of excellence.

Guy Raz:

Yeah. I started in podcasting when it was a backwater, back in 2011. At the time, I was at NPR, I had been at NPR since the beginning of my career as a reporter at NPR. I was a reporter at CNN. Most of my early career I was a war correspondent. I covered the Iraq War, I covered Israel, Palestine. I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, I was in Tel Aviv, I was all over the Middle East. I covered the Iraq War and Macedonia and Pakistan. I mean, that was my life. I was in and out of war zones for most of my career. I covered the military and the Pentagon, which is for many people who know How I Built This and don't know my background would be strange to imagine, but that really was my life. I was living in hotels wearing bulletproof vests, I still have them, dodging bullets and explosions, and that was my life before I had a family.

Eventually, I was a host on All Things Considered at NPR for a few years. I would say around 2011, I started to get a little bit disillusioned with news. It felt to me like the thing that I wanted to do with my life, which was to have an impact in some way, I didn't feel like I was having the right kind of impact. I didn't feel like... By going out in the world and trying to tell stories, the hope is that you will give people information that will help them build a more nuanced view of the world. But what I discovered, and it was a very naive perspective, what I discovered is that we humans generally don't operate that way. So, I wanted to figure out a different way to have an impact.

What I landed on was that news wasn't the thing that I wanted to do anymore. So, around 2011, I started to transition out, and I ended up connecting with people at TED, the TED Talks people, and they were looking to build a podcast, build on a podcast that they had started but didn't really land in the way that they had hoped. So, they asked me to basically build a show, rebuild a show, and it was called the TED Radio Hour, and I launched that in 2012. This was a backwater era in podcasting. I mean, there were relatively few podcasts, comparatively few people listening. I had gone from being in All Things Considered, with an audience of five million people to a show with a few thousand.

Fast-forward, about a year, two years in, there was a podcast called Serial, and that exploded in our culture. All of a sudden, a lot of people started to discover podcasts, including TED Radio Hour, at the time which was a show about big ideas. I would interview TED... People who gave TED talks. The shows were arranged thematically, so we would talk about creativity or curiosity or how we organize our lives or the vastness of outer space. It was this interdisciplinary show where you would have, in one episode, you would literally have Sting, like a rock star, Sting, and then a neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins, and then a former prisoner and an Arctic explorer in the same episode, talking about a broadly connected theme. That show gave me an opportunity to really explore ideas.

What I realized having done that, doing that show, was that it was connecting with people in a different way. So, when I was a news reporter in Iraq or Afghanistan or the West Bank or wherever I was, I didn't get the sense that I was connecting with people in a way that was making their lives better. But all of a sudden making this show, that changed all of that, because the feedback that I was getting from listeners was, "Wow. This has changed my day," or, "It's given me a different perspective on the world." Or, "Now when I look up at the stars, I realize I'm looking at the past in real time." So, that experience really launched my career in podcasting. I eventually started my own production company, called Built It Productions, and started another show called, How I Built This, which I continue to do today, which is about entrepreneurs, founders of companies.

Then around the same time, with a very good friend, Mindy Thomas, started a podcast called, Wow in the World, which we launched in 2017. Along with another friend, Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, we started a kids production company. So, that was really the beginning of my career. Since that time, I continue to do, How I Built This. I no longer do TED Radio Hour. That was an NPR TED show, so eventually I stopped doing that. But it was a wonderful experience. Today I host, How I Built This and Wow in the World. I do a show called The Great Creators, where I interview celebrities, musicians and actors, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, Jason Sudeikis, Jeff Tweedy, Bjork, a long list of people, about their lives, about their creative process, about their failures. I try and create a space for them to show a more relatable side of who they are. Because whether you're an actor or the founder of Starbucks or me or you, we are all characters at certain points of the day or the week or the month.

What I try to do on all of my shows, my interview shows, is to show a more stripped down side of people, the side of people that people might... The part of us that we might see in the mirror. I try and show that to my listeners so they understand that, many of the people they listen to and admire are like them in very many ways. So, my hope is that when somebody hears a founder on How I Built This talk about how they built Instagram or Starbucks or Tate's Cookies or whatever brand that we do, that they can see that there's a possibility there. That if it's something that they want to do, if there's an aspiration they have, they can hear and feel that through the shows that I'm part of, that I make, in the hopes that they walk away from it feeling empowered and inspired and maybe even changed a little bit.

Creating Podcasts for Kids

Michael Horn:

It's fascinating to hear you say that, because inspired is the word that I wrote down as you were talking. It seems like you really help lift people up to believe that they could go chase that dream. In fact, as I said, I first got to know your podcast through, How I Built This. My wife, when she was starting her company, she made all the employees in the kitchen listen to it during food prep and things of that nature. But then obviously you really got into my radar with, Wow in the World, with Mindy. I, for a while was like, "Are you sure it's the same person doing both of these things? Are you really sure?" But I guess that's one thing that you were doing in both cases, which is inspiring and lifting us up to realize what is possible. But how did you see the through line from this podcast world that's largely for adults, entrepreneurs, to kids? Those on the surface feel like very different audiences and very different shticks.

Guy Raz:

Like any business, Mindy and I were trying to solve a problem that we had. I met Mindy in 2014, I was listening to her show on Sirius XM. She continues to have a wonderful morning show on Sirius XM. It's a kids program, that just blew my mind when I first heard it, because I had never heard somebody communicate with kids in such a funny, respectful, quirky way, in the way that she did. I mean, I was completely blown away when I first heard it. I, one day, Tweeted about it and she saw my Tweet and she freaked out. She was a fan of the shows I was doing at the time. Eventually we met and became really good friends, and she would ask me to come on her show to talk about news events with kids. Eventually, after a year or so of doing it, we were on a hike. I said to her, I said, "Mindy," I used to live in Washington DC and we were on a hike together. I said, "Why don't we make a podcast? I make podcasts. Why don't we make our own podcast for kids?"

That was really the genesis of Wow in the World. What it was was we had kids, we both have kids. Now they're teenagers, but at the time they were little. We were really concerned about how much our kids were just staring at screens all the time. We were very careful not to give them access, but the iPad or whatever it was around, they were just like... It was like a magnet. So, we started to think, could we create an alternative, a screen alternative for kids that will be as good as a video, as funny, as compelling, as entertaining as a cartoon, except it lives entirely in that kid's brain?

We knew we could do that, because both of us came from audio. So, that was really the genesis of the show. The through line between How I Built This or The Great Creators, or at the time, the TED Radio Hour and other shows I've done, and Wow in the World, was very simple. It was, if you give me 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of your time, I am going to respect that time so much that I promise you I won't waste it. I will work so hard to give you something in return for your time. Whether it's really great, important information, really compelling entertainment, an inspiring idea, a thought that might change your perspective or trigger your creativity. Now, I don't hit it out of the park every time. I think it's impossible. But that's our North Star. So, whatever show I do, whether it's Wow in the World or How I Built This or Great Creators, that's our goal. That's where we recalibrate all the time.

Are we giving people something to take with them? We're not asking for anything except your time, which is asking a lot. But if I'm asking for your time, I have to give you something additive. I don't want to make extractive content. There's a lot of extractive content out there, especially for kids. Unboxing videos or prank videos that really just needs those eyeballs to click up the advertising revenue. That's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to make something that was so funny and so compelling that kids would ask their parents for it, but wasn't just good enough to win over the kid but it had to win over the parent. We wanted something like Pixar, where you watch a Pixar movie with your kid and you get a bunch of jokes that they don't get. We wanted to make a show that spoke to kids and parents at different levels, and that was the genesis of Wow in the World, which we started in 2016 and then launched in 2017. The rest is history. You listened with your kids, which hopefully, I think, was entertaining for you as well as for your kids.

The Magic of Audio

Michael Horn:

You bet. It kept me awake while I drove. We successfully got to the destinations, as I like to say. But I want to jump to where you picked up on this piece of the magic of audio specifically. I'd love you to just double click on that, because I think honestly, since at least as far as I can tell, since Sesame Street, people have seen video as the way to capture kids' imaginations, tell stories for learning, because Wow in the World is fundamentally about learning at its heart after you get through and learning in the best possible way, through stories, a compelling story that captures imagination. But I think it's fair to say you were one of the first to realize, hey, we can jump away from video into audio for children again. I'd love you just to talk more about the magic of audio. You've already explained how you saw the opportunity there, but just double click on that because I think that's a very important strand.

Guy Raz:

So, the thing about audio is it's like... Imagine, and you'll know this Michael, because when you were a kid there weren't any cell phones and there was no Snapchat, and the only way to communicate with your friends was over a landline. I remember when I was a kid, I'd get a phone call and I would take that phone and we had a long cord, long curly cord, and I'd take that cord down the corridor as far as it would go, and I'd find a closet door and I'd get in there and I'd have a conversation in the dark with another friend, so nobody could hear me. Those were some of the most intimate and powerful. Now, of course, you're a kid, but still memorable conversations. I can still smell the smell of the kitchen, the corridor. I could see the color of that yellowed cord, that curly cord.

The reason why those were so powerful is because voice transmits, human voice transmits an infinite number of cues, emotions, feelings, that we don't normally take in because our brains are so wired to process visual imagery. But if you talk to somebody who cannot see, somebody who is blind, they experience the world sometimes in a richer way because they're focused on sounds and voice, and they hear the nuance of those sounds. Now, jump to Wow in the World. Essentially, what it does and what we wanted to do from the very beginning, was to create in a black box, which is, we'll call it whatever you want, a studio, the ether, a world in which anything could happen. You don't need CGI technology, you don't need multimillion dollar editing equipment. You can create the theater of the mind.

You just need a microphone and some good writing and some good sound effects, and you can build any world you want. You can go in a submarine to the core of the Earth. You can go into distant space, you can go into a black hole, you can go back in time, you can go forward in time. You can ride a giant pigeon, which we do on the show. You can do all of these things because the visual platform is inside of a kid's brain. Every kid experiences Wow in the World differently. We know, I mean, this is not our research, this is published research, that audio, it triggers certain neurological reactions in the brain, essentially builds creativity because every kid's brain is imagining the story differently. Everybody sees me differently, Mindy differently, Reggie, Dennis, the whole world on Wow in the World. Yet every single episode of that podcast is rooted in a peer reviewed scientific journal article.

We go through peer reviewed scientific journal articles, New England Journal of Medicine, science, you name it, and we find stories that we believe we can make accessible to children. We literally take high science peer reviewed science, and turn it into a cartoon for the ear. So, you will learn about why the vertebrae of a thresher shark is so incredibly complex, why it's one of the only sea creatures that can flip its tail entirely over its head to attack its prey. We take this research and we make a cartoon out of it with characters, with funny storylines. So, the hunch we had and what's been proved out, is that kids really learn science when they're taken into the story with humor, with fun, with this fantasy world, and they don't even know that they're learning. They don't even know that it's a lesson in real science. So, that was our theory and our hope. Then eight years later, it's been proved. Not just from the reaction of parents, but from even some of the research we've done with teachers and some of the classroom programs we've done.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. It strikes me that you're building on some of the best known pieces of cognitive science research around the power of storytelling on the one hand, and then frankly from my perspective, not overloading people's sensory. When you absorb information through a visual and auditory channel, they often can work against each other. You're just saying, no. We're going to ride one of these channels to make sure it really penetrates and that it is a much deeper impression and memory, which is really what learning ultimately is, is these building of memories. 

How (and Why) Guy & Co. Built This: TinkerCast

Michael Horn: Then you've taken those insights and you've done it inside of a company Tinkercast, which is where I want to segue to. Tell us about the company and the range of activities it does, because this is then going to transition into some of the work you're actually doing, not just in this informal learning space where we all are learning constantly, but also in the formal learning space of schools and so forth.

Guy Raz:

So, from the very beginning, when Meredith and Mindy and I founded the company, we wanted this to be not just a sustainable company, but a full range kids and family entertainment and educational company brand. We started with podcasts and now we make several different podcasts. Who When Wow, Wow in the World, Two What's and a Wow. We've got other shows that we are working on. We've done, How to Be An Earthling, and several other shows under the Tinkercast banner. But we've also done live events. We create hundreds and hundreds of educational lesson plans every single week, based on every episode of our shows. That's available at our website. We have done partnerships with museums. We had a van that went around the United States, a Wow museum with hands-on activities. One of the things from the very beginning that we wanted to do was a create an educational technology platform that would enable kids to really hone in and really dive into this idea of audio learning, oral learning, in a way that we believed could be really, really beneficial to virtually all kids.

This is a bit of an aside, and it's not... I qualify this because I don't have the peer reviewed data to back it. But anecdotally, from the very beginning when we started Wow in the World, we would hear from parents who would say, and I mean we have heard this now thousands of times, "I have a child who has attention challenges," or, "I have a child who has some learning disabilities," or, "I have a child who will not sit still, except for Wow in the World." There's something about... We would hear this, and we do hear this all the time. At our live shows, we sometimes meet these children, where the parents will say, "My kid won't sit still for anything, but this show captures something. There's something that keeps them listening and attentive." I don't know exactly what that is, but I do know that, and there is research that shows, that when kids learn through audio content and platforms, oftentimes they can comprehend things two to three grade levels above.

Now, that makes a lot of sense to me because Wow in the World essentially is speaking to kids from age three to 12. Now, when Mindy and I started the show, we didn't really exactly know, but I think in our minds we thought we were talking to eight or nine or 10 year olds. But it turns out we're talking to three to 12 year olds, sometimes 13 year olds. So, a three year old might not get all the science, but you'd be really surprised how much they actually pick up, because there is sophisticated science in the show. So, some of these findings that we know about audio learning in the classroom or however, whenever kids listen to storybooks, we know that they have a higher comprehension level than they might if they're watching or reading something. That's really been proved out. I mean, we have seen that in just the range of kids who listen to what we do.

So, as I say, from the beginning of the company, we wanted be where kids are, we wanted to be everywhere where kids are, and we wanted to reach them in every way and create content that was available to every kid, wherever they are, and their parents. We didn't want it to be good for you content, but it is, it actually is additive. It is educational, it is informative, but we didn't want kids to think of us that way. We wanted kids to think of us as something really fun and funny and exciting, and something that fires their imagination. Science was like the secret thing, the secret thing that was hidden inside of it.

Tinkercast in the Classroom

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So, you all have taken these podcasts, or I think what you're calling pod-jects, if I'm not mistaken. So, for those who didn't follow projects but pod-jects, into schools now with the launch of TinkerClass. I'd just love to know, I mean, you have this rich and formal learning world. You have the podcasts, you have all the events that you talked about, the van around the country, this listen, wonder, tinker, make ethos that could fit into design thinking in Silicon Valley, or it can fit in this platform you've created. Now you're going into schools with TinkerClass. I'd love you to tell us what this work is going to look like, and frankly, for interested educators, we get a lot of them tuning into the show, how can they start to connect and work with you all?

Guy Raz:

So, TinkerClass is the result of this journey that we took from the very beginning to build an educational technology platform. It is free for educators, and you mentioned design thinking. I mean, we essentially, inspired by places like Idio, we've created this project based, but pod-ject we say because based on podcasts, learning platform. Essentially what it is is, and you can find it at TinkerClass.com or go to Tinkercast.com and there's links to it. Essentially, it enables kids to listen to an episode of our show. So, you listen and then kids begin to wonder, they work in groups, they're incentivized to work in groups, and they're incentivized to succeed as a group. So, then they begin to talk about their wonders, then they begin to tinker. So, they'll use critical thinking skills to identify questions that they want to explore. Then they'll choose one big wonder to investigate, and then they will make. So, they'll collaborate, they'll investigate, they'll plan, and then they will present their findings on this platform.

An amazing result of this long journey, we got a very wonderful grant from the National Science Foundation a few years ago, to build this platform out. Now, of course, we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of real science-based episodes of Wow in the World and our other programs, to populate these lesson plans with. So, it essentially enables kids to build these 21st century project-based learning skills that are so critical. We've known for a long time that if we can grow kids into adults that know how to collaborate, they are much more likely to be successful adults. Rather than kids who don't know how to work in teams and don't understand the power of success as collaborators. Success in a collaborative form is what we reward in TinkerClass.

So, we've now had several thousand teachers who have signed up. We have spent a few years doing some very intensive research around how kids respond to it. We have found that it has been incredibly impactful, particularly for striving leaders. Going back to something I said earlier, we found that kids can understand things two to three grade levels above when they are using the platform, because it integrates with audio. So, it's been a really, really amazing experiment, and now it's out there in the world available for free to teachers and educators. We hope they'll take advantage of it.

The Power of Podcasts to Re-engage Students

Michael Horn:

It's incredibly cool to watch the evolution of Wow in the World and everything else, from these standalone things to now connective tissue, if you will, into the schools. I'd love to hear you reflect, I'm not a big fan of the phrase, learning loss, but obviously the disengagement of youth since COVID has been a real thing. Whether it's chronic absenteeism, struggling to learn, struggling to get engaged. Interestingly enough, I suspect you probably saw, we certainly saw it in our household and other places, that kids engaged more with these... Whether it was Wow in the World, or for my kids also, Mo Willems doing his drawing during COVID and things of that nature. All these informal things really bubbled, so they were still learning. But I'm curious, as you now plug into schools that are struggling to get that engagement again and to get that learning back up, how do you think that's going to help? How do you see that helping educators and helping students either get back on track or really plug in and get excited again?

Guy Raz:

Look, we are facing a future where we are going to need the greatest scientists, the greatest mathematicians, the greatest thinkers, to solve the biggest challenges that we will face as a species. Probably the biggest challenge we have ever faced as a species, climate change. Our hope and our goal here is to inspire kids to think in a big way. It doesn't mean that every kid's going to become a scientist or a physicist or mathematician, and that's not necessarily our goal. But we want to inspire kids to think critically about problems, how to solve them, how to talk about them in a collaborative way. Is this going to be the magic answer to the question? I don't know. But I think that based on what we've seen in the classroom and what we've observed with kids, we think it's really possible.

We think that there's a real possibility and likelihood that this kind of approach, audio first with images too, we have websites and there are some really cool images on the screen, but an audio first approach that's funny, that's accessible, that doesn't talk down to kids, that gets them excited about science in ways that is mind blowing when you see it in action. I think there's a real possibility that this could have an impact. The question is, will teachers be interested in adopting it? I hope they are. It's free, it's available, it's out there. We're not asking for anything in return except making the promise that we hope... Promise, but trying to promise, that this will inspire kids and will get them engaged around some of the big questions that one day they're going to have to answer.

What’s Next for Guy

Michael Horn:

Driving questions is obviously another great way to get people interested in learning to build solutions. As we just wrap up here, I'm curious. You do so much inspiring of people at different stages of their lives clearly, what's next on your horizon? We've barely scratched the surface of the books, live events, games we could talk about. But as you think about your own journey, what are you excited to do next and how can listeners and viewers stay tuned, so to speak?

Guy Raz:

I'm really excited to grow Wow in the World, and we have some other programs, new shows that we're working on. We've got some really cool toys and games that will be coming out over the next year. We are doing some really exciting things on my grown-up show, How I Built This. One of the things that I have not done and that I will be doing more of is video, is really talking about the lessons that I have learned over many years of interviewing founders of businesses. I have over 600 of these interviews. I think many business school professors would love to have the database and the data set that I'm lucky enough to have. While all of those interviews are available for free for anybody to listen to forever, I think that many of the lessons can be shared in different ways. So, over the next year or so, I hope to really start sharing many of the lessons I've learned as an interviewer, and as somebody who studies businesses, and also kids and even celebrities, to share some of those ideas with my listeners, and hopefully viewers.

Michael Horn:

Love it. We will stay tuned. Guy, thank you for continuing to inspire us all. Really appreciate it.

Guy Raz:

Thank you so much for having me.

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There are new solutions for work and learning, but are we, as a society, open to shifting from the familiar to seize these opportunities? 

I sat down with Ryan Stowers, Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, to discuss openness in the sector. We lay down a definition for openness, look at shining examples of learning innovation, and consider the risk of holding to the status quo.

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Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us at the place where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. There are very few people that I know who exemplify that more than the Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, Ryan Stowers. He's a man who's a friend and has offered a lot of wise advice over this journey for individuals of many organizations over the years. So, Ryan, great to see you. Thanks for being here on the Future of Education.

Ryan Stowers:

Thanks for having me, Michael, and thanks for all that you do.

Defining Openness as a Key Principle 

Michael Horn:

No, you bet. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while for many reasons. You all at the foundation have been working with so many entrepreneurs, educators, and employers, helping rethink, how we develop talent in this country so that all individuals can live into those ideals that I espoused up front. You know like purpose, and that businesses will also benefit in the process. So as a result, you get this bird's eye seat on all these cool journeys about how people are doing things differently from the way they've always done it. This will be the first of a series of conversations we'll get to have. I'll set the table because, over the past couple of months, I've gotten to explore a few of these principles with your grantees. The concept of mutual benefit with Scott Pulsifer of Western Governors University. And what I think you would call the broader dimensions of talents with Kathleen St. Louis Caliento of Cara Collective. I'm looking at your book that the Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Industries put out Principle Based Management. You have this other one in there called Openness - key principle. I'd love you to define what openness means to you and why it matters because it's one of those that I think on the surface, the word could mean lots of different things to lots of different people. And so it requires a little explanation.

Ryan Stowers:

Yeah, thanks, Michael. When I think about openness, I think the best way to define it is the free movement of ideas, resources, and people, and that generates knowledge, innovation, and opportunity. We think that's been critical to fueling progress in society, and we think it's going to continue to be important moving forward. So I think that's the best way to define it.

Michael Horn:

No, that's a good definition, and you couch it in that larger narrative of progress. In the context of learning and education and the workforce, what does openness sort of look like?

Ryan Stowers:

Yeah. And you and I have spent a lot of time on this. If you think of a system that right now, from my perspective, needs thoughtful consideration of openness, it's the work and learning ecosystem as we think of it. For so long, the focus has been on things like credit hours, seat time, and degrees, and it's not working. It's helping a select few get to the point where they can reach their potential, find purpose and meaning, and produce value for themselves and others in society. But for the most part, it's leaving millions behind, and it's setting a lot of people up for failure. So in this context, openness means, and you said this, you use the term rethink. Openness would lead us to consider that we haven't figured this out and that we should consider changing the way we think and act about work and learning to bring about better outcomes for all people with a recognition that we know how to do this. We've seen it work in other industries, we've seen it work in other spaces. We should put that kind of openness and innovation and a willingness to rethink or think outside the box to help us find better solutions for people. From our perspective, the answers are there. If we engage in this kind of openness and backing up a bit, you see it work at a societal level. A more open society is going to be one where new ideas are welcomed, where those new ideas are applied, and where progress is made. In the physical world, you see it like closed systems, they inherently stagnate and eventually fail. If you apply that to the world in which we're working, you can see how in the work and learning ecosystem, you've got more than three stakeholders, but I'm thinking of three in particular. The learner, the solution or educator, or the solution provider, and then the employer. Because so much learning occurs through work in our lives, getting all three of those stakeholders to think and act differently about how they engage in the work and learning ecosystem, I think, can bring about incredible results. So it's in that context that openness, I think, applies very much.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I'm just thinking of so many things as you're talking that through, Ryan, because two of the things that hit me, I think of Glasnost in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev being like, we got to open up. We have to have new ideas. Then I think of the American entrepreneurial system over the last many decades compared to say a place like Japan. Our friend Clay Christensen would always say Japan disrupted the US economy. They played the game once, but then they had no mechanism of venture capital or laying employees off to create new companies that would come create that next wave of growth. As a society, it was relatively closed, whereas, in the US, we have some painful moments, but we keep having entrants come in and rethink and bring new ideas.

Ryan Stowers:

That's right.

This episode is sponsored by

Organizing for Openness

Michael Horn:

So it's an open society that keeps rejuvenating us over time. I guess the question is, so is it the existing organizations rethinking, or is it being open to new organizations maybe coming in and reinventing the DNA of a sector?

Ryan Stowers:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to require both. If you think of just the education system. Look at post-secondary ed right now. There are attempts. A lot of these attempts are well intended. I mean, a lot of these people are trying to help others reach their potential. Universities are, I think fundamentally they are. But if you look at the competition that new alternatives face in the post-secondary ed market, for instance, universities are getting $250,000,000,000 in subsidies to run their business. The anti-competitive forces that create an alternative to be relevant and provide a solution that will empower people are extreme. That's an example of where if we don't rethink what we're doing in the student finance and funding question, we could inadvertently create a more closed system than a more open system that would allow innovation. That would allow, to your point, new entities, new individuals, and new entrepreneurs to come into the space and try to make things better. And to have incumbents and people in the traditional space not view that as a threat, but view that as an opportunity to learn and adjust as well. So that's just one example. I think it's got to be a combination of both. The current actors being willing and open to changing the way they think and act, and then new entrepreneurs coming up with new ideas and driving and spurring that kind of innovation with the intent of creating a marketplace that reaches all learners in a highly individualized way to help them reach their potential. I think we can do this. 

Openness in Action

Michael Horn:

So let's talk about your portfolio because you guys support so many interesting organizations. It's a compelling point you just made that both/and have to be part of this openness. Who's doing this? Well, who's doing this right, right now, that's really bringing in new ideas into the sector, exhibits that openness.

Ryan Stowers:

So just a couple of groups that are maybe on the side of the traditional approach. These are folks that you and I know well. We talk to a lot of these folks a lot. If you look at what Michael. Crowe's done at ASU, he's been open to considering culture change in a space that's been fairly resistant to that kind of culture change over time. Rethinking the role that the university plays in society in order to help more learners gain access to knowledge and skills they need in order to be successful. More open to bucking the one-size-fits-all kind of standardized approach to one that's more. You know, Michael would say this. I don't think Michael's figured it all out, but he's made some huge strides in doing so. Another one that comes to mind, you've interviewed him, Scott Pulsifer at Western Governors University. The fact that they take a competency-based approach to them, from figuring out where they can meet students and empower them to close the gap. To getting the knowledge and skills they need for in-demand jobs, that competency-based approach is highly innovative relative to where higher ed's been in the past. I think you're seeing the outcomes through the results that Western Governors is producing. Another couple that comes to mind that are maybe smaller and less well known but equally impactful is Reach University where they've gone in, and this is where you can bring the employer in, but they've gone into different sectors directly with groups that need to hire people, and they're not able to find people with the right skills, knowledge or aptitudes to meet the demand. So they started with K-12 teachers going into school districts and saying, hey, if we can identify dormant talent either through teaching assistants or substitute teachers who have… Some of them have 20-30 years of classroom experience, but they don't have any way to take that to the market and say it's worth anything other than giving them another role as an assistant or as a substitute. So Reach is going in and saying, how can we help that substitute teacher close the gap in a low-cost way to get them the credentials they need and then have the district recognize them as a fully trained teacher, able to run a classroom and teach students? And now they're going to nursing and manufacturing jobs. Reach University is a great example of what can happen when we take an approach based on openness and in this space coming up with a highly innovative idea that has the potential to unlock things in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Michael Horn:

I love all three of those examples and for different reasons. I mean, the way Michael at Arizona State redefined excellence away from who you effectively exclude to how you can take anyone regardless of their starting point. How far can you take them? And then, Scott, obviously I'm a big fan of what Western Governors does with competency-based learning and fundamentally changing the measure of learning from time to actually what you've mastered. Then Reach, Mallory's,  longtime fan club of what they've created. It's interesting about the last one with Reach that required… and I guess they all do to some degree. It's certainly true for Scott and Western Governors as well. But that's an explicitly big change in terms of the connection with the businesses, the employers in this case. Her’s is school districts, but it could be companies. I guess the question is what's the downside for businesses if they don't embrace openness? Because I'm sure it can feel scary. It's upending the rules of how you have operated. Obviously, there are some great upsides in terms of dynamism and sort of innovating the future. But I can imagine a lot of the colleges or employers that maybe have hired the way that they have historically. They're like, yeah, but it's working for me.

Ryan Stowers:

Right.

The Risks of Closing Off 

Michael Horn:

What's the downside if they don't make the changes?

Ryan Stowers:

At a general level, we've seen examples of companies when they're unwilling to make changes that anyone looking at the landscape would say, hey, you need to change. So think of just out of the work and learning context for a minute. Look at Kodak, and remember, Kodak was the leader in their industry. At a time when they should have probably seen the writing on the wall, understood the landscape, and been willing to open themselves up to new ideas, new concepts, and new technologies. They shifted away from digital photography because they didn't want to threaten their profits from their film photography. And you think of the consequences of that decision. They were cataclysmic. For Kodak, they meant stagnation and eventually, ultimately failure. I think we're at a point where if you look at the US economy, you look at the number of jobs that are available and necessary in order to keep these companies moving, in order to help them produce products and services that make the world a better place, make people's lives better. Based on our current approach to talent, who and how we hire, and how we develop our people as employers. We've got a more closed system than would suggest is necessary in order to be successful in the long run. There are a lot of companies that are looking at changing the way they hire and changing how they develop their employees from a social impact standpoint. But I think what you and I are talking about is that they ought to be thinking about it from a business standpoint. For far too long, companies have relied on the proxy of degrees as telling them, for instance, what person they're finding in the marketplace and how that person is going to add value to their enterprise, their company. An over-reliance on something, sticking with the degree, in the long run, to help employers understand who they're hiring and what that person will be able to do in the company. This could be the Kodak moment for a lot of these companies because things are shifting. People are valuing things in different ways. There's so much fluctuation in the education market, the credentialing market. People are looking at skills now more than just degrees. From my perspective, they're not going far enough. How do we use technology and identify solutions that can empower employers to know exactly what they're getting when they hire somebody? Because there's a way to understand aptitudes and mindsets and gain skills and knowledge. To me, that has the ability to give a company a competitive edge in industries, especially where other companies are slower to respond in that way. To me, the answer for a lot of these companies, if they want to continue to be relevant, they'll change the way they think and act, and they'll approach all of their talent practices in a very different way. Understanding that their human capital, their talent, and their employees are the most important assets they have. Investing in them in ways that matter more to the individual, I think, is not just the right thing to do, it's going to be the competitive and smart thing to do as a business.

Michael Horn:

It's so interesting hearing you sort of develop that out. I get new things every time we talk about these principles. The one right there I got was actually openness, the opposite of it isn't just closed, it's a risk aversion. Right. In some ways, you often think of the HR function in a company as being very risk-averse. It's sort of the, no one got fired for hiring IBM back in the day.

Ryan Stowers:

That's right.

Michael Horn:

I like that Kodak moment language. You can almost imagine, I think, what you're arguing is you can stay with the same practices. You may have heard the Andreessen Horowitz podcast recently on Higher Ed where they were saying their companies don't just recruit from Stanford anymore because it turns out it's not a good predictor of success in the companies. So they're having to get more creative and look at different measures and assessments themselves on point because, in many ways, the degree is itself discriminatory and not very helpful to the companies. So as an HR leader, breaking out of those tried and true, quote, unquote, mindsets is important, perhaps to staying ahead of the curve, if I'm understanding you right.

Ryan Stowers:

Yeah, exactly. Look at some of the other problems they're facing. In addition to not being able to find enough people to fill roles, they're having a hard time retaining talent. In reality, the answer is the same. If companies will invest in people in ways where they're empowering them, where they're meeting them, where they are, we're seeing the data. I mean, paycheck and compensation matters, the commute matters, but so does purpose. So does meaning in one's career, even to the point where this younger generation seems to be willing to trade off some levels of compensation in order to find that purpose and meaning. A smart employer would tune into that aspect of the landscape and recognize that in order to stay ahead of the game, they've got to change their talent practices in order to hire the people that are going to want to contribute, to have that contribution mindset to achieving what the business wants to achieve. And I think that tweak is huge, Michael. I think it's going to matter a lot.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're seeing the same data. As you know,  I’ve got this book that I've been working on, and the data we see on individuals trying to make progress as they switch jobs is that the paycheck, it stands in as a proxy for something.  It's a proxy for I want more respect or I have to pay daycare bills. So it's a proxy. It's not the root cause. We really need to get root causes and understand people's purpose and progress underneath it. To your point, as a whole individual, not just you at work. David Brooks had this piece recently on marriage being much more important than work for happiness. 

The Effect of Openness on Individuals

Let's end our conversation here with individuals. What's the upside and downside for individuals if they are or are not in places that actually support openness? What should individuals be looking for and thinking about?

Ryan Stowers:

Yeah, there are a couple of different ways you could talk about this. If you step back and think about openness in the workplace, think about the difference between working for a company where not just your input from day to day, whether it's making devices or transferring information or whatever your role looks like. Think about the difference between you just kind of plugging in and doing your thing, versus an environment where your supervisor or the people on your team or your employer generally respects you for what you have to bring to the table and is open to your ideas. Given your local knowledge about what you do from day to day versus anyone else in your organization, the possibility of you coming up with ways to make that better, or make that more efficient, or make it more impactful or effective, and that kind of empowerment approach internal to a company, or that kind of openness to the possibility that a leader doesn't always know everything that's best about what's going on in the company. The learner worker in this case is learning through experimentation, learning through trial and error. He or she is respected and given the chance to share his or her ideas and thoughts and know that they're impactful. That kind of empowerment and openness in the workplace creates a much better environment and one that people want to be a part of. They go to work because they find purpose.It connects up with what we were talking about a minute ago. It connects with their ability to make something bigger than themselves better and move forward. They've got a sense of ownership in that improvement. They've got a sense of ownership in that innovation. So I think it has a ton of potential to unleash things in people that, frankly, we just haven't seen in the past in ways that are much more empowering and much more effective for both the employer and the employee. This gets back to a different level of mutual benefit than I think we've seen in the past. There are employers figuring this out. There are employers doing things differently right now. I think Walmart's taken a huge step in this direction, focusing on lifelong learning, focusing on the merits of understanding who the individual employee is, what their aptitudes are, recognizing that if they invest in people in these individualized ways, they're going to be empowered and want to contribute in ways that are much more meaningful and important to the company than otherwise. I think you're going to see companies that take that approach gain a competitive edge. I met with an employer last week, Martin Ritter, who's the CEO of a Swiss-based company that makes passenger train cars. And his US operations here in Salt Lake City. He came to the US and recognized this challenge. They weren't finding talent at the level they needed to, with the right aptitudes or skills, through the traditional system. So he approached a local community college and built a program that allows juniors and seniors to come into the company, and get credentialed for what they're doing in conjunction with what they're learning through the community college, as well as what they're learning through this apprenticeship program. They're hiring people because the people are more connected to what the company is trying to do.They're more motivated to be a part of it. They were met in a way that the traditional system wouldn't have met with them. In fact, in a lot of cases, there would have been barriers preventing this level of access. So in this instance, it's an employer fundamentally being open to more risk and fundamentally changing the way he thought and acted about work and learning. That's leading to improved outcomes for hundreds of young people in the Intermountain West mostly in Salt Lake City, Utah. So it's just an example. And you're seeing this. You're seeing employers start to step up and change. And, you know, the reason they're doing that is they know that it's going to give them a competitive edge and let them be more effective. In turn, it's going to help unleash the potential in their employees and workers in people.

Michael Horn:

I love that case study, and it's a great place to end because it really is the win-win.  It's the positive sum as opposed to too often I think in society we sit there thinking, who's the loser in this? No, the individual benefits. The schools are certainly benefiting, and of course, the employer is in that example. Ryan, thanks for doing the work you continue to do and for joining us. We're going to find time in a few more months to catch up on what you're learning from the portfolio and continued evolution but just really appreciate it.

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So many teens are addicted to phones and social media. How can parents and educators help kids thrive in a digital world with unwritten rules, uncertain effects, and endless changes?

Devorah Heitner wrote her latest book, Growing Up in Public, to help adults better play that role. I sat down with her to discuss strategies for maximizing the benefits and mitigating the risks. We also talked about whether legislation around social media is a good idea and how all this technology should or shouldn’t be used in schools. As many of you know, this is a hot topic—an an important one. People have strong hot takes on both sides. Devorah takes a realistic and practical path into the conversation that I appreciated and enjoyed learning from.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can develop their full human potential and live a life of purpose. To help us do that today, we have the noted author Devorah Heitner, who is the author of the new book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. Not her first book, but this is a really important one and an important moment in time where we are starting to see both the negative and positive impacts of social media. Devorah, welcome to the Future of Education. I think no one does it better than you at helping articulate, really both sides of this complicated world into which our young people are entering. So first, thank you for writing the book and welcome.

Devorah Heitner:

Thank you. Yeah, I'm living in this world and talking to young people every day. And if anything, I think I started over a decade ago with slightly more technology, rose-colored glasses, and now I'm more like in bifocals, but that sort of befits my age, I guess.

Michael Horn:

No, I like it. I like it. I mean, as you mentioned, it's not your first book. You had Screenwise as well. Talk to me about your journey into this topic, and how you've progressed. I like that analogy from rose-tinted glasses to bifocals. But just tell the audience about your own journey into this.

Devorah’s Journey to the Work

Devorah Heitner:

I was a college professor and very connected still to higher ed. But when I was teaching college, I had my students, I had written my master's paper on Sesame Street, and I taught classes on kids media culture, and I had my 18 to 22-year-old undergrads doing research about kids and media in the community. And they would interview third graders. In our case, I was teaching in an affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had kids interview my students, interview third graders in a working-class suburb and in their own, where the school was, which was Lake Forest in Illinois. So it was very different. What they got was that third graders are using tech in really interesting ways that were very different from their own use. And that was less than a generation. These kids could have been their siblings. A nine-year-old could be a sibling to an 18-year-old.They're certainly not a full generation apart. So that was eye-opening to me. Then I became a parent in 2009 and really witnessed a moral panic around smartphones, touch screens, tablets, and schools using tech more in k twelve and how's that going? Colleges deciding if they're going to ban cell phones in the classroom. All these conversations about, is tech killing our kids. Is it helping our kids? Is it doing both and trying to really understand what is the experience of being a young person and then an emerging adult with all of this and with growing up in public, I'm really curious about especially the pressures on young people's identities, like, how do you figure out who you are when so many people are looking at you?

The benefits and drawbacks of social media 

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Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's such an interesting question because even at that age, they're trying out identities, right, and figuring it out for themselves, let alone, as you say, growing up in public, showing it in a very public-facing way. As you describe in the book, this world of social media, is obviously a big, scary place in many ways, but it also has the potential to be beneficial for kids to express themselves or find those communities. So I'd love you to just go deeper on sort of both sides of this if you will. What's the good and what's the bad? Because we're hearing a lot about that right now in the more mainstream media.

Devorah Heitner:

I think there's tremendous potential for young people to find and keep and deepen community online. I talked to a lot of young people who had found connections with friends on Discord and via other spaces. In the old days, it was Tumblr. Kids are good at making use of digital communities to learn things. If you even look at the sort of college forums, college confidential, it's a lot of young people informing young people about, like, well, there's a lot of drinking on this campus, or if you don't want to be in a fraternity, this might not be the place for you. And that use of digital community, whether it's information seeking, whether it's supporting a new identity, maybe if kids are coming out as LGBTQ plus, if kids are trying to figure out their mental health issues, there's a lot of good information on there and a lot of community and a lot of support, and there's just a lot of opportunity to have fun. So my own kid is a pretty avid player of a couple of games. He would kind of resist, I think, the identity of a gamer because it's not his full thing, and he doesn't want to see himself that way. But there's a couple of games he really enjoys, and he and his friends are able to play, for example, sometimes for just an hour after homework on a weeknight, which is not a time where I would want my 14-year-old going out necessarily and where kids really aren't right. Maybe if the other kids were out, I might be okay with it, actually, but we don't live in a world, at least in my community, where kids are out very much, especially during the week, and they're not hanging out in person. So this is a way for them to hang out and a way for them to connect and check in and say hi and have something fun to do that's strategic, that's intellectual. It's interesting. So I think we sometimes dismiss these forms of community because it's where the kids are. It wasn't like our experience. I did hang out with my friends in person a lot more than many kids in this generation are doing. We kind of feel bad for our kids because they don't have that. But online it can be really positive for them. I think the downsides are some of the ones that have been brought up in the hearings, but I especially worry about comparison kids comparing themselves with others. And you can really quantify your response on social media. Any of us can see how many followers we have, how many likes a post gets, and it's so easy to compare that with others. Adolescents are wired to be figuring out who they are through some of those comparisons. But there's a degree to which social media, I think, turns up that dial and can be maybe too intense or even worse maybe, than comparing with peers is comparing with sort of not real people comparing with influencers or someone who's been airbrushed or had surgery to look the way they do. So from a body image perspective, for example, that can be problematic.

How parents can help kids navigate social media 

Michael Horn:

Yeah and terrifying for parents. Let's start with them before we go to the legal landscape, if you will, and schools. Just for parents, what's your advice for how their kids can start to get the good of social media with not the bad? Do you think that there's an age at which they should or shouldn't be on these platforms? How do you help parents navigate this world?

Devorah Heitner:

Parents want to be thoughtful even when their kids are not on social media and don't have phones, about our own use and how we communicate. A lot of the challenge right now is that we are thumbing out our lives in front of our kids and that they're not hearing us on the phone make communication decisions. They're not hearing us realize maybe, oh, when I scroll, maybe I don't feel good. So I'm going to take a break. So we actually need to talk more with them about our own experiences of using social media, even if they laugh at us. Like my kid, I remember when the first time I experienced some sort of platform anxiety when my TEDx, this is many years ago, was shared on Upworthy, and I started noticing more views and I kept coming back to check. And of course, that's a very short-lived pleasure as any of us with any kind of experience online for our work. It's like, oh, this is fun. But it doesn't lead because you can have 4000 followers and then someone has 40,000, and then if you get to 40,000, someone else has 400,000. There's no place where you can get to with building those kinds of numbers where you're like, oh, okay, I'm good. There's enough. And certainly for those of us publishing books, there's no place where my publisher will be like, okay, Devorah, you're good.

Michael Horn:

You don't have to stop selling books. You're fine.

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, you're all good here. So I think that sense of chasing clout, which we make fun of teenagers for something adults do, and so if we can notice that, for example, about ourselves and laugh, and my kid was laughing at me, but I was kind of like, okay, well, I can laugh with you at myself because this is kind of funny and silly and ridiculous, if we can kind of just be open to those conversations, be open to the conversations about, wait, who do we want to be in contact with in these apps? Why do you think Snapchat has streaks? Why do you think they have a map that shows you where all your friends are? Is this in everyone's interest to have this information? Is this even safe to be sharing this information? Just getting kids I think tapping, especially with adolescents, into that natural skepticism that they have so that they feel like winning is using the tools and not being used by the tools. That's what we all want when we're using digital tools. It's like, I want to use LinkedIn, but I don't want to be used by LinkedIn. I want to use TikTok, but I don't TikTok, sort of using me. Right. And it's tricky because, to a certain degree, we are the product in all these sorts of free apps. But it's like consumer ed. It's like teaching kids to notice that, oh if a gallon of milk is $5 and half a gallon of milk is $4, then a gallon is a better deal. Like, how do I feel when I scroll Instagram? If it's making me feel bad, I probably want to take a break. Maybe I don't need to completely quit because my friends are DMing me there. But maybe I don't want to be spending mindless time scrolling. Maybe I want to set a timer on myself. TikTok was the most frequently quit app of all the apps I interviewed interesting adolescents about because it was so immersive for them. Some of them just had to leave.

Legislation limiting use of social media and technology for kids

Michael Horn:

That's so interesting. The intentionality you're speaking about there for the parents and then by translation to the young people using this makes a lot of sense. It reminds me, I realize, because we don't get a newspaper, I'm on the phone in the mornings at the breakfast table, reading news articles, and my kids have no idea what I'm doing on the phone. So it's occurred to me that when I was growing up, I saw my dad or mom, right, reading the paper, and therefore I got interested or reading the same articles. So just that opacity of the medium seems to me a very big barrier. Obviously, then, lawmakers are now getting into this. You've seen all sorts of proposed legislation, I think the most recent… I want to get to schools in a moment because obviously, that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking about. But the big one that's gotten attention most recently is a law that would require parent permission before teenagers effectively were allowed to use social media. What do you make of proposals like this?

Devorah Heitner:

I think it's really tricky. I like the idea of more awareness. I want the companies to be much more responsive to complaints, and I understand why everyone's so fed up, so I just want to put that out there. I understand why parents and educators feel frustrated with these mega companies that don't seem to be that responsive to the concerns of their users around mental health and haven't been as supportive of parents and caregivers and educators. That said, I don't think there's a way. I mean, this would be like saying that you have to be 18 before you're allowed to have a dime to put in a payphone. This is the medium that all people are using to communicate. And if you're putting roadblocks to that medium, what do you say to the kid who's trying to report abuse at home? Do they still have to go to that parent? What if the problem is your parents? We have to understand that not all kids even have parents. Some kids are in a legal never-never-land and they're in between foster homes. Does that kid just never get to be on Snapchat and communicate? What if they're on the debate team and everyone's communicating on Instagram or Discord, like, they can't join because they don't have a legal guardian.I just think there's a lot of problems with it. That said, of course, in an ideal scenario, every kid would have mentors and adults who care about them, who have their best interests in mind, who could support their entry into the complex world of social media. But we don't live in that world.

Michael Horn:

So we have to take that reality for what it is. So then I guess that translates into the next one, which is, as you know, a lot of countries and several localities have had these suggested, or in some cases enacted bans on having cell phones in schools, period. They have the yonder pouches where they require them to go in there and you're not allowed to use them during class time. What's your take on legislation there? Or is this sort of the case that it should be more managed at the school level? How do you think about those trade-offs?

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, I mean, I do think that every school knows its situation better, and I've really come around to understanding why schools are leaning into the bans much more. I mean, I talked to a group of school resource officers last summer, and they talked about rampant fights being broadcast, for example, on TikTok, where it was encouraging other kids to even come to the school to participate in violence. I get why if I'm running a school and I think there are kids who are going to get hurt or die because other kids are sharing this stuff, I would understand wanting to cut that off at the source and say, okay, if this is exacerbating the problem of fighting and even giving kids motivation to fight, what can we do to reduce that? At the same time, I think, again, every situation is different. There are many kids using their phones as assistive devices, both kids who are recorded as having differences in disabilities with a 504 and IEP, and kids who may have self-identified accommodations that they need that are helping them get through school, that maybe don't have a documented disability. There are kids who have been in unsafe situations at school that they've documented using their phone. So it's really difficult to say. And I know everyone wants the easy answer.

Michael Horn:

Everyone wants the magic bullet.

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, but there isn't one. I do think that when I walk into a cafeteria and I see kids just in their phones and not talking with one another, I do have concerns. I want kids and young people to be able to talk. I think especially when I see that in higher ed, frankly, because I do remember closing down the dining hall with my friends and getting kicked out. Having the dining hall closed and they were like, all right, you all have to leave now. We're just sitting around talking to each other. That easy communication is something that I think, especially in this sort of late pandemic, late stage pandemic is very tough. I don't know if I would have 4 hours of conversation to have, even though I'd love to see my college friends. But would we talk for 4 hours as easily now or am I too rusty after being home on Zoom for these many years and having all my conversations be focused and on the hour, the art of especially sort of untethered conversation may be something we're losing. So to come back to what schools should do, I do think for now it makes sense for schools to individually even experiment and notice what works. It is very hard to make these kinds of policy changes. So I understand again if a school doesn't want to just try it. But one thing some of the schools I've worked with closely have done, especially if it's a k twelve school, sometimes they'll have different policies at different levels and they'll notice, wow, our middle school students are getting a lot more done in study hall because they can't have their phones. And our upper school students don't seem to be getting anything done. And I've talked about can you share that research with the upper-school students and see what they want to do. There might be kids who would opt into a yonder patch bag even if they don't sort of, if not mandated, because it’s helping them focus. And that would be a different feeling than not being trusted by the adults to make your own decision.

The risks of parental oversharing on social media

Michael Horn:

That's super interesting because what you're pointing to throughout this is sort of the sense of agency that all individuals want to develop and a sense of mattering right in all of this and not dismissing that as you sort of make these well-intentioned rules at whatever level you ultimately do as a school, as a lawmaker or whatever it might be. I'm sort of curious. You have this other part in the book which relates to college, which I had not honestly thought about until I read it, but then it made all the sense in the world and I had this horrified reaction which was parents sharing their kid's college decisions in social media. It seems like parents are making a lot of faux paws themselves perhaps around sharing news that is not theirs, is the way I might say it. It occurred to me that I probably violate this I think I'm doing it less. I've sort of gone on a no kids on social media, but I'm sure I violated that when they were young as well. So I'm sort of curious how you think about that.

Devorah Heitner:

Well, all our families. I mean, I became a parent in 2009, so it was like right in that early Facebook years. So I also shared my kid a little bit and was not thinking as much about the future. Then as I started leaning into writing about privacy, and now I have a skeptical teenager who knows I write about privacy, so God help me if I share him now without permission, given that he knows what I do. But the college thing is such a good example because kids are sharing a lot with one another, and yet they're much more thoughtful about the audience they know. If my best friend applied early to Amherst, say, and I did, too, I know that's going to be a complex thing for us this year. And I also know the kids are confident their friendships can survive it. But they are more thoughtful about how to share that information and what to do with that information and how to process it and how to support one another, frankly, when denials happen, which is obviously so many of our kids experience and especially low these last dozen years, and I love them for that. I'm so impressed with how young people have found ways to communicate about this and have their own etiquette around it. And when their parents undermine that, it really is a problem. And it puts tremendous pressure on young people. Even talking about the visits puts a lot of pressure on young people then, because then Uncle John knows that you visited Madison and he went there and why didn't you decide to apply or whatever it is. All of that is really hard. So the less the better, I think, on that front. And taking a cue from the kids is really thinking about the audience and how people will feel.

Academic monitoring and comparison

Michael Horn:

It makes a ton of sense. And just having that sensitivity on all sides, as you're navigating this in the book, you also talk about how not just parents, but also schools have so many more tools to monitor children, often communicating behind their back. We know online grade books and all those things that have increased some of the helicopter parenting and other things of that nature. Just love your take at both levels. This is elementary school all the way through high school and even into college sometimes. What are the risks of these apps and what are the ones that give you concerns out there right now?

Devorah Heitner:

Yes, I wrote a lot in the elementary school years about a behavior-monitoring app called Class Dojo not to pick on Class Dojo. They seem like nice people, but because there's something very insidious about monitoring behavior, and especially the sort of micro choices and experiences kids have with regulation, like raising your hand or speaking out of turn, that kind of stuff. The apps use a gamification of behavior modification that really concerns me. So that level of, like, you're competing for points, it's all externalized, extrinsic rewards, and it just tends to lean into rewarding the kids who are naturally more self-regulated, which broadly in elementary school is like girls versus boys, but even more so, like, some kids versus other kids, like neurotypical kids versus non neurotypical kids, kids who had breakfast versus kids who didn't get breakfast. There's all kinds of ways and reasons why some kids are consistently more self-regulated than others. And even those kids can become quite anxious. I interviewed several parents of, for example, very typically well-behaved neurotypical girls who were kind of like this, at the edge of their seat, stressing about these apps and worrying about losing points that one time they did call out without raising their hands. And instead of seeing that as like, wow, they must have been really enthusiastic about that answer, there's this denigration. So kids get really stressed about all of this. Then I would go in the book, I trace that all the way up through the app, the Grade Books, which we can come back to in a minute. But I want to talk about Naviance with you and the other ones, Maya learning and S-C-O-I-R which I don't even know how to say it. All the apps that kids or high school students use to quantify the data, put the recommendations together, and there's tremendous convenience to having that all in one place, especially that. Plus the common app, I think, is driving some of the sort of, I would say, over-application. But the much higher numbers. I mean, you're talking to someone who applied to three colleges and I live to tell the tale, and I have a PhD in everything, right? But the number of colleges, of course, are much higher. And it's because there's so much aggregate data. But the things that concern me a lot about Naviance are, first of all, Power School owns it. So you're taking the people who have your kids' grades, they have some of this behavior data, then they also own all the stuff they put into college. That's a lot of data about someone for 16,15 years of formal education, from age potentially four to 18. A lot of personal info in there. Suspensions, expulsions, behavior data, anything a counselor may have written down. A lot of that data is just in there. I don't like it being digital and being available, even if it doesn't all get shown, for example, to the college, that raises concerns. Then how do I feel, as a college applicant, getting to… seeing my dot on the app? And I've already looked at what Maya learning looks like for my son's school, and it's kind of crushing. You see your little dot on the app, and then you see where other dots are, and there's a line. So if you're looking at a specific university where students from your child's high school have applied, or they're looking at… and one of the things my editor wouldn't let me use in the book was an article. Now I'm going to have to link to it. In your show notes was an article from a kid at a prep school. We'll decide if we can use this, but my editor is like, it's too mean. A kid at a prep school in Chicago, where I live, writing about the first day they got access to Naviance and how people cried when they saw their chances on the chart. Yeah.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Devorah Heitner:

I mean, it was written in kind of a slightly sarcastic, slightly, you know, high school mean kind of way. So I think that's why my editor didn't like it, and I see why she didn't like it. But I thought, no, this is something people need to know, that people get on this app, and it makes them cry. I'm not saying, by the way, that we can protect kids from the realities of admission. I think people need to go in with their eyes open and also radically rethink what's so important about whatever ten or 20 name-brand schools they're so obsessed with. All of that is important. But I think there needs to be more sensitivity in how we handle that data as well. What we know, especially for students who don't have good access to counseling, is they can underreach because the data is so sobering that what you can see, and this was what was so interesting about the Dartmouth article in the New York Times the other day, is seeing with SATs, too, that with test-optional students, we're underreaching.

Alternatives to monitoring apps

Michael Horn:

Let's. There's so many different ways we can. No, this is great. This is great. I mean, if you're okay with including this, I'd love to keep it in. But it's so interesting, because, like, a Class Dojo, for example, I know those folks. Well, I know the teachers who use them that would say that's all well and good. I'm sure that's great in theory, but gosh, it really helps me keep the class in line and they're learning more and it's so helpful. What would you tell the teacher, I guess, around what they might do instead or how they might reframe the system, in effect, that you're talking about?

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, I mean, I would lean into, because I don't presume to mentor k twelve teachers. Like, I do a lot of PD, specifically around social and emotional stuff and kids' digital milestones. So I presume to talk to teachers about that. But like classroom management, I would say lean into your other professional cohorts and your principal and other people who have good experience, lean into referrals and making sure that kids who are needing special ed actually get it. Because there's a tremendous, I think, underdiagnosis and undersupport in some schools where kids aren't getting. If you're really having trouble supporting a kid's behavior, maybe there's more going on. If none of the tricks you're trying are working, maybe they need more support. And those colleagues could also be helping you. But one of the things that I learned from a teacher and actually a principal in St. Vrain, Colorado, was she doesn't allow them to use Class Dojo. She said, if you feel like you need Class Dojo, come see me and I'll sit in your class. I'll help you… you know we'll work together. So I like that level of support. I think all teachers ideally need that. They need a principal who is willing to come and help them with classroom management and mentor them, but she sees it as a sign of, like, okay, you feel like you're drowning. What can I do to support you so that you don't have to do this? Because the short-term compliance is not leading to long-term better behavior and not leading to internalized self-regulation, and it can really harm kids.I mean, the extreme examples that I gave, and I know not every teacher uses class dojo in the same way. And I do want to acknowledge it has a translation feature that's clearly positive. If you need to speak to that parent in Urdu and you can do it through class dojo, I think that's a great use of that app. The problem is things like kids getting denied recess or there's a prize for all the kids who are well-behaved and the kids who already struggle. You have to figure a kid who's struggling to self-regulate is already having a terrible time at school. Already probably doesn't like school. Then you give a party to the other kids and make those kids watch. You're talking about potentially ending someone's education trajectory early.You're increasing the likelihood that they may drop out. You're harming their self-esteem in ways that are lasting. It's not worth it. Even if you get short-term compliance out of it. It's not worth it.

The effects of grading apps 

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. As we wrap up here, it strikes me that there's a consistent theme across a lot of this, which is that sort of a zero-sum world of comparison where one gets the prize, the other doesn't, even though we're trying to develop both or social media. That's true, too. I'm comparing my likes versus yours or whatever it is that ultimately that zero-sum view as opposed to a positive-sum view of like, hey, we're all trying to be the most unique version of our best selves because the system is so built around the former as opposed to the latter. All of these apps, in some ways, they may not have created the conditions, but they're perhaps turbocharging the negative parts of that. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Devorah Heitner:

I think so. I think the grading apps, which we didn't really get to, where parents can just check kids' grades, it also can undermine the relationship with teachers. I think that's really important. That three-way triangle of student, teacher, parent, all of those relationships can get strained when there's too much access to information that's too frequent. We don't want too little feedback in education, but grades shouldn't be the only feedback. And maybe, I think maybe aren't the best kind of feedback. That's a whole big conversation, and I kind of like, nibbled on that in the book, but I don't want to bite it totally off the but there's that. But then it's like, what's it going to do to the relationship with the teacher? Or a high school teacher might have 180 students a day, some may have more.So even just remembering in your email etiquette, as I try to remember to do, to always put my student's name and ID number, even though I think they probably know who I am because I'm that parent and they probably do know who I am, I still feel like, let me identify myself because this person has hundreds of students in a day and just thinking about do you want to be writing to them about that zero, or do you want to wait and see what happens? Do you want to let your kid self-advocate, and figure out what they need to do? Or has the grade just not been entered yet? You're starting a feedback loop of anxiety because of a grade that hasn't been entered. So this is why some schools are closing their grade books. This is why Challenge Success is recommending limited access to them. I've just talked to a bunch of schools that don't have them, and I think that's great. But many, many schools do. Most people who work at schools or have students in school are probably encountering online grades, and the pressure from the school to check my son's school will tell me, check Canva, check Canva. That's just one of their big messages.

Michael Horn:

No, it makes total sense. Look, we could go in a number of different directions and keep geeking out on this, but with respect to your time and the audiences, I can't recommend the book more. Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. There it is. We will flash it up as well. I think it is a great resource, like I said at the beginning, to really get at the nuance in what has become a very polarized good-bad social media. Yes-no sort of conversation.And see, there are upsides and there are a lot of risks as well that we need to bear in mind. So thank you for helping us think through it. Thank you for helping schools think through it. Thank you for helping parents and students navigate their way in something that none of us have dealt with before.

Devorah Heitner:

Thank you.

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On our latest episode of Class Disrupted, I interviewed Diane Tavenner about why America’s approach to math class isn’t adding up. We analyzed the outcomes produced under the status quo, considered the current system’s alignment with workforce needs, and proposed a personalized approach to teaching each student the math that is meaningful for their path—and doesn’t privilege Calculus over things like data science and statistics, but also doesn’t strip opportunities away from those who are accelerating in their studies. As always, subscribers can listen to the episode, watch it, or read the transcript below.

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Michael Horn:

Hey, Diane, how are you?

Diane Tavenner:

Well, I'm well, and I'm going to start with urgent priorities today. Do you have any recipes that use a lot of lemons?

Michael Horn:

Lemons, okay.

Diane Tavenner:

And it's not because we're going to make lemonade out of lemons today. It's literally after years of drought, with all the rain we've had, my lemon tree has gone insane, and I have now made curd and cakes and ice cream and ice cubes of juice. And I have run out of recipes and I still have hundreds of lemons.

Michael Horn:

Well, it sounds like you're in California. It sounds like you've had rain. It sounds like I remember why I miss California. And I will tell you, the only other two I will add to your list is preserved lemons for salads. And then, of course, there's an alcohol that you could make as well. But we won't go there today. Instead, we could think about all the ratios and all that stuff that goes into making it just right, because I know you've been wanting to talk about math and some of the things that you've been learning about how our school system thinks or perhaps doesn't think about math in relation to work. So I'd love you to start to unpack that.

Status quo K-12 math pathways 

Diane Tavenner:

Well, great, because it's much better that I talk about this with you than turn to the drink because math can make me feel like I want to do that sometimes. So I appreciate your willingness to have this conversation. And what is prompting it for me is, you know, I have thought about math for many years from sort of a K-12 educator perspective, but now I'm coming at it from this new direction where we're really thinking about careers and post secondary and what's getting me going on this topic is my observation of how important math is in careers and how that is really at odds with how people in K-12, I think, think about it. And so let me just lay something out and see if it makes sense to you, which is my experience in K -12 is there's a mindset there and it's a mindset among students and parents and teachers and counselors and kind of everyone who is in the system. We really focus on math almost exclusively in how it relates to college and specifically, like, how do I do what I need to do in math because it's a key to college admissions, essentially? And so the big thinking that ends up happening, especially in high schools, is if I can get all the way to calculus, it gives me a better chance of getting accepted to college. And an elite college at that, maybe into the major that I want. Taking the most challenging…if I can't get to college, taking the most challenging courses that I can in high school relative to what's offered, helps me get into college. Getting good enough grades in math helps in my GPA to get into college. Previously and maybe a little bit again now emerging, taking the SAT and the ACT and getting the best score I can helps me get into college. The point being, as you hear, it's all about getting into college. And as I think about my time in K-12, we almost were never talking about the value of the learning of the math. It was always this entry into college.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it certainly matches up with my experience as well. Diane, and I know it's playing out there in California. Let's go there in a moment. But I'll just add, Jeff Selingo has made the point to me recently that all of what you just said is absolutely true. And it's a little bizarre that colleges care this much about math because most students, when they get to college, are going to take at most one math class. Now, if you're going to MIT or Caltech, maybe that's different. But for most of us, we get to college, you do your math requirement if you have one, maybe you had gen ed math, so you have to pass a test or something like that, and then most students are sort of done with it, Diane, so it's sort of bizarre how much the college and K-12 system cares about it as an entry point into admission as opposed to anything you're going to do with that track. But let's unpack what's going on in California.

California’s new math framework 

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, this is the other piece that just has me deeply into math right now, which is I feel like California is always having a math war, but there is a renewed math war at the, you know, peaking right now. Over the last multiple years, about four years, California has been trying to, as a state, adopt a new math framework. And this framework has been very controversial. And know was first presented and everyone's outraged. And so they went back and they edited and revised. That's been going on for four years. Well, it just got approved at the state level. Still people are very upset about it. But I've been reading the coverage about it and the arguments around it, and maybe I'll just give you a couple of quotes here that I think go directly to what we're talking about. This is from the LA Times, and the quote is “Another concern of people who don't like this math framework is that many top colleges still place an emphasis on whether applicants get to calculus and how well they do in that course.” And so this is just a well-known, well-communicated expectation from colleges and universities. And what I would also say is from the most selective and elite, because you and I both know there's a small number of those. There's a huge number of colleges that are non selective - you don't need to take calculus to get into those colleges. So it's like this small number really driving the agenda for most people. That's on the one side, you've got these people angry that because we're driving every kid to college, we're not actually focused on equity and going at a slower pace, more kids able to kind of learn together and things like that. And then the flip side of that is parents who are really frustrated and worried that their kids opportunities will be limited and held back. And this actually happened in California and in San Francisco, where they decided they were not going to teach algebra in 8th grade because it wasn't fair and equitable. And so we're literally saying we're withholding learning from some kids in the name of…And on both sides, I'm like, oh, my gosh, Michael, this is not third way thinking.

Michael Horn:

No, not at all. I mean, it goes to the heart of, I think what frustrates both of us around these conversations is that clearly the answer to equity is not the opposite of excellence. And clearly, having a system that drives off the expectation of calculus for all doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. And I know you've been investigating about how does math even manifest itself into these careers. So I'd love you to tell what you've been finding in that, because that may be the most interesting piece of the puzzle.

The role of math in the modern workforce

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Diane Tavenner:

Yeah. And I think that my headline here is, and we're using datasets that lots of people use, so sort of the federal government data sets around labor and statistics and jobs and careers and things like that. And so as we just dig into this and really think about the usefulness of it, my headline is…Well, let me just share with you what we're discovering. So there are approximately 923 careers in the US. And I say approximately because we do, in these data sets, believe there aren't careers that are represented in there. There are some, I will also tell you, that I had no idea were careers. So it's fascinating. It's a little bit of a game. Like, I challenge anyone to write down the number of careers you can think of 923 is quite a lot.

Michael Horn:

There's no way I would get there.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, 235 of those 923 literally have math as an important skill for doing that job. And these are jobs where you're going to be doing math kind of on a daily basis, doing calculations, using math in your actual work. And so just some examples of these types of careers. You're an actuary, you're a statistician, those probably seem pretty obvious. You're a sales manager, you're a personal finance advisor. And so I feel like those seem like, oh, but there are 235 careers that are using math kind of regularly. There's 573 careers, inclusive of those 235, that also have math as like, important knowledge you need for doing your job. And so you might not be doing calculations and stats every day, but when you're a pharmacist and an economist, and a wind energy engineer, and a stonemason, and a logistics engineer, and an insurance underwriter and a farmer, you need a grasp of and knowledge of math in order to effectively do your work and to be engaged in your career. The other thing I would just say about this is all these careers, these 573 careers, when I look at them and stack rank them and money isn't everything, but making a family sustaining wage is really important and a thing we aim for. These careers are highly represented in the group that makes, on average, $75,000 or more a year. So in the sort of top end, so not only math an important part of the majority of careers that are in the country in some way, shape or form, but definitely overrepresented in those where you're going to make more money. And here's maybe the punchline. Very few of these careers require any use of calculus, or quite frankly, advanced algebra even. And so most of them require just a strong grasp of real world applications of math, like statistics and fluency and basic math concepts, and confidence that you actually understand these things and practical application of them. And so I just would say this is so contrary to my experience in K-12, where almost no one is focused on math for career opportunities and success. I don't think I ever had that conversation in K-12.

Michael Horn:

No, that makes sense. It's interesting. It brings to mind when I wrote from Reopen to Reinvent, I joined the argument that many more people should be learning data science and statistics, rather than the algebra II into calculus path. And one of the arguments was Anthony Carnivale, who was then the director of the Center on Education and Workforce at Georgetown, had this stat in an article where just 11% of US jobs involved work that required understanding algebra II concepts, and only 6% regularly used those concepts. So a bare minority. But then you're pointing out that doesn't mean the careers don't have math at their heart. It's just not math on this calculus track, if you will, that is a relic, we should add. It's a relic of the sort of distinguishing between vocational education and the college track education, which in our mind is a boundary that should stop existing also. That's an outgrowth of all this. So where do we go, I guess, from here? If that's the reality, where do we go?

Results of the status quo

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, and I definitely want to get into some solutions. We never, of course, want to leave here without generating some path forward. But it might be worth staying for one more minute on what is underlying this problem because it's not just like K-12 people running around and purposely sabotaging math. I don't think that that's the objective, but I do think that our current design of our K-12 system, kind of, as we know, results in very few, let's call them mathematically literate, let alone fluent students. And I was thinking about this because we talk about reading and we talk about literacy quite a bit. And as we both know, there's a renewed focus on the science of teaching reading and literacy. And I do think as a whole society feels very convicted that everyone should be able to read and everyone should be literate. I'm not sure that that's how we think about math literacy, quite frankly. And so I think one of the things that you're just pointing to that's embedded in the system, the K-12 system we have, is if you have calculation as this destination, and you just said it, there's one pathway, then there's like this sequence of courses that you take, and really it's like every single person's on that same pathway, and it's just how far you're going to get on it in what period of time. Will you make it to algebra? Will you make it to geometry? Will you make it to algebra II? To trigonometry? It's almost like this game of like, well, where is everyone going to fall out, if you will. And this is all driven by this drive to four-year college for all, which is the thing we've been talking about a lot. And so I just think it's worth us noting that only about 8% of high school students actually take calculus. So that is the dropout rate, if you will, of math along this pathway. So I think one thing in the design we need to think about is this pathway concept. I think the second challenge is K-12 is not really connected to employers and to employment. Again, college for all, that's our focus. That's what we thought we needed to be doing. And when you're disconnected from the actual use and what people are doing, I think it's challenging. And then, Michael, there are very few teachers capable of teaching math. I think this is something we're really going to have to grapple with when I'm going through these 923 careers. You need to know a lot of math in order to teach math. And as we just showed, there's a lot of other careers where if you know math, you're going to be very competitive in those careers. They're very lucrative careers. They don't often require as much post-high school education and credentialing. And so why would you choose to be a math teacher? And I will just say math teachers for a long time have been among the very hardest to hire. There are tons of math positions that go literally unfilled every year. And I just see this problem growing and not shrinking. And so I just think those are some of the elements of the system that we need to think about solutions for if we're going to do something different here.

Defining math literacy in the age of AI

Michael Horn:

No, that all makes sense. I'm just curious, and you may not have a take on this if I'm putting you on the spot, but how would you think about defining what is math literacy, as opposed to the completion of algebra two, trigonometry, precal, calc, if that's the old sequence. How would you define that? Or how would you think about creating a definition? Maybe that's the fairer question. And then the second part of it is, I'm just sort of curious if you have a thought of does AI change any of that? We know a lot of these large language models don't do math particularly well today, but we also assume that that will change over time. So I'm just sort of curious how that enters into your thinking or no?

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah, this is such a good question. Well, the first one I love, because you sort of are inviting me to think about a rubric and learning objectives, which, as you know, in my nerdy world is…

Michael Horn :

You geek out there.

Diane Tavenner:

So it's really fun. So the first logical place I think people go is, well, rather than this traditional sequence that most of us are familiar with, sort of this pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, algebra II, et cetera, you go with an integrated mass sequence. And California this is one thing that the state has tried to do in this framework, is promote a more integrated approach, which conceptually I think is maybe in the right direction, in that it does seem to be a little bit more grounded in real world applications. Like, very rarely are you getting these pure sort of subjects when you're using math in the real world. I think it breaks down in a couple of ways. One, I don't know that it is truly connected to real world application. And two, I think in the teaching of it, it's not how math teachers are trained, unless your entire system is doing this when kids are having to move, shift back and forth like it's just a mess. And it's not recognized by college, which is driving things. So I'm not sure integrated math gets us where we need to be. So how would I think about what it would mean to be math literate and math fluent? One way we could start would just be to go look at what is the math that is being done in these careers and quite frankly, in real life. I mean, I don't know about you, but being a human, you have to manage your budget and your finances. What are the real world uses of math, concepts of math, 

Michael Horn:

And then pull back and define around that.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah.

Michael Horn:

Interesting. Okay.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah.

Michael Horn:

And I guess it'd be super interesting if AI starts to, in fact, change some of these professions. As you know, I'm seeing white papers come across my computer screen saying we don't need to worry about computation anymore. And I suspect there's a point where that's true, and there's a point where maybe it's not true that actually still learning these fundamental processes in the same way we do work about on phonemes and things like that are still building blocks to understanding how math is in fact functioning, even if the manipulation of equations or things like that become less important.

Diane Tavenner:

I had a really interesting conversation the other night with Irhum, who was on our second episode of this season related to AI about this very topic. And there's a big generational gap between us. And so he's always a little surprised about what I did in the old days. So he was saying to me, he's like, I am one of the few people where I literally use calculus in my job. So he is truly using calculus. So he's very mathematically literate and fluent, obviously at high levels. But he was advocating to me that what most people should be focusing on is statistics and data, significantly more to your exact point, and what you've been writing about, and certainly what I agree with and he was so surprised to hear my experience of doing research methods in college and statistics in college, and he's like, wait a minute, you used a calculator, and he's like, why would you do that?

Michael Horn:

Why wouldn't you just type into Excel?

Diane Tavenner:

Literally. The actual computational piece is just far less important to him. It's the conceptual understanding and the application and usage, because in his mind, we have all of these tools that do that. He's like, technology does that so much better than humans. The likelihood that a human is going to make a mistake is very, very high. It's inefficient for us to be doing that type of mathematical work. And in some ways, it's what becomes the turn off to a lot of people, I would argue.

Michael Horn:

Sure, 100%. I mean, when it becomes so about essentially formula manipulation, as opposed to understanding the conceptual underlying what you're, in fact doing right, it turns a lot of folks off. So that all makes sense. If we've identified the problem, we started to define how we would think about literacy and fluency in this world. We can admit we haven't nailed that yet, but sort of putting some questions out there and suggesting maybe some of this might evolve. Can we go to solutions now? 

Innovative solutions to our math challenges 

Diane Tavenner:

I guess my first suggestion would know, I don't know many people in America who are super excited about the presidential campaign this year. So maybe we take that one out and we sub in a different campaign. And here would be my vote for the campaign of America is that we just need to rethink the importance of being math literate in America and why it matters to each of us. Personally, I used to work with this incredible math teacher, Megan Taylor, and she always tried to drive the point home. She's like, no one would go to a party and casually say, like, “Yeah, I'm illiterate. I can't read,” and be fine with that. And yet, all the time, people, I'm terrible at math. I can't do math. And so this notion that we have gotten comfortable as a nation, that most people are terrible and can't do math, we need a campaign in the other direction of the importance of math and the importance of us collectively being literate at it. A changing expectation. I would want you and I, as starters, to be as passionate about young people coming out math literate as we are them coming out reading, writing literate. 

Michael Horn:

Love it. If in future episodes, we cover what presidential candidates should be saying about elections, we'll have to strike this from the record. But I agree, this would be a much more inspiring use of the next year of our national dialogue I suspect.

Diane Tavenner:

Indeed, that second one we've already touched on a little bit and we started to brainstorm there. But we need the math that's being taught. We just need to shift the focus, I think, in K-12 away from how is this a screener for a small number of kids into elite colleges? And how's that driving the whole system into what is the math that is meaningful and useful and used in the real world and really organizing our instruction around that? And again, we've talked about integrated math should be able to do this. Maybe it's the starting place, but it's falling short right now. It needs some work.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And on this one, and this may bleed into where I think you'll probably go next. But one of the thoughts that I've had is for those individuals like Irhum who like calculus, is going to be central to what they do, I want that pathway available, but I don't want it to be the expectation that that's the only option. And I don't want it to be seen as better or worse than, I just want it to be a choice that I've made because it speaks to me, because it aligns with things that I have learned about my passions and purpose and things of that nature. And it's a considered choice as opposed to something either done to me or an option that I don't even have. 

Diane Tavenner:

Completely, and I feel like we're going back to our roots of what we actually originally met over, which is personalization. And I think that this is probably going to be the most controversial. And I want to be really clear about what I'm saying and not saying here and the whole totality of it, but we need to totally rethink how we're teaching math from a needs outcome, but a practical perspective as well. We have technology, and AI is only going to help this. We have personalized math instruction options that are pretty darn good right now in the world that really, I would argue, can do a better job of personalizing instruction and creating a personal pathway for every single student to learn math from very young all the way through high school than what almost every math classroom in America can do. And then you add in the fact that you have to have this math classroom be as good as the next year and the next year and the next year, which is just unrealistic at this point. We need to personalize math instruction. We need to use technology to do it and that means it needs to look completely different than the way it does in school. And there are many implications to that, and we can take a minute to unpack those. But I'm guessing that you're aligned with me here on this.

Michael Horn:

100%. And I think it's interesting for people who hear this, they'll say, well, tracking does that. And in my mind it doesn't. Because while the opposite of tracking, putting everyone in the same thing at the same pace is not an answer, and I would totally argue against that. Tracking is a very blunt instrument on this. As we know, math is cumulative, right? So there's a certain number of power skills that translate, that are critical for learning what comes next and that branch you in different directions and so forth. And you just think about that individual and I'll just tell you a story. This happened a few years ago in Lexington, where I live, where I was talking with the father over coffee, and he was just anguishing because his then 8th grade daughter was trying to decide would she take honors geometry or regular track geometry, something like that, in the 9th grade. And I was just thinking what a terrible choice for a young person. She should just be taking math and she could move as fast or as slow as she needed to do along the skills. And then if because of the way our education system works, we needed to give it a name, afterwards we could, at the end of the year, look at what she had mastered and give it a name. But why were we forcing her to make this artificial choice that was either going to hold her back or create stress she couldn't handle and all these other things when the objective should just be learning the math. And to your point, we can do this in a personalized way. And then for people who I think may be hearing us and saying, well, that sounds really individualistic, well, great, because then I get to work in projects where I apply the math. I've worked in a group with people, but I'm not like being held back on the conceptual understanding because my neighbor is ahead or behind me at any given point in time. 

Diane Tavenner:

We're totally aligned, Michael, and I would just add even a little bit more like, let's describe what this could literally look like in a school so people could imagine it. Imagine a young person going to school starting from kindergarten all the way through college, and they are literally in a math software technology program, probably more than one over the time. Maybe it's a small cluster of them, but they are in that program continuously for their entire K-12 education. It's adaptive. It's growing with them. There is no limit on the amount of math they can learn.

Michael Horn:

There's no five-week review at the beginning of fall to see where you may have or may not have remembered.

Diane Tavenner:

You're just making progress. You're never sort of waiting on a class or like behind on a class. They're doing that. Imagine whatever, an hour or two or three a day, whatever it needs, they're doing that work in the school building. What can the adults be doing so they're not isolated? A couple of things. One, there's a whole sort of coaching and mentoring component to supporting young people to stay in there and hang in there and reflect on what they're doing and making sure that they're growing and monitoring their progress and diagnosing what's happening, if they're falling off and celebrating when they're advancing. So there's that role and component, which is important, but it doesn't have to be done by a math teacher and a math expert. And the second piece is, and you said it, if schools are teaching the way they should be, which is they have projects that kids are engaged in where they are really heterogeneously grouped and they are real world, and they're applying these concepts, you can have exactly what the California math framework is envisioning and what San Francisco wanted, which is all these kids working together using math concepts, regardless of where they are in their development and applying the math, being in a social setting, all of those things.

The obstacles to change 

Diane Tavenner:

So that's the type of thing we're talking about. But what that requires is changes in policy, changes in the role of the teacher, changes in course offerings, changes in how the transcript reflects what kids are learning, which feels a little daunting.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work on this, as you know, and I know that the traditional system, it's like, I mean, Clay would always say this when he would describe this Michigan manufacturing corporation case study, and he's like, there were metaphorical grooves in the floor that meant that the welding station only visited whatever station and would never go across the factory floor to see someone else over there. It was like they were just so well worn. And that's sort of where our system keeps getting stuck as well, I think. And you make sort of a change to any one of these, right? We're both pretty excited, I think, about the team teaching work that Arizona State is starting to roll across, the next education workforce stuff, but that's going to bump into something else. Or as we've talked about in this podcast, before you change seat time requirements, the Carnegie work that we've had Tim on talking about, Tim Knowles talking about, yeah, but then finance, then how you do scheduling, how you've credentialed, like all these things ripple in very complicated ways, that it's never just one simple answer.

Diane Tavenner:

No, well, this is your expertise now, but as we know, the big existing incumbent system doesn't really disrupt itself because something is always getting in the way. And so I do think we have to wonder, are there other ways to getting to this outcome because it's so important. And I do think this is where the rise of ESAs or educational savings account gets interesting. And especially if you combine that with what I think is an emerging opportunity for alternative methods to validate skills and knowledge. And we had some of that conversation with Tim when he was here in Carnegie and what they're doing with. But like, especially in the world of math where we have plenty of valid assessments that are valid and no one's…

Michael Horn:

Going to question.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah. And so what happens if the campaign works and families are like, oh, I want a good career and job and I need to know math and the school is not giving me a pathway to understand and learn the math I need. So I'm going to unbundle and I'm going to use some resources to go get that somewhere else.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. So before we wrap up here and move on to what we're reading, this just throws me back to season one where we had this conversation of the haves and the have nots in the schools and in a place like Palo Alto where all the kids had already taken the math class before they showed up for math, you know in summer school or in their Russian school of math after school or whatever it was. And my reflection is, well, okay, I mean, that's not how I would choose to spend my kids time or my money, but let's say they did it. Could you just say, like, yeah, you've passed an assessment that shows you have mastered these math concepts. Great. Why waste your time doing the exact same thing now? Unless you didn't really master it, in which case it's more about cementing it and we should be able to. These assessments can measure that as well. And I think you're right, the ESAs…It's funny how we both have come sort of around to this view that I think it creates a really important set of alternatives that aren't just schools to rethinking a lot of these structures. And you mentioned transcripts and grading and things like that that get very complicated. But when you get out of that world and you find other ways to validate and other ways to offer, it changes a lot of the questions that you ask in some pretty fresh, exciting ways that I think become more intuitive when they're not asked from the perspective of a parent or student in the system itself.

Diane Tavenner:

A lot there.

What we’re reading and watching  

Michael Horn:

That was a lot. All right, so let's get out of there. And besides thinking about math and researching all the math that will be used in careers, are you reading, listening to, watching anything outside of math? Because I don't know if you know this, we actually have someone on social media now who has created a Google Doc, apparently with all the recommendations we've given over the five seasons. No pressure, but anything good?

Diane Tavenner:

Oh, my God. Tracking to make sure I'm not repeating. Well, I think I may have mentioned this, Michael, but Rhett is in his last semester at Minerva. He's in London. So I'm going to head to visit him soon, and we're actually going to go up to Scotland. And I'm super interested in Scotland because there's so many interesting things there. It was one of the most literate countries at one point in time. Small, poor, yet highly literate, an enlightenment. They're really amazing thinkers. So I've just been immersing myself in Scottish history and reading, and I've sort of moved over to the fiction part of it now. So one of their most famous authors is Ian Rankin, and he has this famous detective, and all the novels take place in Scotland. And so I'm actually reading his kind of memoir, which is super fascinating right now.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Diane Tavenner:

Yeah. How about you?

Michael Horn:

That'll be an interesting trip. What about me? I was thinking about this beforehand. I have not finished a book in a while, but I've just been continuing to geek out on tennis, which I think I said last time on the two-minute tennis. And so I am now completely hooked on…Andy Roddick has a new podcast called Served. I'm completely hooked on that. And then there's this new rules of tennis, sort of money ball tennis sort of thing called Fuzzy Yellow Balls. And I've been reading a video book, and as you know, I don't…Irony since we're video recording this, but I don't love watching videos generally to learn, I prefer to read, but I finally, like, I subscribed to it several months ago and then was like, oh, it's videos, and put it aside. And then I've been obsessively going through this new singles rulebook. It helped me in my match the other day, and it's been awesome, but I feel like I'm unlearning literally everything I thought was true about how you play tennis over the last few months, so it's been really cool.

Diane Tavenner:

You're a great model for what we should probably be doing in education.

Michael Horn:

There you go, disrupting everything. And with that, we'll conclude and just say thank you for joining us on Class Disrupted. We'll see you next time.

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Tutoring has been a favorite intervention among school systems looking to get their students back on track after the pandemic. But not all programs are created equal. Results have been uneven at best.

I sat down with the Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez of Saga Education, a nonprofit that has been supporting schools to get tutoring right since long before the pandemic. We discussed the evolution of their model, what it will take to weave tutoring into the fabric of schools, sustaining programs after federal COVID funds are depleted, and the role of AI in the future of tutoring. As always, subscribers can listen to the podcast, watch the video, or read the transcript below.

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Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential and live a life of purpose. And here to help us think about that are two co-founders of Saga Education. We have Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez. Alan serves as the CEO and AJ is the Chief Policy and Public Affairs officer. But as we'll hear, Saga has been at this work of tutoring long before the pandemic made it a trendy topic. I remember meeting with both of them outside of Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had a great conversation about all the things that they were learning about how you do tutoring well, how you start to think about scale and a lot of the questions that were on their minds.

So, Alan, AJ, great to see you. Thanks for coming back and educating me once more.

Alan Safran: 

Yeah, great to see you again.

AJ Gutierrez: 

Yeah, it's great to be here, too. And usually after meeting us for the first time, people don't want anything to do with us. So I'm actually surprised and excited to be here.

Saga’s founding story 

Michael Horn: 

When you reached out, I was like, yes, I need an update. I want to know what's going on, but fill our audience in first. And Alan, I'll start with you. What's the founding story behind Saga Education? Because it has an interesting origin story that is perhaps not what most people think of when they think of tutoring.

Alan Safran: 

We go back to Aristotle and Socrates thinking about individual tutorial, but a little more modern. I was Executive Director of the Match charter school in Boston. AJ was a 9th grader when I first met him at that school, and Mike Goldstein was the founder. And Mike had the idea, look, kids are coming to school like AJ and his classmates, many of them three years behind grade level. What do you do when you're a normal school with a normal schedule, with normal classrooms? You can't do it. A teacher, no matter how heroic, has a hard time differentiating in a class, say, at 9th grade, where there's an 8th grade differential between some kids coming in like six years beyond grade level and other kids coming in two years ahead. It's impossible. The burden we put on teachers.

What the expectation is for teachers to reach grade level skills is impossible. So how do you structurally address that? So Mike had the idea, let's build a dorm in our building. Bingo. Let's recruit tutors from around the country, like Teach for America recruits teachers. Let's recruit tutors. He said, what I think of the idea, I thought it was crazy. But then we worked together. We started it in 2004 and within a few years we had a reputation.

The US Department of Ed said we were in the top seven charter schools in the country. And the results for kids like AJ were remarkable. And my own story is I come from two public school teachers, so I long have had in my blood this desire to get justice for kids. It's a phrase not often used for teaching, but getting justice for kids whom the system has not provided enough for. For me, that's a big theme of my life. And AJ's origin story is even more interesting than that.

AJ’s journey through and back to Saga

Michael Horn: 

AJ, why don't you give yours and how you go from a 9th grade student, the beneficiary of this tutoring model, to starting an organization to think about tutoring more widespread, not just in match education.

AJ Gutierrez:

It's certainly been an extraordinary experience for me, just working alongside Alan, who's known me since I was a 9th grade student and he was my chess coach. For me, it's such a pleasure to bring a model that had such an impact on my life to lives of students internationally, not just in the United States. We've had some exciting work and research done in the Netherlands, for example. But as Alan mentioned, it was really game changing for me. When I was entering 9th grade, I was really disconnected from school as a c minus c plus student. I grew up with a single mother with three kids. And for the people who are listening, who are parents, you know how hard it is to keep up with day to day. Can you imagine working multiple jobs and trying to stay connected to what's going on in school? And that's exactly what's happened with my mother.

And every year just got harder and harder. And so when I attended Match, I had a chance to work with the tutor, it was really game changing for me. But as I look back at that experience, I don't really think about it from an accelerated learning perspective, although that was really important. But the opportunity to really connect with someone in a meaningful way who knew my name, who knew my birthday, who communicated with my mom, was so amazing to me. And for my tutor, getting to know his life story and really discovering there's just so much that we had in common was really important to me. So it matched. As Alan mentioned, it had a lot of traction, success. Some other charter schools replicated the model and we had a chance to work to see if we could bring this model into traditional district school settings.

And that was at the early stage of my career in education and I was kind of thrown into the frying pan because the first time we tried to replicate this work was in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when it was under school receivership. So the state took over the district due to academic performance reasons. And at that moment, it was the greatest turnaround in high school math in Massachusetts state history on the local state exam in terms of what they call the student growth percentile. So that was a really great indication that we could be onto something here. And roughly around that time in 2011, the University of Chicago Education Lab was conducting randomized control research studies on a social cognitive behavioral therapy program called becoming a man, which was the catalyst for My Brother's Keeper initiative for President Obama. And they wanted to see if you can couple this cognitive behavioral therapy with really intensive tutoring. And so we work with them as part of several randomized control research studies, which was, at the time, really encouraging. It was one of the most significant academic gains I've seen that's been rigorously evaluated in US public education.

You could double or triple math learning compared to students who didn't receive tutoring. We started Saga to continue, explore how we can develop and scale this approach. I mean, everyone knows tutoring is a great way to help kids. What's the first thing you do once your child starts falling behind academically? You get a tutor for them. And so the question is, like, how do we give access to this type of resource to families and students who wouldn't otherwise have had access to it? And so, as we try different models and permutations, try and understand the impact through rigorous randomized trials like the gold standard for research.

Scaling the early model and adding live online 

Michael Horn:

So stay on that for a moment, because you've done a ton of research, as you mentioned, through the various iterations, you've had. The base Saga model, and I know you've iterated it in recent years, but coming into the pandemic, the base model that you all had, describe what that actually looked like from a student and tutor perspective in terms of the time, relationship, and number of other students may be with them or not, and so forth. Just let's be super clear about what this looked like.

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Alan Safran:

Let me take that. So the base model had two permutations I'm going to highlight. One was the classic, the Coke classic. One tutor across two kids, live in a classroom, no technology, build relationships, have the kid in front of you every day of the year. It's a period on the class schedule, in the 9th grade schedule taken out of an elective period, or for some other time. And that was it. That got the results of the University of Chicago published from the 2013 to 15 study of 0.26 standard deviations, which is up to two years of extra learning. Up to two and a half years of extra learning in one year.

That was the base model. We varied that before the pandemic and had a tutor across from four kids. Now they weren't tutoring four, they're tutoring two. The other two were working on an adaptive practice tool like Matthia or Alex or Khan, something practice. They tried to get the tutor's attention. Tutor said, look, you'll have me tomorrow because the next day the kids on the platform will get the live. Kids on the live will get the platform. The idea of that cocktail was use the relationship of lifetime to motivate the kids to take the tech time seriously.

And if they take the tech practice time seriously, they generate data that's useful to the tutor in the live time. So we went to that model. University of Chicago also evaluated that recently published results, same effectiveness at about 60% of the cost. So we were already driving down price. Keep maintaining impact. And even before the pandemic, we had a third flavor, which was live online tutoring. College Board challenges said, look, you should look at live online. We don't know why.

[We] said we'll look at it. We did an RCT in Chicago and New York and showed exciting, dramatic results for just 20 hours of dosage in a live online environment. So Dave Coleman, the CEO of College Board then and still was perspicacious. I don't think he knew that COVID was coming, but he knew something was real about live online. Wanted us to test it and we found it pretty valid and it's going to be important to the future of tutoring.

Michael Horn:

Stay on that for a moment. The live online, because I think that's where we'll just say, like, the pandemic took off. Everyone got excited about tutoring as an answer to all of the challenges, whatever you want to call them. The learning that was lost out on during that time and online was a big part of it. A lot of those, as we know, have not delivered. So when you say live online, what are the features of those? I think you said 20 hours a week or something like that. I'm not sure what you just said, but tell us features like how much time are we really talking? Is it the same person every single time? What are the features? How many other students, et cetera?

Alan Safran:

Yeah, so I should clarify, when we say live online, we mean a live human tutor. By the way, we talk about AI and bots in that, but for now, it's live human tutor interacting with a kid in the vertical environment of a platform as opposed to the horizontal table that we sat at in person world. So we did live online trial. It was 20 hours of dosage in that trial with the college board on the SAT, but now live online that we do in New York City. It's our model. In Chicago, some of our schools and others of our schools, it is at the same pace, same frequency. It's a class on your schedule. Whether it's one day a week or every other day, it's a class on your schedule.

Your tutor comes into your platform live, and you build a relationship with that tutor. The ratio is roughly the same. The training of the tutor is the same. The qualifications of the tutor is same. The labor force, though, is dramatically bigger than the ones you could find down the street from the school. That's why I have written a piece with Bob Runze, head of Chiefs for Change, recently in EdWeek, that said, look, the labor issue is going to be a big limiter to the potential to scale tutoring to what we think are the necessary focus, which is 3 million kids. We need 100,000 tutors to do that. Live online will open up that pool.

You can either draw a circle around a district school with like 20 miles if you want to have neighborhood live online, or you can go nationwide. You can go global if you want it. But let's say nationwide, the pool is so big that you'll be able to be selective in the tutors you hire. So on average, with a bigger funnel, the quality of tutors hired through live online will be better on average than the ones you can find in person locally. We think it's a piece of the future of education, in particular of tutoring.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting. Let me just make sure I got this straight. When you've studied it, are you still seeing, I think you said point two six standard deviations. Are you still seeing something like that?

Alan Safran: 

We don't have an RCT on live online yet. We have some quasi experimental results on live online. We have our own internal measures that we actually have measured because we run programs now in four cities. It's not a big part of what Saga does. What Saga really does is help states and district to build their capacity. But in our four cities, we have some live online models and some in person. We've compared them on our internal measures. Very little degradation in student outcomes.

Hard outcomes like academic soft outcomes like student engagement and student belonging, and much higher tutor satisfaction in the online environment, which leads to tutor retention and less attrition so very encouraging. Early signs in live online. We're going to get a quasi-experimental design out of New York City with Jim Kemple of NYU's center analyzing propensity, matching set analysis retrospectively and current year, and I'm looking forward to the results of that. I'm optimistic that lava line is pretty good. It'll get better as we do it over time and as the country is starting to do it in some states like New Mexico and some districts like Ector County, Texas, which I visited just recently, it can be effective. It's got to have some key elements though.

Elements of high-impact tutoring

Michael Horn:

Okay, so let's talk about that then. AJ, turning to you, because we talk a lot about high dosage tutoring or high impact tutoring, there's different phrases right for it. What are the critical non negotiables that you all have discerned that need to be there for the tutoring to be effective?

AJ Gutierrez:

Yeah, many of the people listening to this right now are probably wondering what we mean when we say high impact tutoring. And usually when you think about tutoring, it's like homework help or after school. What we're trying to do is encourage people to think differently about it, where it's just part of the fabric of school design, where it's part of the regular school day, it's integrated to what's going on, it's aligned with what classroom instruction is. The tutor works with his or her student consistently throughout the year, maybe two to three times a week. Do you best keep those parents consistent and you provide coaching and ongoing feedback to tutors the same way we have those expectations for our teachers. And Phil, when Saga in the early days in our thinking around this, we were so fired up about the research, we're like, yeah, we're going to serve 20,000 students directly. We're going to keep growing. Pandemic comes along, flips k twelve education on its head.

We're really eager, but we just noticed there's just a dramatic need. And after having conversations with folks at the Bill of Melinda Gates foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation, we just recognized that given the need, we can't possibly scale to serve this directly. And our thinking really started to shift from the spirit of trying to replicate to a much more practical approach for scaling evidence based programs that's focused around adaptation. And what we're trying to do is empower schools and districts to implement high impact tutoring on their own. So what is it that we can do to provide them the resources, tools, technical assistance so that they can do that and trying to understand whether districts can do this effectively on their own, what student outcomes look like, what are the steps necessary to transfer what we know to be best practices to districts? And what we've discovered is that high impact tutoring really is a framework, it isn't a model. And there's a lot of opportunities to play around with different concepts, including thinking about ways you could integrate artificial intelligence to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of tutors. And there's so much that is worthy of exploration and I think we're excited to be part of the exploration. And lots of other merging organizations also are thinking about this issue and we're going to continue to share those insights.

The University of Chicago has a large-scale randomized trial in multiple school districts. Right now there are about 16,000 students who are part of this RCT with aspirations for this to increase even more. And it'll be the largest randomized trial on tutoring that's ever been conducted nationwide. And the early data on that is really encouraging and suggests that districts can do this. And that's really good news from a scale perspective, because if we can make this part of the fabric of school design at critical growth years, you don't have to provide a tutor for every single student, every grade. You maybe can create the conditions where as part of the K-12 experience, maybe students can have one or two years of really intensive personalized support to keep on track for graduation.

Weaving tutoring into the fabric of schools

Michael Horn:

So I want to stay on this. We'll go to the technology and AI toward the end, I want to come back to that. But what you just said, that you are now increasingly playing really a support function in the ecosystem to make sure that districts, states, schools are putting the right conditions in place so that whatever model or form of high impact tutoring that they put into place, that it'll be effective, that they can be confident that it's actually going to help students make progress in line with what they hope. Just say a little bit more about what that work actually looks like. And does that mean you're helping districts or schools pick out which tutor provider to work with? What does that actually look like? AJ, let's stay with you. And then, Alan, I'm going to flip in a moment to what this looks like in the school design itself, but I want to stay like at the level of support and helping them stand up these programs. What does that really look like?

AJ Gutierrez:

Well, Alan's like Mr. Miyagi right now. It's like wax on wax off, with the district leaders, I mean, that's something we're exploring now, what does it really take to help districts get this right? And we're really excited about that. It's really tricky. It's really complicated. And the interesting thing is, what we're trying to figure out is with Saga, we can gain as much as, like two and a half years of math growth. But even if a district could get half of that or a quarter of that, I mean, that's still game changing and that's still really exciting. And so I think part of the work is really providing hands-on support with program design and implementation, giving them access to things like our curriculum.

Some of the technologies we're using help them think about, how do you schedule this in the regular school day? What is providing training for the managers of the tutors? Providing the training for the tutors checks for fidelity, observing the tutors and providing feedback, just to name a few of the ways we're providing support to.

Scaling through customizability 

Michael Horn: 

No, that's super helpful. Okay, Alan, I'm going to turn to you here because I think the first time we met, I was like, yes, finally, someone's thinking about bringing the best of tutoring and scaling it. Because as I think about it, from a disruptive innovation standpoint, as you know, disruptive innovations get their start in areas of non consumption. And by my estimates, some 80% of students weren't getting the tutoring that they needed when they needed in this country for different things. And so you seem to have started to come up with some secret sauces that allow us to scale this more and more right online, one to four alternate days, different things like that. How do we start to weave this now into the design of schools themselves? Because, as you know, my passion has been how do we make schools places that can truly personalize in the right ways for an individual child whenever they need it, as opposed to thinking that they all need the same thing on the same day just because they have the same birth year.

Alan Safran:

Yeah.

Michael Horn: 

So what does that look like?

Alan Safran: 

Yeah, I'm better on this over a couple of beers and wine, but I'll try to condense it to a couple of minutes without the alcohol. So it's hard. It's a big battleship out there, the American public school system, 55 million kids turning that around really hard. So you got to get buy in. Buy in will come locally when people locally...And this starts with parents, by the way, I think. Parents, the major secret sauce here. Parents of kids who got tutoring in these Covid years and are at risk of losing tutoring for their next child who's coming up the pipeline, parents of multiple kids become a secret force to drive tutoring's continuation.

So turn the battleship around. You've got to get buy in from parents. You've got to get buy in from teachers. Fairfax County, Virginia, great example of this. They came to us, a group called J. Pallet of Cambridge introduced us. We went to them, said, look, we'd like to help you. They hired a district wide coordinator, terrific guy named Joe Ash, and he said, look, we want to do this, but I want to go slow.

I want to hire a principal who knows the work. The schools know him. He'll go school by school. Get principal, buy in. Give him a month to talk to the teachers, like, work it out, get the buy in. That's number one. You get buy in, then you start it small. Matt Kraft has said, start slow to get big.

You got to start tutoring slow to get good. There have been example[s] of starting big that still get results. Big city in America. But the better strategy. They started with one school in Fairfax. They have 130 now in a two year period. So start slow, get buy in, show results, show excitement. Now, I visited Fairfax, Orange County, Florida, Hector County, Texas, in recent weeks.

Now, the teachers say, I can't live without this. And here's what happened. The buy in comes not from getting a vendor necessarily. They don't know. They don't know the tutors. They don't know how they're selected. But maybe have the district put the tutors, whatever they are, whether they're district hired or vendor hired, into the teacher's classroom. The big worry, I think, by teachers here is that tutors are going to, we've heard this earlier, tutor is going to replace you in your jobs.

Well, no. Tutors are there to do two things which very few interventions accomplish. They support hardworking teachers who need help in differentiating and personalizing, and they support kids who are not getting their needs met because of the lack of structure that allows for teachers to personalize. So tutoring is an intervention that serves both the most important constituencies in education, which are the kids and their teachers. Building into the classroom is what Fairfax did, Orange county did, and it's not what we did. Talk about adaptation. Our model is not being replicated. We're not looking, as AJ said, for our model to be replicated.

We're looking for the framework, the framework as AJ described it. But let them vary it. Like, let them go to a different pool of tutors. They're going to part-time tutors. We tend to have full-time tutors. They're going to build it as part of the classroom. We tend to be our own classroom. A thousand flowers can bloom here.

But the way to turn this battleship around to scale this is to solve the time, people and money factors. We have answers to that. But initially to get the buy in from the people on the ground, that it's not being imposed on them, that they're going to have choices in the model here. But there are some key conditions that we know will lead to a better likelihood of success.

The cardinal sins of tutoring implementation

Michael Horn:

When the practices have gone off, what are the cardinal sins, to your point? And I couldn't agree more. Start small to go big. That's not always been the way of districts.

Alan Safran:

Right. Well, they're balancing the urgency of now, the fear surge.

Michael Horn:

They're balancing urgency of now, equity. There's a lot of things for sure, but when you say that, just what are the cardinal mistakes besides the we started all at once or something like that.

Alan Safran:

There's three. There have been three. We saw. One is they've asked their own teachers to do the tutoring. Teachers are broke...Their backs are breaking. Now even offering them $30, $40, $50 an hour to buy out their planning time, and I've seen this in a big city in America, is a disastrous pathway. It will break the back of teachers.

They will not succeed and it's not sustainable. Second big mistake was hiring, putting tutoring after school and on demand. That's not tutoring, that's just homework help. Like there's a company called paper. They're out of school time. They're offering the most. They say it's the most equitable because all kids can access will. Very few kids do access it? The ones who do or tend to be more motivated.

And we want to access the kids support the kids who are coming to school and meeting us halfway by showing, going up who are far behind grade level, not the kids who are highly motivated, whose parents could otherwise pay for it. So doing it out of school time, homework help was the second cardinal sin. The third is again, like just going too fast, too soon. But the way they decided to go fast, in many cases, knowing the labor force was limited, they said, look, ten to one, we'll be tutoring ten kids per tutor. Texas has that as a statute. There's some states that have five to one as part of the stats. That's wrong. Ten to one is not tutoring.

You're not going to find the pool of people who can handle ten kids at a time. You could find people. This is one of the great conclusions by the University of Chicago. The skills that it takes to be a tutor of one, two, three, or four kids are far different from the skills of tutoring class of 25 or 30. When you make a ten to one or five to one, you create a conditions in which the tutor is not going to succeed and then the initiative is not going to succeed, and then kids are not going to succeed, and we've failed. In another ed reform initiative, you got to start it with ratios of tutor to kids that are manageable by that labor force, not go to one to ten. I understand why it was a way to save money and to reduce the number of laborers you need, but it's not tutoring.

Sustaining funding for tutoring programs

Michael Horn:

Got it. That's super helpful. One more question on this, because you mentioned money as part of the equation, and obviously the thing that I think a lot of people have been worried about is federal funding that came in in the wake of COVID that a lot of it has gone to tutoring. We know it's drying up. So where does the money come from to be able to continue to support this on an ongoing basis?

Alan Safran:

Yeah, there's one more painful way, which is to repurpose what schools already get. Schools get lots of federal funds, about 5% of the budget, but it's about 1000 per pupil, steady state title one for schools that are serving high poverty kids, that's certainly enough money to provide a high impact tutoring program of quality. So repurposing some Title I dollars for the subset of kids that we say in grade three who need help getting over the literacy bar, and in grade eight or nine who need help getting over the algebra 1 bar. District has huge pool. Take a piece of it, fund tutoring efforts there. That's hard because they've got to unfund what they're already spending. Title one dollars are on. That's the harder one.

The easier one is find new federal funds that are replacements for the departing federal funds. The two best sources of that will fund the labor force at 80% of the cost of tutoring is on labor. The tutors, AmeriCorps, state commissions for Americorps have money. They distribute it every year. It's an application process, and they have made a priority of looking for high quality tutoring programs to fund. So a district can become an Americorps partner or a vendor can become an AmeriCorps partner. It becomes a subsidy for the cost of the wage.

Nearly all the cost of the wage of a tutor will be covered by federal AmeriCorps funds. The money is there. The second piece of federal funding is federal work study college undergraduates. Here's a set of kids who receive financial aid, subset of kids in college who receive work study as part of their financial aid, separate from grants or loans. They get a work study, have to work for the money. The college gets federal work study dollars. It's been around for 25 years. They fund the kids to get jobs in the community.

And one of the priorities now of the federal work study office is tutoring programs. So if you're a district, say, look, I want 20 kids from the local college down the street or 30 kids from the local community college down the street. If they're getting federal work study dollars, it'll subsidize 50% to 90% of the wage of those tutors. The tutors will get good money, say $20 an hour for a college undergrad, maybe 25. The college could subsidize 90% of that if the district negotiates hard. And we did that back in Boston in 2002, we had MIT saying, look, we're doing 90%. Harvard said they do 75. I said to Harvard, look, MIT is doing 90.

Okay, Harvard did 90. So you create a little competitiveness that only works in neighborhoods where if you're going live in person, you've got colleges to tap from. If you're rural America, again, you're going to have to go live online. But again, with colleges in rural America to become a source of labor subsidized by federal work study. So we think it's existing funds, federal title I funds, new federal funds, Americor and work study. And the final piece is just rethinking what a school does. You've written a book called from reopen. To reinvent, schools need to reinvent what is school.

School doesn't have to be only teachers. A class of 25. Throughout the day, it can be different set of people, adults working with kids. ASU, Arizona State is doing great thinking on this. Brent Bannon, I recommend him for his work. But a pool of tutors, who supports teachers and actually, the payoff here is financial. The return on investment is financial. You hold on to kids at grade three, literate kids, they graduated a four times graduation rate nine years later.

You hold on to kids to pass algebra one. They graduated a four times graduation three years later. And since school, local and state funding is tied to kids who are enrolled in your school, if you've lost them as a dropout at the end of grade nine, you've lost three years of their future funding, $45,000. Invest 1000 of your title. One dollars at grade nine to get some insurance that more of those kids will graduate. You've made the correct financial decision. That has a better ROI than anything else studied.

The role of AI in tutoring 

Michael Horn: 

Super interesting. Okay, as we start to wrap up here, AJ, you talked about technology. You mentioned AI. Alan, you talked about how if you pair technology alongside of the tutoring and create this reinforcement loop, what are y'all imagining right now? Could be on the horizon. Obviously, Khanmigo captured a lot of imaginations. I will tell you, Sal gave me an early license on it. I put one of my kids on it when she was home sick from school one day last year, and she was coding by the end of the day, it was pretty cool to watch. But what are you all dreaming up? Is an appropriate use of these technologies coming on the horizon to boost the sorts of effects you're seeing? Oh, AJ, you're muted.There you go.

AJ Gutierrez:

It's a super exciting time we're in, in education with the dawn of artificial intelligence. And there was a really interesting McKinsey study where they looked at consultants on the lower end of the bell curve, giving them access to AI. And at the end of the day, those consultants actually outperform some of the most know McKinsey consultants. And I think a big takeaway from that is that these types of technologies can supercharge human beings, and so now becomes more important than ever, I think making sure that people have access and know how to use these tools effectively, because it could exacerbate inequities if only a subset of our population knows how to use them effectively. But with that in mind, I think these types of technologies can supercharge our tutors. I can imagine a really interesting study on combining tutoring with Congo and what kind of outcomes you can get. Maybe a tutor can serve more students. Maybe it could be more prescriptive in providing guidance to tutors on how to be effective.

Maybe it reduces the amount of prep time it takes. And so these are some of the things that are worthy of exploration that we're really excited about. The most sophisticated AI project we're working on right now is in partnership with the University of Colorado School of Mines, where we're looking at developing a scalable way to provide ongoing coaching for tutors. And from our perspective, that Saga is really the secret sauce, I think, for success. And this technology can provide coaching and feedback just as effectively as an expert observer on a set of instructional strategies. And we think that's a really great way to supplement ongoing coaching. And what it does is look at the discourse that's taking on has affective analysis of different emotional states of students and what's really causing engagement, what kind of moves that tutors are doing that they're leading to understanding. And so that type of information, I think, could help us get a sense pretty quickly the quality of tutoring that's happening, but also be really prescriptive in how we support tutors.

And so that's some of the ways in which we're excited about how these technologies can really transform how we think about the scale of this type of resource so we can support more students.

Michael Horn:

Very cool, Alan. AJ, thanks for the continued work and rigor you're putting behind the work to make sure that what we do is actually helping students make progress. Appreciate you both. And in a couple years, when you have some more insights on how technology further changes or doesn't this game. Either way, whatever you learn, love you to come back on and inform the audience.

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Where did you turn for help in deciding what you wanted to do when you grew up?

For more and more students, CareerVillage.org, an online platform that connects high schoolers to advice from real-world professionals, is serving as a trusted guide in navigating their career paths. I sat down with the nonprofit’s founder, Jared Chung, to discuss how they are sourcing and delivering career advice; developing AI that enables the scale needed to address the massive need; and ensuring the reliability, transparency, and accessibility of their services through their growth and innovation. I was particularly struck by some of the intersections with the book I’m working on to help people find their next job, which you’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks. As always, subscribers can listen or watch the conversation or read the transcript below.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Time Topic

00:54. The story behind Career Village

03:48 Career Village’s scale and services 

09:31 How end users engage with the platform

11:25 The AI Career Coach 

16:44 User reactions of the new AI

18:59 Ensuring the quality and transparency of the AI, from source data to end product 

26:18. Building access through scale and ensuring equity

29:36. The promise of the AI Career Coach and where to learn more

Michael Horn: 

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us on the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And part of that, of course, is really navigating the world and transitions from education into career and making sure that you're finding something that really helps you make progress, not just in the jobs that you hold, but in your life. And it's consistent with the purpose that you have. And to help us think about that, today we have Jared Chung. He is the founder and executive director of Careervillage.org, which we're about to hear a lot more about. So, Jared, welcome. It's great to see you.

Jared Chung:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Michael Horn:

I'm excited to learn about what you all are doing. I know you have a number of initiatives in AI and elsewhere that are very cutting-edge. But before we get into that, just level set us all what is Careervillage.org, and what's your founding story behind it?

Jared Chung: 

Careervillage.org is a nonprofit organization based here in the United States that helps people prepare for careers. And we do that using technology. We do that using people, the power of people. And importantly, we do it at a very large scale. And the reason we focus on scale is that the scale of the need is massive. The number of people who need support, advice, guidance, and information to prepare for their first or next career move is nearly ubiquitous. So, we focus on scale. The origin story, I think that it's almost such a universal mission. Everybody finds in it something that speaks to a part of their lived experience or the communities that they're in. For me, I, as a young person, was very career-oriented because I cared about financial stability for myself, and for my family. When I was in education, I knew that I wanted to get a job after an education that was going to allow me to put food on the table. And that was pretty much my only calculus at that time. I got very lucky to have some people in my life who served as mentors for me to help me navigate my way into college, help me ask questions that I was able to get answered about careers and help me navigate my way in my first job. So, when I started my first job, I turned back and was mentoring and advising young people, volunteering with nonprofit organizations and youth development, and helping young people prepare for careers. So that's kind of what brought me into this work and just frankly, I just love it. Being able to talk to a young person about careers, talk to an adult who's looking to make a career switch, it's so unifying. It's like such a window to connect with people and such a great service, and I think that was what draws me, has always drawn me into this work. But our staff is drawn into this work for a variety of other reasons. Sometimes because they are immigrants to the country and had to navigate the labor market, sometimes because they had experiences in their lives where they felt that they needed to get into an occupation where they weren't well represented and didn't know how exactly to get started. I think that each of us brings something unique to the mission, but it's really unifying.

Career Village’s scale and services

Michael Horn:

No, that's super helpful. Now, you mentioned scale, so give us a sense, I guess a little bit of a lightning round here, right? Give us a sense of what kind of scale are we talking about. I know from your website this isn't just like sort of one-off mentoring conversation.

Jared Chung:

No, not at all. The first thing I should say is that Career Village, as you mentioned, offers multiple services. And if you take those services, and we've been doing it now for 12 years, if you look over the long arc of our existence and the services that we offer and add them all up, what you'd find is that we have reached millions of people with career information advice. The latest count is, I think over 7 million people engaged in this in one way or another, either as a learner or as someone who is giving career information or advice to a learner, mostly in the United States. But we have had beneficiaries in virtually every country on earth. I think the last count was 190 different countries where we've had people coming to access the career information that we are putting out. So, when we talk about scale, we are talking about millions of people and we know that even that, although we're very proud, hundreds of millions of people need this service at any given moment. We still very much ask ourselves the question, how can we continue to expand the scale of our services to match the scale of the need? 

How end users engage with the platform

Michael Horn:

Yeah for the book that I'm working on right now, our estimate is that in any given year a billion people worldwide are switching jobs. So, no question about it. I'm curious, how are students engaging in it from the top? What's the biggest pain points that they come to you all with and how are you reaching the students? Is this a direct-to-consumer or is this something you're working with colleges, universities, and high schools around?

Jared Chung:

Yeah. Well, I think traditionally Career Village has been most known… I think we're most known for one product and one service in particular, which is an online career Q&A platform. This is our standout performer, and on that platform, learners come in and can ask any question about any career. And we have now over 150,000 people who are working professionals from all walks of life who answer those questions on the web platform. So, a classic Internet Q&A forum, but really tailored for this particular purpose. And the platform is really, really good at doing this. The community is really good at doing this. They answer questions quickly. You get multiple answers per question. The quality of the answers is really high. And the community is also incredibly accommodating of wherever the learner may be in their journey. So, they may be asking a very sort of what you might think of as an entry-level question, a basic exploration question. They also might be asking a very advanced question comparing particular credentials that they might want to get, or how they might go about improving a cover letter or other topics. I think that the thing I do want to highlight is that the breadth of questions people have is so massive that it can become hard sometimes to say, well, what's the main use case? Because there really isn't one. We get such a huge breadth of occupational interest. There are some spikes, like TV careers, programmers, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. You get some spikes in those areas, but there's such a long tail of occupational interest. And I think that's one of the things we've learned that I want to communicate broadly to the sector, is that if you only provide support for particular occupational verticals, you're going to miss a lot of students who are in the very long tail of occupational interest that you don't support. So being able to say any question about any career is an important promise to be able to make to a learner.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. The service you're providing, frankly…We have this nine-step process we've been writing through, and part of it is helping people flesh out, as you were basically alluding to, divergent prototypes for what they could do with that next job. And one of the biggest things is understanding what do people actually do in those jobs and how does it line up with the things that bring me energy and the skills that I have. This is a great platform, it strikes me, for that engagement.

Jared Chung: 

Among the most common archetypes of questions is walk me through a day in the life of insert occupation. How will my life be different how will my experience be different if I'm an ER nurse or a pediatric nurse? What might my day be like if I'm an auto mechanic versus if I'm doing some other occupation? So, it's super, super common. To some extent, learners would like to hear that from first-person narrative. And that's one of the reasons why I think that this online platform with a large community behind it has had such success.

Michael Horn:

No, that makes a lot of sense. So, last question before we switch to the AI piece of this. That is, I imagine, turbocharging all of this. I'm just curious, how are you reaching the students? Is this direct? They find you. This has become a big community, obviously, or do you work with schools to access the students and help give them the support that they need?

Jared Chung:

Yeah, we've worked with schools, educational, and nonprofit organizations since day one. We started off in classrooms providing this program and service. However, after a couple of years of building up the Q&A content, the direct-to-learner online audience started to really balloon and at some point, eclipsed the population that was coming in through a classroom. And that's continued to this day, where the vast majority of the people that we reach with the online Q&A platform are actually finding us on their own, either on Google or LinkedIn or social media. Sometimes when they are actively searching for the answer to a career question could be Thursday night, they're on their cell phone at home. It's not a happy moment, it's an anxious moment, wondering something about the job that they're looking to get into and searching the Internet. It's hit or miss of whether you'll find something good. And often they will find Career Village. That is the step that brings them into the community. If we earn their trust and create a welcoming space. The direct-to-learner channel has really become by far the largest channel for that particular service.

The AI Career Coach

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So now you've launched this AI career coach. Tell us what that is all about. How does it complement what you're doing and what does it allow you to do that maybe you weren't before?

Jared Chung:

Yeah, listeners probably have at this point heard AI attached to everything in the world. I think what I'd say is this use case is so perfect for large language models in the current era of AI. And I really believe that personalization is one of AI, and education, I think is one of the real shining spots of AI. I'm not an AI promoter like the whole world should have AI everything. I'm not like that. But I do think in education, personalization is so valuable and AI really allows us to scale that. We are seeing huge impacts of using AI in the field of career development. I’ll give a little bit of history. We started the AI career coach project really, like pretty much right at the beginning of 2023. So, we moved pretty quickly on it. And I think the reason for that is that we have been already using machine learning in our community for quite a while for sometimes simple things like automatically categorizing content or flagging things. But pretty quickly we realized that as a text-based online platform, a lot of the operational stuff that we were helping our advisors with could be supported with large language models to give them extra tips to make their content more comprehensive or to offer them some grammar checks or spelling check, things like that. We started to play around with that and then pretty quickly realized that we could do so much more. We went out to put large language models right in front of some of our users and just immediately saw that some of the things that learners want to get practice with, like a mock interview or writing a cover letter or things like that, could be instantly available with large language models. So, we started the AI career coach project. And really what it's trying to do is to be the world's greatest career coach. Instantly accessible but working in collaboration with the educators who are already supporting the learner. And I think that part is really important. It's a chat-based, real-time chat application. You go in as a learner and you pick off of a menu of activities that have been predefined and pre-optimized to be helpful to you in your career journey, and you engage in those chats. And the coach is bringing in third-party resources. It's doing monitoring and quality control, but then also it's integrated into the work that your guidance counselor or your teacher or your program leader is already doing with you. They can see what kind of activities you're doing. They can get tips from the coach on areas where they can support you in your next step. They can assign activities to you, and it serves as almost an assistant to them to give them more time to spend their energy doing the stuff they really want to do, which is one-to-one work with the learners.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, I as a student might find this resource, but then the real magic is I connect it to the team around me who's supporting me, guiding me in my college, career, whatever choices. And they're also getting feedback or reports about me. In some ways, you become almost a network hub with this AI in the middle, just giving insights or prodding or feedback, whatever's required to the different parties that are supporting that student.

Jared Chung:

I'd say yes, however, very intentionally, not in the middle, very intentionally. It's a three-party collaboration.

Michael Horn:

Got it.

Jared Chung: 

Even to the extent where we're looking at potentially actually having the chat not be between just the learner and the coach but giving the ability for the educator to be in the chat as well. I think what we've learned from the testing of the career coach so far has been that learners don't want to just get help from a person or just get help from an AI. They want to have that real integrated hybrid. They want both because there are times when you want to go to a trusted person to talk about certain things and times when you want to get that instant dialogue and sort of safe space exploration that you can get from chatting with an AI. We're really leaning into not in between, not in the middle, but it's a space where there's this three-party collaboration happening.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So, have you found people excited about this? Are they skeptical? You mentioned AI cheerleading. 

Jared Chung:

Right off the bat.

Michael Horn:

They’re excited right off the bat?

Jared Chung: 

Right off the, well, I'll say the learners right off the bat. The benefits of personalization, literally day one of testing. And just to give some context, I mentioned that we started the project very early in 2023. We went into beta testing with real students in real classrooms back in, I want to say, July of 2023. Everything moves so fast these days, that it's kind of hard to remember, but I'll just tell those who are listening, that was pretty early. There was very little AI large language model chat going on in classroom settings. Right on the very first day, I was in a school library for a summer school program watching 70 high school students using the coach. That morning, their counselor had given them all a mock interview worksheet, and they had all answered the same five or six questions. They go on to the AI career coach platform that we built, and each of them gets their own customized mock interview that's customized to their particular career interest. You could just see how much they appreciated that personalization right off the bat. And since then, we've had tons of iteration. You have to make sure that if you're making a chat-based application it's really easy to read. You can have too much text or too little. There was a point when it was too fast. It was generating text too quickly. The learners were getting intimidated. We wrote in lines of code just to slow it down a little bit. So, there's a lot of this kind of fine-tuning that we've been doing over the course of many months in partnership with schools and nonprofit organizations. Over 20 schools and nonprofit organizations have been part of the testing to get ready for where we are now, which is coming up on the public release, where anybody in the world can just sign up for it and any educational institution can roll it out with their learners.

Michael Horn: 

So that's exciting. You've been in beta for a while, coming out full release soon. Is this built on top of OpenAI's Chat GPT, or is this something that's proprietary to you all? Where have you built this on top?

Jared Chung: 

The way you have to make these applications these days is deeply layered, and you have to use multiple large language models. So, this is not just a wrapper on OpenAI's Chat GPT. This is a system that is multi multi-large language model. It's an AI agent that's going through lots of steps. It uses third-party data at various points. I don't know for the technical folks who are listening, that uses retrieval augmented generation to give the AI agent access to verifiable information to improve accuracy. It has to use lots of models because you have to make sure that you're using the right model for the right step, and you can't rely upon any single model for that.

Ensuring the quality and transparency

Michael Horn: 

I think the other… You said that learners are excited about this. They don't have questions about its form factor. But quality advice, as you know, is something not to be taken lightly. I mean, something that I've talked a lot about is it's fine for Netflix or Amazon to use an AI model that's based on percentages, because if they recommend a squash racket and you don't play squash, very little harm done. In the world of education and careers, the harm can be much more significant. So how do you think about making sure this isn't misleading people or undermining their confidence or something like that?

Jared Chung: 

We've been thinking about the quality of advice and appropriateness of content ever since the very beginning of Career Village because we have been running this large-scale online crowdsourcing platform. We've built extensive systems for monitoring and moderating career advice written by people for a very long time. It's one of the reasons why I think I'm particularly excited that we are working on the AI career coach is that we have such a history of being thoughtful about these things. I think in an AI context you have particular challenges. Number one, the volume of content is massive. So, we've had to really take all of our monitoring and moderation systems and scale them up to deal with just orders of magnitude more content. The second thing that's really important is, in addition to the factor you mentioned, which is quality, and accuracy, those factors, in addition to that, in an AI context, it's also super important to be thinking about things like bias, and explicit or implicit things like inclusiveness. You need to think about whether the AI application is doing hallucination of any kind and transparency around that. In fact, there's a huge list of things that have to be checked. So a lot of our attention has been on the monitoring and moderation system, and we built this system that is a two-tiered system where the first tier has a series, a very comprehensive set of automated checks that have to happen before the content is essentially greenlit to go to the learner. And it's checking for, again, a wide variety of things. Then you have to have a second tier, which is human oversight, sometimes trained career village staff members, sometimes experts who are qualified to look at that first tier and say, is it doing a good job? And what do we need to do to make sure that it does an even better job to be able to handle the volume of content? And then you also have to set norms with your learners. You have to be transparent. You are not chatting with a human being here. You're talking to a computer program. We're very consistent about that, especially with the younger learners. We have to be clear, this is a computer program, and there are limitations to what it can do, but also to the educators in the mix as well, to make sure that they understand what these systems are capable of right now. One of the things we learned at the very beginning is a lot of young people are going to end up chatting with the AI career coach as their first time chatting with an AI. And that means in some cases, we need to offer a supplemental AI literacy curriculum that people can do as a prerequisite to even being able to go into the platform. We picked that up very early in testing, so a lot of work has had to go into that. And it's one of the reasons why. I think one of our key insights here is that even though making a system like this can seem intimidating, we'd say actually at this point, making a chatbot is actually pretty easy. But making a system that's really using responsible AI principles in practice, that is actually the really hard part.

Michael Horn: 

Well, that makes a ton of sense. I want to stay on something because you talked about all the different models you're using and blending to create this. And I assume that the fact that you have massive amounts of real conversations on the platform creates a great data pool or data lake into which to train the AI and use some of the checks. I imagine that you've come up with real people before as well.

Jared Chung: 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key there is to know in that chain of thought that has to happen. When a learner initiates an activity, they initiate a mock interview or they initiate network 101 chat, for example. At each step, the AI application is going through a series of chain of thought processes that involve multiple large language models. Some of those have to be deeply steeped in career advice. Some of those are doing a very simple thing and don't need that kind of specificity. So, I think you have to be, from an engineering standpoint, you have to be attentive to which steps of that chain of thought require which learnings and context. And it's one of the reasons why we're really happy to have these twelve years so far and counting of really high-quality career advice content to help inform the AI career coach. And I think these things will work together. Ideally, you want to see that a learner at times, they want to go to an AI application and get a real-time chat, and at other times they want to go to the community, and they want to ask that question, what was your job like yesterday? And they seek that first-person narrative. And I think we need to be offering both of those to learners.

Michael Horn: 

Got you. Now, I'm sure people listening are saying, wow, they're a nonprofit. How does the business model work for this so that you can support all these connections, both the personal and the mentors as well as a tool like AI career coach?

Jared Chung: 

Yeah, this is not easy work to do. I'll just say tremendous credit to the Career Village staff, which is an extraordinary staff, a small staff, very, very talented people who are building, like, let's be clear, this small nonprofit organization building a cutting-edge AI application that's being deployed in the wild. This is really important and hard work to do. And there are two commitments that we've made. One commitment we've made is that for individuals who just want to sign up for themselves, we believe this should be free. And as a nonprofit organization, we have had great success going to philanthropy to make sure that they understand the value of this kind of service for individuals. And we're committed to continuing to go to philanthropy to get the funding needed to continue to support the individuals so it can be free for them, for institutions, we've made the second commitment. While we do ask institutions to get licenses to use it at large scale, if an institution is unable to pay a license, then we also are earmarking a significant budget to subsidize, or even sometimes in certain cases, make it free for those institutions. I'm going to try to stretch that as far as we can to make sure that this is as equitable access as possible. And just to give context, we're talking about single-digit dollars per learner per year. It's very low cost. But even at that level, if you look at an international audience, there are going to be places where even a single digit US dollars per learner per year is prohibitive. And we think that access to a tool this fundamental needs to be as broad as possible.

Michael Horn: 

Gotcha. Now the AI career coach, as students are engaging with it, I'm sure a lot of folks have been reading AI can be expensive, too. This isn't just like a marginal cost of zero, right?

Jared Chung: 

It's not a marginal cost of zero very much. We feel that for sure. You have to be very cognizant of the cost of AI applications. They're very different from traditional web applications in terms of cost structure.

Michael Horn: 

Yeah, but compared to, I guess, the alternative, which is every single individual finding someone to give them a mock interview or something like that, or to give them coaching on their resume or whatever it might be, it sounds like that's the comparison set that has led you to say, if we care about scale and equity, this is worth that trade-off, if I'm understanding.

Jared Chung: 

That's exactly right, the return… If you're going to take a very sort of purely financial look at this thing, what's the return on investment of having an AI-based supplemental career coach tool? And the ROI is super massive, especially if the return we're talking about, by the way, is learner outcomes.

Michael Horn: 

That strikes me as the most interesting part of this. I know from talking to a lot of individuals who work in the college career coaching and counseling space, for example, those offices tend, as you know, to be extremely understaffed. They are often on the back end of a student's journey, not on the front end when they're thinking about courses and internships and networking. I'm curious. It strikes me that the more you develop the AI, the more it can be part of a companion almost to a student, not just when they're having the conversation with a counselor, but much, much earlier as they think about courses. What might I do this summer? On and on and on. How big does this vision get from your perspective?

Jared Chung: 

How can we support those teams with the cavalry charge to help them deal to… Do a great job with the huge caseloads that they're often asked to support, and the huge number of people they're often asked to support? And I think that's kind of the approach we're taking, is let's bolster that team and have the coach serve in that role. It should be great when it's one-on-one with an individual who just wants the help themselves. And it should be fantastic when you're using it as an individual in an educational setting where it's supplementing the work of a counselor or instructor.

Michael Horn: 

That's a great, inspiring place to leave it. Jared, thanks so much. We will look eagerly as a career coach gets launched into the wild and for the masses. Please check it out.

Jared Chung: 

Yeah, careervillage.org. And if you want to go, check out the AI career coach itself: Aicareercoach.org.

Michael Horn: 

Aicareercoach.org everyone check it out. Jared, thanks so much for joining us on the Future of Education.

Jared Chung: 

Thank you for the opportunity and the work you do.

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Ryan Craig joined me once again to talk about his new book Apprentice Nation—this time as a part of Class Disrupted with Diane Tavenner. As a school leader who for years led the charge for college-for-all but has changed her mind in recent years, Diane had lots of questions for Ryan about how K–12 educators should think about apprenticeships and alternative pathways for high school students.

Given I’ve recently sent out a transcript of another conversation with Ryan, rather than produce the whole transcript from Diane and my conversation with him, below are some key excerpts from the conversation that I think are illuminating. And, as always, subscribers can watch the video or listen to the podcast.

I’m also thrilled to offer my paid subscribers a chance to win a copy of Ryan’s book, Apprentice Nation! Five lucky paid subscribers will get a free copy just by entering your information here. I’ll notify you if you win.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Time Topic

2:45 Defining apprenticeship

5:49 The current state of apprenticeship in the U.S.

8:25 The role of apprenticeship in an increasingly automated world 

13:05 How K-12 educators can move away from the “college or bust” paradigm

16:22 Refuting claims that apprenticeship creates hierarchical post-secondary funnels

18:02 Reducing operational obstacles to accessing apprenticeship  

28:33 Apprenticeship’s opponents 

32:49 The lack of incentives for employers to develop apprenticeships 

35:23 Achieving scale 

37:20 Reasons for optimism 

40:00 Book and show recommendations 

Diane Tavenner:

Ryan, what you are sharing is I've spent the last 20 plus years in K-12 education in high schools, really for decades, focusing on ensuring all of our students were accepted to a four-year college. I thought that was the right thing to do and the thing that was going to lift them, especially serving mostly first-generation college-going students. And then what you described is what we started to see in our own data, that if they made it through [college], they were underemployed on the back end, they were carrying significant amounts of debt, and depending on what program or major they went into, it really mattered [for] what their prospects looked like outside. And many of these students don't have the social networks to gain the experience that you're talking about as being so valuable. And so I guess one of the questions I have as a recovering college-for-all K-12 educator is what do you think people like me should be doing right now in the high school space, particularly what are the top one or two things that we could do to start shifting in the right direction?

Ryan Craig:

Yeah, well, look, I think CTE and career discovery at the high school and even middle school level are a casualty of this sort of college-for-all mentality. We've really allowed it to wither on the vine. I did a piece a couple of months ago about the fact that the sort of AP honors industrial complex, with its higher GPA, college is the only pathway. You sort of have to take those courses and you have to take that path, which leaves no room for…CTE kind of withers on the vine in that case. But I get it right. If there aren't alternatives for your college, then what's the point of career discovery at the high school? So it is sort of a chicken or the egg problem. I'm very focused on how do we build out that post high school infrastructure of earn-and-learn pathways so we can kind of get to where we are in the UK now, which is, this last fall, for the first time, graduating high school students in the UK could look at the UCAS portal, which is kind of the common app of the UK, and see listed alongside all the university programs, all the apprenticeship options. It's in one portal, in one place, and they can look with their guidance counselor and they can say, “Okay, here are some real earn and learn options that I might pursue.” Here are some tuition-based options I might pursue. So that's the ultimate goal. But I think beginning to work on CTE and career discovery. I did a profile of the superintendent in Winchester, Virginia that Ted Dintersmith introduced me to, who just is doing an incredible job of really elevating CTE and almost making it mandatory that every student has to pursue a CTE pathway. And so I think then we need to prime the pump both on the supply side and the demand at the high school level.

Diane: So, Ryan, I want to stay with that just for a moment, because I think part of the narrative that we often hear when people are skeptical of the non-four-year college pathway is - and I can't count the number of times I've been on a panel with college presidents, of course, being the ones to say this -  “Well, the people that are clamoring the loudest for alternatives to college are those who are going to send their kids to college.” And so they have this real skepticism that it's for them, but not for me. Why are you relegating them, if you will, to something lower? In Apprentice Nation, you make a pretty compelling counterargument around the data on this, but I'd love you to just walk us through that a little bit more. And part of this, I acknowledge, is we only have 500,000 apprenticeships in this country. There's not really a dataset in this country to sort of play with, but walk us through it.

Ryan Craig: 

Yeah, look, I just think that's inaccurate. I mean, I hear every week from a charter school organization that is focused on how do we help build new, how do we facilitate pathways, how do we build a sort of plus-two transition program to something other than college? Because like you, Diane, they see their students graduating and either not completing or completing and graduating into underemployment, so it's clearly not working for everyone. So, I don't buy that argument.

Diane: We had a group of interns in my new company, and so we actually asked them to do this little experiment. They're high school students, and we gave them 100 apprenticeships in California that theoretically they should be eligible for as they graduate from high school. The apprenticeships are open to 18+, and we asked them to try to figure out how they could apply to and if they had a chance at these apprenticeships. And so of the 100…It was mind boggling. This is not a friendly process at all. They go to the website. There's usually like a phone number or an email that they have to call or email, just a cold email that they have to send. So they email 100. They only get responses from a third of 100. Out of 100, only 30 responses. And many of them were redirecting them back to look at the website, which is circular because the website says to email these people. And when they actually talked to people, they were often told “It says 18, but we don't really want 18 year olds.” And so I'm just curious. It seems like we have a lot of work to do, so much work.

Ryan Craig: Experience, so many things there. So, first of all, I don't know what list they were using, but if they were to use the most authoritative list out there, which is the federal Department of Labor Rapids database of registered apprenticeship programs, they'd be in for a disappointment because I use that database as the basis for the appendix in my book, which is a directory of apprenticeship programs outside the building and construction trades. Not to say that those aren't good apprenticeships, but the point of the book is: “We're actually doing okay in the building trades. How do we expand apprenticeships beyond the building trades?” So there are about 6000 apprenticeship programs in the US in the Rapids database that are not in the construction trades. And so I asked the question, well, how many of those are actually real? Meaning where I could apply for a job as an apprentice tomorrow and I'd be considered because they're actually hiring apprentices. And so we went through that whole list and of those 6000, only 200 are real. The rest of them are what I call paper apprenticeship programs, which are primarily a kind of relic of how we've been funding apprenticeship programs at the federal level. So one reason we're doing so poorly is that the federal government, while they've increased apprenticeship funding over the last decade and they've been actually trying to fund intermediaries, which is one of the key points of the book, which is that employers don't do these things on their own. Colleges don't do them on their own. They're usually set up and run by intermediary groups. Like in Germany, it's chambers of commerce that do most of the work of setting up and running these programs. In the building trades, it's unions who are doing it. So the question is, who are those intermediaries going to be? So, the Department of Labor has tried to identify and fund intermediaries, but of course they've been funding groups that are really good at applying for Department of Labor grants, namely workforce boards and community colleges who get these five or $10 million grants. And then here's what they do. They develop the curriculum for the formal training, the related technical instruction, RTI component of the apprenticeship. They register the program and then they sit on their hands and wait for an employer to come along and say, “Wow, if only I could find curriculum for the RTI, I'd launch my own apprenticeship program.” But of course, that's the easy part of apprenticeship. The hard part is convincing an employer to hire and pay a worker who's not going to be productive for a period of time. And all the other stuff too, the mentoring and the recruiting and serving as the employer of record, all that stuff. So as a result, that's how you get from 6000 down to 200. But then even if they're reaching the 200 who are actually hiring you're absolutely right. Apprenticeships are not designed sort of post-high school right now, largely, I think, just because there's so few of them. So every time you actually launch an apprentice, a cohort of apprentices, and I can say this is at achieve, what we do is we buy companies and sectors where there's a talent gap in tech and healthcare, and we build apprenticeship programs into those companies so they become talent engines for their talent starved sectors. And I can tell you that every time we launch a cohort, we have 100, 200, 300 applicants for every seat in the cohort, which is so much as we would like to make them available to 18-year-olds. It's hard for an 18-year-old to compete with a 23- or 24-year-old who's applying for that apprenticeship program. We're probably going to hire that 23- or 24-year-old. And this is one of my pet peeves, which is that if you talk to the philanthropies, the big philanthropies who are involved in apprenticeship today, and I'm not sure, well, maybe I'll name names. Gates Foundation, they actually don't care about apprenticeship. Broadly, all they care about is youth apprenticeship, which is for kids in high school, which sounds good, but the hard part is, if you can't convince an employer to hire a 24-year-old apprentice, you're never going to convince them to hire a 16- or 17-year-old who's still in high school. That's like an order of magnitude more difficult to do. And so we need to focus on building the apprenticeship infrastructure we need for regular role apprenticeships before we begin focusing on what are called youth apprenticeship programs. So, yeah, the system is not set up today post-high school. And a big reason is we're just not funding it like in the UK. At their peak, they were spending four or five billion pounds a year on apprenticeship, which, based on the size of the US economy, would be more like $40 billion a year. We've been spending less than one hundredth of that. So, if we've been spending $400 million a year, that's even a smaller fraction of what we spend on a tuition-based post-secondary education. That's one thousandth what we spend on. So it's one hundredth of what we should be spending on apprenticeship. It's one thousandth of what we do spend. And if you compare the funding that an apprentice receives, the public funding that an apprentice receives, compared to a college student, for every dollar of taxpayer support that apprentice is receiving, a college student receives $50. Those ratios are just way off. Every other developed country is like an order of magnitude or more. In the UK, it's two orders of magnitude higher on earn and learn an apprenticeship than we are. And what does that do? Well, it makes a big difference because it allows intermediaries to market and sell apprenticeship programs to employers, which is what's needed. So, in the UK, you have apprenticeship service providers like Multiverse who can go to big companies and say, we'll set up and run an apprenticeship program for you. And it's totally turnkey. All you need to do is put this apprentice on your payroll at the reduced apprentice wage. And that sounds pretty good, but everything that Multiverse does is covered by the government here. Multiverse does the same thing. When they go to a US employer, they say, oh, but it's going to cost you $15,000 per apprentice in program fees because there's no funding associated with apprenticeship. And so you may say, well, what about the $400 million that we're spending? That's not going to intermediaries like Multiverse. It's going to community colleges and workforce boards who aren't currently building apprenticeship programs. Part of the problem is that we viewed apprenticeship as just another workforce development or training program, and we've lumped it in with all these other training programs, most of which are pretty ineffective, and other countries don't do that. Other countries have a separate funding mechanism for apprenticeship because they recognize they're different, they're jobs. They're jobs first, and they start with an employer willing to hire an apprentice. So a lot of what the book is about is sort of policy fixes for this. Unfortunately, a month after the book came out, the Department of Labor came out with their fancy new apprenticeship regulations, which is 800 pages of new hoops that employers would have to jump through in order to register an apprenticeship program with no incentives whatsoever to do so, which is just the opposite of what needs to happen. We need to streamline apprenticeship registration, focus on the things that matter. Is it a good job? Does it have career progression associated with it and actually provide funding for it?

Diane Tavenner: 

I read your recent piece on those regulations, and I will confess that I had a moment where I was like, oh my gosh, this feels exactly like my charter school experience, where we started in the right place, where we create schools that serve kids, name the outcome that you're going to get, and that's what you're held accountable to. But over time, we have been regulated and reregulated and back to sort of the old system. And I was reading your piece about this 800-page set of regulation. I was like, this feels exactly like what I experienced as someone who was trying to do this in the charter sector. And it made me wonder. There's always interest groups. And look, I was reading through what you summarized. I get why they want people to do all these protective things and whatnot, not for bad reasons, but you have to balance the risk and you have to be thoughtful. Who are the blockers who's contributing to these 800 pages?

Ryan Craig: 

Yeah, these are building and construction unions who would very much like to keep apprenticeship as their own little sort of private thing for the most part. And it's bureaucrats who have never worked in the private sector and actually don't know what's involved in convincing an employer to hire an apprentice. There aren't really…I mean, part of the problem is, up until last year, with the creation of Apprenticeships for America, which is this new trade association of apprenticeship intermediaries, there had been no voice for employers of apprentices. So we're working hard on that, but that's what's necessary, and we need to get the folks like the business roundtable and Chamber of Commerce in this discussion. So I'm confident that these regulations are not going to have the force of law as currently proposed, but they're just going the wrong direction. So there's a lot of work to do here. And it's so important to think of a country where we could have as many earn and learn options as we have tuition-based options. I think that it's a big reason why we have such social and political sort of discontent. You have almost half the country who sort of sees this bright, shining digital economy, but feels like these jobs are out of reach because they're told that they need to run the gauntlet of a four year degree, which can be five or six years in many cases, and with no guarantee of any employment outcome. And they just feel like it's unaffordable and unrealistic and life's going to get in the way, so why bother? And as I toured around the country talking about my book in the fall, I would start my talks with talking about what I call the song of the summer last summer, which was Rich Men North of Richmond, by Oliver Anthony, where basically he's complaining about his crappy job. And that's sort of what they. The only jobs available are these bad jobs that are breaking my back with no career progression available. And we need to address that. And it's such an obvious political benefit for the Democratic Party. I don't understand why the Democrats don't become the party of earn and learn and apprenticeship. They're not going to lose support among the university educated at this point. But we desperately need to support it, and obviously that's where the other side is getting their momentum from.

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