Joe Ross, president of Reach University, joined me to offer an alternative take on where the “College for All” movement went wrong. His analogy? One that will be familiar to my audience—computers. Specifically, disruptive innovation in computing. Our discussion covered the historical cycles of higher education reform, the false dichotomy between liberal arts and career-connected learning, and the emergence of disruptive models like apprenticeship degrees that integrate workplace learning, reduce costs, and challenge traditional assumptions about who higher education serves and how.

Show Notes:

A Student’s Guide to Apple Computer Guide for Apple Computers by Simpson’s creator, Matt Groening

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that, today, I’m delighted we’ve got one of my favorite folks in the world of education joining us. He’s none other than Joe Ross. He’s the president of Reach University. You’ve seen me appear on his podcast, and I thought it was only fair play, Joe, that we had you on mine now. So welcome.

Joe Ross

Well, really excited to be here to see you again, Michael. How’s it going?

Michael Horn

Good, good. I’m. I’m excited for this conversation. You and I have been riffing on a few topics together a lot, asynchronously, a little synchronously. And so we’ll let people into our headspace here. But I want to pose a question for you. It’s sort of almost a riddle, if you will.

Okay, so we’ll go back to the late 1970s. I think it’s 1977 or something like that. Ken Olson, he’s the CEO of this company called Digital Equipment Corporation. They make mini computers. And he has this quote that there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. And, I’m gonna share with you what a computer to him at that time looked like. We’ll share that up there for folks, this is what a mini computer looked like.

It was like a very, very large file cabinet. Yeah, not particularly mini.

Joe Ross

Yeah, right.

Michael Horn

Cost quarter million dollars. And I think the mental thing in his head, Joe, was like, hey, computers for all. Everyone’s buzzing about this in the hobbyist circles and stuff like that. Are you crazy? We’re not scaling this thing to every single home. What’s wrong with the picture I just painted?

Joe Ross

Well, it’s funny, just a couple years later, Microsoft was getting started, and the vision that Bill Gates put out there was a computer on every desk and in every home. So there was a rising tide of the sentiment that computers actually should be for all. And it took some time. But what’s striking today right now is I think well over 95% of households do, in fact, have a computer on a desk or in their household. And that is a huge turnaround. So, yeah, famous last words.

Michael Horn

Famous last words. Right. And so it’s the power I think you’re pointing to is disruptive innovation. Right. People didn’t think of computers at that time as these small, dimpy little things that then Microsoft comes along and, you know, it’s a couple thousand dollars, it’s a toy for hobbyists and children. It’s radically more affordable, convenient, portable over time and so forth, and it. And it literally changes the world. And then you made the observation to me that there’s been this quote unquote, College For All movement.

Questioning the necessity of college

Michael Horn

There’ve been a bunch of people like me questioning that movement as of late. But you said there’s like another possibility, which is we’ve gone about College For All in sort of the most backwards way you would go about it in any other sector of the world. So, maybe talk us through your thinking there and you have like a really interesting statistic that goes, I think, 10 years or so later, 1989, if I’m remembering correctly, about how many people had computers versus college degrees. If I’m remembering.

Joe Ross

Yeah. Right. So back in 1989. And we’ll come back to why that year is interesting, but other than the fact that it’s the year I graduated from high school but in 1989, just aged myself beautifully, didn’t I? Yeah. But back in 1989, 15% of households had a computer and bachelor degree attainment was about 21%. That is flipped. So today over 95% of households have a computer, including the small computer people have in their pocket.

And college degree attainment is now well behind that. It’s more than 21%. It’s grown to close to 40%. But it’s nothing like the way the computers become something for all. College degrees not for all. Yet the computer definitely is. And that’s an interesting contrast to examine.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And I guess the point. Right. Clay used to always say this, and Clay Christensen would talk about healthcare and he’d say, you know, what we’ve been trying to do is allow people to afford what is an expensive healthcare, as opposed to ask the question, how do we make healthcare itself fundamentally affordable?

Joe Ross

Exactly.

Michael Horn

And we’ve done the same thing in higher ed. We’ve asked how can subsidy and so forth allow people to access what is fundamentally in most places still an expensive college degree? As opposed to how do we radically remake that degree and make it more affordable and accessible?

Joe Ross

And this is what’s so ironic because in the last couple years there’s been a whole lot of dialogue around the idea that College For All is not actually such a good idea. The same folks who were proponents of College For All 10 years ago, 15 years ago, are now proverbially off the bandwagon.

Michael Horn

Yeah, I mean look, look at my co host at class disrupted, Diane Tavenner, like famously 100% of their students at Summit going to college. And she’s sort of like, I think we had the wrong goal. Like we need to be looking at economic mobility and things of that nature. Much wider prism of pathways, if you will, which may still be right, but sorry, stay with the argument.

Joe Ross

Yeah, no, absolutely right. So you have the charter movement personified by someone like Diane Tavenner. You’ve got folks like Kathleen DeLaski who herself admits that she is off the bandwagon in which is, I think aptly titled, came out last year, Who Needs College Anymore? And, what’s ironic is that there are a couple things that are ironic here, that should be noted. There’s three. First is this idea of College For All is actually a long standing aspiration probably you could argue goes back to the 1800s with the, with the launch of the, the Land Grant University. There was a little bit of a spirit of democratization in that. The reality if you look at it, is that this sort of, this concept waxes and wanes. In Kathleen DaLaski’s book, she acknowledges that her title, Who Needs College Anymore? Is a riff on a headline in Newsweek, a cover story headline in Newsweek from 1976, which was Who Needs College? And so back in 1976, you saw kind of some doubt about whether college should be for all.

And that came after about a decade of College For All policy advocacy. In 1967, the New York Times published an op-ed about how the legislature in New York is trying to do College For All, for both private and public universities, making them free for everybody. And so you have this wax and wane, that’s thing one, thing two, and I’m not going to, I don’t think we’ll get into it in a big way today, but AI has I think just recently caused a lot of people to write, oh, maybe we do need more liberal arts. So I think you see, you kind of see another kind of potential driver of this waxing and waning, and we’ll see where we are five years from now. But third, to your point, Michael, one could argue that the College For All movement that we most recently came through, and I would argue that it really kind of took off around 2001 in earnest with the Jobs for the Future and Aspen Institute publishing a piece that took for granted that the purpose of high school was to send everyone for college, like literally was the first line. It’s like every high school needs to send everybody to college. Jobs for the Future does not have that position anymore. Right.

But I think the ironic thing is, as you said, I don’t think we’ve really tried College for

All yet in the way that it’s most likely to succeed. And yes, the way we have seen efforts around it has been more top down, around subsidy, around encouragement, around movement building for many decades. We basically expanded access to student debt almost without any kind of underwriting, without limit at the graduate level. It’s as if back in the 1980s when Bill Gates was saying a computer on every desk and in every home, that he was seeking federal student loan subsidies to enable everyone to buy a $30,000 computer, well, he was not doing that. Right. You can’t look at any. I can’t think of any other industry where we’ve done so much. Maybe healthcare is the one.

Michael Horn

Healthcare would be the only other one.

Joe Ross

Would be the one example where we’ve done so much to try to make college something affordable for the masses by just stuffing the channel in terms of providing financing. Right. And it’s worked to some degree, but it’s created a lot of side effects everyone’s complaining about. So the question is, could you imagine College For All following at some point the same storyline that computers for all did?

Michael Horn

Yeah.

Joe Ross

When I read Kathleen DeLaski’s book and I interviewed her for my podcast, I saw that her idea of calling the question is college relevant anymore was not a new idea. 1976 Newsweek cover, I thought, hmm, I wonder if there was a time when people were asking the same question about computers. I wonder if there was a time when people literally were publishing articles that said, who needs a computer any, you know, anymore?

Michael Horn

So. Right. Like the CEO of DEC.

Joe Ross

Yeah, I literally searched for that and, and I. And you know what came up was a Matt Groening cartoon from 1989, the Matt Groening advertising.

Michael Horn

Not tracking the Simpsons founder. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Ross

Right. So this is the Simpsons founder before the Simpsons made him super famous. And. And in 1989, Steve Jobs evidently hired him. Was Steve Jobs still at Apple 1989? Was that the.

Michael Horn

That’s a good question. I guess it was around. That was around the time he prob, maybe a year or two later he got. I think 1990 was when Scully came in. So yeah, we should. We should Google that.

Joe Ross

So I did this search. Who needs a computer? And up comes this pamphlet by Matt Groening. With the one eared rabbit Bongo. And it’s basically making the case for why someone going to college should have a computer. Right.

And so in 1989, it was not a, it was not a given that everyone should have a computer. I think this is evidence of that. The next, the next three decades saw everyone deciding, yep, we all need a computer.

Michael Horn

We all actually need this. Yeah.

Joe Ross

So I think we should put a link to it in your show notes if you have something like that. It’s kind of a fun thing.

Michael Horn

Yeah, we’ll definitely do that. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Ross

So nobody today is asking who needs a computer anyway. Right. But back in 1989, people were asking who needs a computer? And, and I think it’s interesting to think, okay, so what was the difference here? And what you saw with computers starting in the 80s was the classic elements of disruption which you can talk about. And what you’ve seen with, with higher ed for a variety of reasons is not that. Right. And when you, when you, when you think about what College For All means, it means targeting non consumption at the end of the day. Right. Like if everybody’s going to get into this market, that means you’re dealing with non consumers becoming consumers.

Well, that made me think of disruption theory. Made me think of you. Right. And I think it’s worth asking, okay, what if we’ve been going about this all wrong? Maybe what we need to do instead is address the barriers to disruption that are endemic to higher ed. And if we can remove those barriers, or if the timing is right for other reasons, perhaps we will find that the headlines saying College For All is dead may be famous last words. Almost like saying College For All is dead to Long live College For All. Like we might be at an inflection point right now.

Evolution of higher education

Michael Horn

So I just looked up, we can correct ourselves. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and the cartoons a few years after that then. Let’s dig into this and one of the arguments you’ve persuasively made is that there’s been more, I’ll call it generational innovation in higher ed over the years. Like we have reinvented what is college several other times in ways that we don’t always give credit to. So I’ll give my run through. And then you edit me. How about that? Which is like, so first you sort of have this very religious tutorial, almost model of higher education, very bespoke, very often actually, frankly, high school age students attending Harvard and places like it. And then the real sort of two revolutions, I guess, that really start to change that occur in the 1800s.

You mentioned one of them, the land grant universities. And then the other of course is the research university being brought over from, from Germany really and adapted here with Johns Hopkins and the like. And sort of a change in what we think higher education should look like. And then I think that the next wave, if I would, is probably the GI Bill and community colleges dramatically expanding access and our notion in the 1940s and then through, I guess maybe you’d say the Higher Ed act. And then I would say the next wave was online education, which I would argue was the only one that could have been potentially disruptive. And I think there are some entities that are disruptive, but big but, because we had the subsidy top down thing that you were describing, a whole bunch of traditional institutions implemented online learning as a sustaining innovation, which actually meant they never innovated on cost because they didn’t have to. And so it sort of gummed up the wheels, if you will, of disruption in some pretty significant ways.

Those are the big shifts off the top of my head, but I’d love your edits on that because you’ve thought more about it.

Joe Ross

Yeah, I think that you’re right that there’s the storyline of the College For All movement that goes back literally a couple centuries. Right. And I think you’ve laid that out and it’s basically marked by various efforts to expand access to post secondary education for a variety of motivating reasons. Another angle on this history is to think about the seasonal, if you will, pace of change in higher ed. And John Thielen in his History of Higher Education book that is I think required reading and for anyone who goes to get a PhD in the history of higher ed, I dug into it when we started reach universities six years ago and one of the things that struck me is his observation that higher ed undergoes a series of pivots every generation or so, every 20 years, but undergoes a major revolution every century or so. And like folks waiting for the next big earthquake in California, I guess we’re kind of due for this, this earthquake. It’s been about a century or so and if you mark it this way, you could observe for example that three centuries ago Harvard was actually primarily focused on religious education and teaching in Latin.

That was the primary language of instruction at Harvard. Into the early, in the 1800s you saw the emergence of the land grant university. That was a major change. And then in the 1900s, I think we saw a lot of the systemization and industrialization of higher ed processes as well as approaches that we just take for granted now. The SAT, the fact the medical school starts with four years followed by an internship and then a residency, the way business school leverages the case study method, all that kind of, all that kind of systemization and uniformity around approach started really in the, in the 1900s with an attempt to expand access and make it more efficient. I think in the 20th century the question is, the 21st century where we are now, what is the big pivot we’re about to experience? And I think you’re right. There was a sense with the arrival of the Internet that the Internet was going to transform higher education in a material way. And we saw lots of interesting sustaining innovations, whether it was the, you know, flipped classroom or the MOOC or a variety of other things.

But I would argue, as you just, I think said, that these were examples of higher ed adopting an innovation, but not actually doing the innovation themselves. That’s the way I would put it. Meaning they adopted technology. Fine, great. But disruption theory, as I understand it, includes a couple of elements. And one of those elements is a radical affordability that expands access to people’s, you know, creates more capacity to engage in something.

And that leads to non consumption being addressed. Typically it’s paired with kind of a simpler streamed down approach to the product or the service. I guess my question is technology has driven so much disruption in the last several decades. I mean, one of my questions is if higher ed adopts technology and that creates sustaining innovation, what would it look like for higher ed as a human to human enterprise? Let’s just assume that that’s what it is. We could argue about that. We’re seeing schools arise that are thinking about using AI to do all the teaching and learning.

Right. But there’s a case to be made that education requires social construction of learning, interaction with other people, dealing with ideals in real time, building relationships that are learning relationships and also networks. So if we were to assume that higher ed is a service in the same way that Chipotle is a service, right. Then I guess what are the models for disruptive innovation that higher ed could look at? Are there examples of primarily human to human businesses that have been disrupted not so much by the technology adoption, but by other things like process innovation or the like?

Michael Horn

Yeah, and it’s interesting you say that because Paul Peterson has made the case that disruptive innovation, right. In lots of service industries it looks like changing the relationship and the work that you have the consumer themselves do. In some ways there’s a change. There’s a technology enabler. Yes. And there’s some sort of process change that puts more, if you will, on the consumer and changes the relationship in some way to the entity itself. And so I would argue it’s almost always a process change is at the heart of disruption. And process you could almost actually think of in technology.

If you think of technology as sort of like input, process, output. Right. In some sort of like simplistic way. It’s not how we think of it today. We think of it as technology being synonymous with digital, but I don’t think that’s how it would have been historically thought of. When we think about the big disruptions throughout history, you know, going to like steam ships, disrupting sail. Right. Or anything like that.

So that’s my quick reaction to you. I have a second reaction which is I do think like the Western Governors Universities of the world and the Southern New Hampshire onlines, they do bear a lot of the hallmarks of disruption. And I think the question has always been in my mind is the reason the technology enabler is so important is it allows you to start doing simple things but without changing your cost structure, start to do more complicated problems, if you will solve more complicated problems. And it hasn’t been clear yet what that looks like in that context. Right. So you just referenced. So let’s stay with Western Governors. I love them for a lot of reasons, but it’s largely asynchronous.

Discussing upmarket education strategies

Michael Horn

Not while there are a lot of people supporting you. It’s not that person to person delivery or conversation you just referenced. One might think of that as like the step up, if you will, in terms of like, you know, more complicated use cases of education and things of that nature. Which then asks the question like, okay, well what would that look like for them to go up market or for fundamentally, you know, what you all are doing, obviously this apprenticeship degree concept that you have slotted in here, perhaps take advantage of online, but actually to enable some of these conversations and really dramatically change the credit. I’m going to use that word that the student gets for work that they’re doing in other realms of their life. And that may be the interesting flip that allows for that sort of upward technology enabler to do things that were previously complicated and expensive and had to be sort of centralized in, in a traditional public university. Those are quick download of thoughts. Your turn to riff.

Joe Ross

Yeah, no, so I think I’m drawn to the Examples of innovation. I don’t know. There’s the Minute Health clinics, for example. Yeah, Minute Health, what was it? Discount retailers, clothing retailers.

Michael Horn

Discount retail was actually the one I was thinking. Right. So like if you think about Walmart, Kmart, Target, all birthed in 1962, disrupted the 300 plus full service department store chains. And like, I don’t think people realize because of like what Macy’s has become, how radical it was because like you walked into a Macy’s, you had literally like a store consultant as your shopper, like helping you navigate this. And the big innovation in some ways of Walmart was. No, no, no, no, like we’re going to organize it super easily for you, but like you do the work of like finding your stuff. Right, right. In many ways.

Yeah, sorry, keep going.

Joe Ross

Yeah, yeah, no, so I look at this and think, okay, so, so there are ways for service businesses to disrupt and then technology can actually accelerate that or enable it in certain ways. I agree with you that WGU, Southern New Hampshire University radically lowered the costs of a degree and altered processes and leveraged technology in a variety of ways. But I wonder whether there’s a broader, deeper disruption possible here. If you fully think about rearranging all this deck chairs, all the chairs on the deck. And I think this work embedded education movement, including the apprenticeship, including the apprenticeship degree, is pointing to some things that we should look at as possible drivers of a much more radical disruption of higher education. There are a couple things that you could point to. First, work based higher education and apprenticeship degrees leverage workplaces as their campus very intentionally so. There are plenty of places in this country where college or university is not within community distance.

But there’s no county in this country where there’s not a school within community distance. And there’s almost no county where there’s not some type of medical center within community distance. And in those places, especially in rural communities, those are the families sustaining wage jobs in those places, the school or the hospital. Right. So you’ve got all these workplaces that could become learning places. That’s thing one, thing two, the apprenticeship relies on people in the workplace to do a lot of the teaching. Right. Whether they’re mentors or they’re providing on the job training or related instruction, you suddenly have an opportunity to bring instruction out of the ivy tower and into the you know, floor of the workplace.

And now you have a different pool of folks who are able to provide instruction and that could drive different cost models. And to your point, the behavior of the learner is driven to change here too. To some degree there is still instruction, there are still assignments. We’ll talk about the credit hour being disrupted or broken up in different ways. But at the end of the day, an apprentice or anyone engaged in work based learning needs to do their own sense making and their own connection making. I am at work. How do I connect what I’m doing at work with whatever I’m being instructed on? And there’s a little bit of increased onus on the learner in that context as well. I think that there’s a bit of a perfect storm converging that suggests maybe we’re going to see.

Shifting views on higher education

Joe Ross

I actually think there’s a good chance that we’re going to see all the calls for all the obituaries for College For All look like famous last words say 10, 15 years from now. Because things are really different than they were for most of our adult lives. There’s a complete collapse in confidence in traditional higher ed. There are a lot of folks and families who used to want their kids to go to college and half as many do now as they did 10, you know, 10 years ago. Employers are seeing once in a lifetime labor shortages in healthcare and teaching and other fields. There’s a call from this administration to re industrialize the country and bring more jobs to more places. There are a lot of things coming together and the student debt system has been discredited. So you could decide based on all those things.

College is dead. Right? And as I said, the history of higher ed suggests that it’s. Everyone hates when I say this, but it’s kind of like a cockroach. It does not know how to die. Right. Like higher ed has changed radically when it has needed to. And I think there’s some early signs that my proposition here may be right. You’re seeing the potential of new accreditors arise to make it easier for new entrants into the field.

You’re seeing both sides of the political spectrum, whether or not they like degrees, they seem to like apprenticeship degrees. I think there’s a lot of ingredients in the soup here that suggest we may be looking at a book that says who needs college anymore? In the same way that we could look at the pamphlet in 1989 asking who needs a computer? I mean look, I’m staked in this future obviously, so I think.

Michael Horn

Yeah, but what you just said is important, right I think. Which is, it also answers them. So people like me who’ve been arguing, I’m not sure College For All makes sense. What we’ve been saying is career connected learning makes sense. What’s interesting about the vision you just laid out is we don’t have to choose. Right. Like it sets it up as a false choice because there’s this new structure coming in that actually does both.

And maybe that’s where I want to dig into because like, you drew a very subtle distinction for me, a few, maybe it’s a couple months ago at this point, but where you said there’s sort of like apprenticeship degrees and degree apprentices or something like that. I may get the second formulation wrong. But. So I’d love you to unpack that. But I’d also love you to unpack something else really interesting you said to me, which was all the people like me who are now saying the liberal arts actually are.

It’s their moment in some interesting way. You actually made the argument. Yeah. And it also might like liberal arts versus career connected might also be a false dichotomy. So I just asked you two questions in one, which is like, you’re not supposed to do that, but

Joe Ross

You’re not a lawyer, so

Michael Horn

I can go riff.

Joe Ross

I can’t say Objection. Compound question.

Michael Horn

Exactly. Yeah.

Joe Ross

But let me hit the liberal arts one too first and then I’ll go back to the apprenticeship degree. I think that a couple years ago it was very, very unfashionable to say liberal arts still mattered. That that is clearly not as much the case today. I’m seeing lots of articles being published. Elevating the liberal arts is a answer to the challenge of AI, but it’s still considered kind of a binary work based job training on one hand versus liberal arts on the other hand. As I’ve shared with you before, I think it’s a false binary. I think that. And it was a false binary before the challenge of AI.

I think liberal arts can equip people to solve problems and be entrepreneurial. To draw metaphoric connections between one problem and other contexts in ways that I think have driven a lot of innovation in this country. And of course there are a lot of examples of. Let’s go back to Apple. But Steve Jobs talking about how important the humanities was to innovation in his context. And I think that you just have to posit a few examples of how this could be true. Yeah. Learning some.

Connecting liberal arts to careers

Joe Ross

You know, when I was at Yale, I took a course on Chinese Buddhism. It’s hard for me to know exactly what Chinese Buddhism has to do with my life. I’m dure, I could draw some connection, but probably there’s some way to do it. The great books that you see being taught at St. John’s College or starting at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, there are ways to draw connections between that classic conception of liberal arts and on the job work. The example I always give is if you’re teaching someone project management, you could assign John Locke, who writes about property and goes on the sort of a topic of how ownership of property actually leads to better productivity of that property. And then you could ask someone to make their own sense of that in the context of a project. Okay, what does what John Locke has to say about property have to do with you as a project manager in the workplace? Make your own sense of that.

Right. And I think it’s pretty easy to say, okay, ownership of a project leads to more productivity. And so I think there are ways to make the liberal arts applied and connected. And there are also ways to let it be completely irrelevant. And that’s just a choice. It’s a design choice. Right. You could design a scope and sequence of curriculum that really embeds and centers of liberal arts.

One of the things we’re doing at Reach University is doing that. One of our big convictions is that liberal arts should and can be applied to work based learning no matter what field. And that’s a challenge we’ve set out to realize.

Michael Horn

Quickly, what does that look like? Right, like just break it down because you just said the students workplace. And so just to be clear, like for the teachers you’re educating, future teachers you’re educating.

Joe Ross

Yeah, the teachers need to know liberal arts. So it’s actually a gimme in teacher education. Teachers need to know literacy and history and social science. And the broad definition of liberal arts being basically conversation with works and conversation with other people. It’s easy to make the case that that’s essentially liberal arts in the workplace. Okay, how about healthcare? We’re about to launch a healthcare college. It’s gonna be called the Apprenticeship College of Health. By the time this airs, probably it will been announced and we are starting in a behavioral health occupation.

And so the question is, okay, what does liberal arts have to do with behavioral health? Well, one of the things you need to learn in behavioral health is Psychology 1, Psychology 2: Abnormal Psychology. And so we challenge ourselves to pair that psychology sequence with something in the liberal arts that was relevant. We need to provide a literature course as part of general education. Even in an apprenticeship degree, you could choose whatever literature you Want? Well, why not choose the literature of mental illness to pair with the psychology and abnormal psychology course? So you have a track on psychology, you have a track on the literature of mental illness, which could be everything from Freud to anything written by a Russian author as far as I’m concerned. And you got the literature of mental illness. But it’s about the intentional pairing of works that you would consider part of the liberal arts world with the workplace. And that’s an act of selection.

Right. You, you need to be intentional about that. And I think sometimes in traditional higher ed, professors want to teach what they want to, what they’re, you know, what they’re writing about. But when you’re designing work based education, you need to be selective about making sure that there’s an applicable relevant.

Michael Horn

Well, it points to the other piece, the disruption. Right. In the sense of like this is not a research driven institution. It’s an education driven institution which starts from a different set of precepts. And you’ve rethought what the faculty’s role is in that we’re not going to just listen to. Because Michael Horn wrote a book on this. He’s going to teach that which is, let’s be honest, that’s somebody do.

Joe Ross

It’s still very interesting for faculty to do this. It’s just a different challenge. Right. Instead of teaching the thing that you’re writing your next book on, how do I look for a way to find something that’s relevant to the workplace but still gives someone grist to engage in kind of like thinking about how things are different, how things are the same particulars versus generalities in life.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And it might be okay to say it’s not perhaps the right model for the research. New knowledge of the future that is perhaps disconnected from the immediate workplace concerns. And that’s okay as well. That’s a different model.

Joe Ross

There are still mainframe computers out there. It’s still a business, they still exist, they serve a function. Right. It’s just a different model. And there are a lot more laptops and desktops than mainframes as a sheer number and a sheer revenue volume. But you still need mainstream computers for certain things. Similar.

Michael Horn

Can you actually just. I’m going to highlight that point and then a couple other questions, which is just to make the point, like mainframes, you just said it. They still exist. They still do raw computing better than does the things we have in our laps and desks and pockets. And what disruption really was, was the volume went elsewhere. Right. And the market greatly increased in terms of the number of participants and volume collapsed from the mainframe computer companies, which led to their demise, I think in higher ed, frankly, like the Harvards of the world, the research universities, you know, they’re sort of predicated. Their quality is predicated on whom they exclude, not whom they include.

And so.

Joe Ross

That’s right.

Michael Horn

They may be just fine with the volume going elsewhere. And their business model is actually built to last in that scenario, which is different from say a Digital Equipment Corporation as a mini computer provider. So that, that’s one thing just to underscore. I mean, even vacuum tubes are still used for crying out loud.

Joe Ross

That’s right. That’s right.

Michael Horn

So, so the other thing just on that, the. There’s an important part of your definition of liberal arts that I think is clarifying because I also think it’s like a. It’s a bit of a catch all phrase and a lot of people sort of mean more humanities by it. But then they exclude the natural sciences, which that’s actually incorrect. If you think about liberal arts, it is incorrect. You have it as more like that conversation piece of what the liberal arts. Can you just expand on that? Because that’s an important piece.

Joe Ross

Yes. You know, my son went to St. John’s College and that’s one of the. That’s kind of a pinnacle. He turned down a bunch of places to go to St. John’s College, which basically is a four year experience of reading a prescribed curriculum of great books and great works. And it includes the history of science, includes the history of math. It is a broad view that defines liberal arts as having to do with works across many fields that have been in conversation over the centuries with other works.

Defining liberal arts education

Joe Ross

Pano Kanelos was the former president of St. John’s he went on to become the founding president of the University of Austin. And I’m actually drawing a little bit on his definition here, which I think is really compelling, which is liberal arts can be thought of as a conversation in two dimensions. In the first dimension, it is a conversation with works, human creative works. And in the second dimension, it’s a conversation with humans about those works and about ideas. And I think if you think about liberal arts as that, the word liberal comes from this idea of free. And so how do you free one’s mind to engage with different ideas with surprising evidence, to unshackle itself from dogma? And I think that when I think about liberal arts, I think about that conversation and then if you can apply that conversation into the workplace, you create a toolkit for solving problems and for being creative and for challenging assumptions. And I think that’s a core skill in the workplace.

I want to get back to the apprenticeship degree itself.

Michael Horn

Yeah, that’s where I was going to go next.

Joe Ross

Apprenticeship degree, you want to go there? Yeah, let’s, let’s go there. Because you mentioned it there, there is a such thing. If you look at New America, they have defined a degree apprenticeship, which is the foreign terminology for this model that comes from the uk. The UK has a whole degree apprenticeship field. In France they call it the laissez professional. In Germany it’s called dual education. There is kind of an international set of examples of work based higher education paired with apprenticeship. You could argue that that’s been going on here for some time.

New America just came out with a report. There’s 600 registered apprenticeship programs that they found that have a degree embedded into their program standards. So I think of that as a kind of a useful thing. Knowing that a degree apprenticeship defines an apprenticeship is helpful, but it’s really an apprenticeship that includes any kind of degree at all. Right. There’s a degree in its program standards. The reason we’re really intentional about talking about an apprenticeship degree where the apprenticeship is the adjective and the degree is the noun, is that we are challenging the concept of what a degree can be. And I’ve laid out three core elements in this definition that I remember as the ABCs that I think fit with disruptive theory to some degree.

A stands for affordability right there. That’s what we said at the outset has been lacking in kind of the history of higher ed College For All recently. And at reach, we just, we just set a price for ourselves. $75 a month out of pocket for every learner. We’d figure out the rest through a combination of employer contributions in the Pell Grant and workforce dollars. B stands for based in the workplace from day one to the day of completion, where the workplace is the learning place where classmates are colleagues. I think that’s part of the process change in an apprenticeship degree where you’re really leveraging real estate differently, similar to the way maybe mimic clinics leverage real estate differently. Right.

And then C stands for credit for learning at work where you’re embracing the idea again, a process change that actual measurable and credible learning happens in the workplace and you’re actually giving credit for that learning in a way that just makes it a lot more easy for more people to get into the pathway towards a higher credential.

Michael Horn

And that’s important, I think because. Yeah, I was gonna say that

Joe Ross

I think it’s important because, yeah, it calls. When we think about the apprenticeship degree. I’m not trying to change apprenticeship. Right. I mean, maybe there are reasons to change apprenticeship, but that’s not my job. We’re trying to change the degree. We’re trying to create a model of a different kind of degree that is still not a compromise in terms of what you get from it, but fundamentally different. And so if the degree itself becomes driven by apprenticeship elements, you could imagine much more access, much more, if you will, College For All than necessarily would arise from expanding the apprenticeships in the department of labor that have a degree because that’s going to serve a certain subset of the population.

But if degrees change as a thing, whether it’s part of an apprenticeship or not, you get to a space where maybe we’ll see the trajectory in college follow the trajectory that we saw with computers. Right, like that.

Reducing student opportunity costs

Michael Horn

Yeah, that’s what we’re hearing that switch. Well, so let me try to draw out what I see as a couple important precepts here as we start to wrap up, which is not only have you dramatically reduced the out of pocket cost to the student and frankly the fundamental expenditure that you all are putting forth, you’ve also erased the opportunity cost in large measure because now I don’t know the number, 70% of students are actually working at least part time, I think, while they’re doing their degrees in the US and you’re saying, great, that’s no longer at the expense of time studying. It is congruent with studying. So you’re like, right, and you can keep earning. And so you sort of have obliterated sort of this time pressure and the opportunity cost, it seems to me on students that’s a big deal, I think. And then the second thing you’ve done which is so critical at the moment is, you’re embedding it in the workplace itself. That’s going to be relevant to what they go do next. Right.

It’s not just like a random walk place and you know, walk through work. It’s intentional around the things that they’re going to go do. And there’s some sense of the competencies that they should master in that set of experiences. And then as I understand it, at least the online is sort of giving both theoretical construct and importance to what they’re doing in the job. But it also is allowing for these conversations, this liberal arts part of the package, if you will, which seems so important at the moment with AI and sort of, again, splits these things as false dichotomies and radically changes this picture of what is college. And so maybe there are a few other things you’d add, but I’m curious how you think we did.

Joe Ross

I think it’d be great. And I think on that point, it’s an example of how technology is actually enabling this. Right?

Michael Horn

Yes, I agree.

Joe Ross

Online, before COVID meant message boards and asynchronous correspondence between faculty and learners.

Michael Horn

Or when it was synchronous, let’s call it what it was. It was more expensive. Right.

Joe Ross

Or when it was synchronous, it was more expensive. Yeah. Everybody’s very much used to using Zoom and Zoom, but people forget, like, it used to be very hard to have multiple people doing video conferences at once. That was a technology problem.

Michael Horn

That’s a good point.

Joe Ross

Until, like, 2010. So Zoom got started in around 2011, by the way. I was at Cisco at the time. The founder of Zoom took me to lunch and said he was going to leave WebEx and start this thing called Zoom. And it was going to be. I think at the time, he was done with the enterprise world and he wanted to create a video chat experience for teenagers.

Michael Horn

Well, you remember, like, we had. What Cisco was telepresence. Right.

Joe Ross

And it was like they tried telepresence.

Michael Horn

Expensive. Yeah, it was hugely expensive.

Joe Ross

The mainframe. Yeah, like the mainframe of video conferencing. But they also had. They also had acquired WebEx. And WebEx was like the dominant player in video conferencing. But it was quite expensive and challenging to have multiple different videos happening at once, even in WebEx. And so one of the things that Eric Wan did is he really wanted to have multiple folks talking at once and have that maybe more affordable. So he leaves Cisco, starts Zoom.

He actually had my oldest child play with an early version of it because he thought it was for teenagers. And then he’s like, no, it’s not for teenagers. It’s still enterprise. Right. This is an untold story, perhaps, but I remember this was real. I met him at a party and he was like, you know, if you could have your children come and play with my new things, Zoom, maybe I’ll learn something. And he did some user interviews with them. Next thing I knew, it was for the enterprise.

But anyway, point being, it’s much, much more possible and feasible and affordable now to have a seminar online with 20 or 25 learners at once, cameras on, talking to each other around a virtual Harkness table than it was 15 years ago. It’s much, much more possible. And so I think that’s critical. If you believe in liberal arts, you believe in that synchronous conversation and you believe in that discussion. And we’re able to do that now at scale because we could have several thousand people online at once in Zoom spaces of 1 to 20 across the country. And for us that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know if we could have done that 20 years ago.

Michael Horn

So one other piece of this that I imagine is that hopefully people will agree with this framing, but if they don’t, that’s okay too. But one of the trade offs, it seemed to me, was the asynchronous again, dramatically improves convenience, access, et cetera. And because like you’re not supposed to be at a certain point, you know, a certain class at a certain time, success rates are lower and contrast with the synchronous versions. And so I’m thinking of the OPM providers like 2U at the time, right. Going to top institutions, charging a ton of money, right, for these synchronous experiences doesn’t really expand access. But like success rates are super high. And so all of a sudden that becomes like a bit of a talking point in the industry, right? Well, you can do high cost synchronous or you can do low cost asynchronous where the success rates aren’t going to go. You can, you know, expand access versus success.

You probably know where I’m going. I think you all have 3400 students at this point at Reach. What do your success rates look like? Have you broken yet another dichotomy, if you will?

Joe Ross

Well, I think so because, you know, overwhelming majority of our population are what used to be called non traditional, so working adults in their 30s, sometimes, more often than not, single parents have full time jobs, full time families, anywhere between 65 to 75% Pell eligible, depending on the moment in time. That is a population who typically graduates college at rates below 50%. If you just look at the pell eligible population, we across our cohorts are seeing 70% on time graduation rates, a trend towards that. We’re seeing much stronger, not just first year retention, but retention overall. And part of that is because of the human social connection in the experience right. If you can actually put people in a space together as we do, and not only are they during the day treated with their colleagues who are also their classmates, and they build that social nexus there, but also the seminars in the evenings, which by the way mix people from all parts of the country and seminar spaces on Zoom. We’re seeing people become close to each other in those Zoom spaces and forgetting that they’re far away from each other,

Michael Horn

Which is what 2U reported as well. Like when they were powering the UNCMBA, these people would show up on campus and be like, oh my gosh, it’s you. And they’re thrilled to see each other.

Joe Ross

It’s real. It’s real, it’s real.

Michael Horn

But you’re doing it with this radical affordability and access piece that is like, seems different to me.

Joe Ross

That’s right. It does not need to be expensive. And I think, you know, part of the reason 2U, it was expensive is they were working with the elites, right? So the elites had.

Michael Horn

They were layering it over their existing business model rather than reinventing it.

Joe Ross

That’s right. They had a high sticker price. It was their existing business model. You know, it cost over $10,000 to recruit people into those programs, but they were charging much, much more. Our approach is almost no recruitment costs because our employers are doing the recruiting. And so we’re able to charge much, much, much, much less and cover our costs.

Michael Horn

Sorry, that’s a big piece. Can we just like. That’s a huge piece. Because the biggest cost to online programs, if you just looked at one lump sum, is the cost of student acquisition. Everyone loves to poo poo it, but it’s just like it’s real. Right?

Joe Ross

So it’s real.

Michael Horn

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Ross

And look, it’s very hard to know what actually it costs to recruit people into higher ed because so little of it is public and it’s conflated especially with.

Michael Horn

Well, with athletics and all sorts of things.

Cost of student acquisition

Joe Ross

Yeah, all those other things. But if you look at some of the public company P&Ls the public for profits in higher ed, you can get a sense of what it costs to recruit because they do have to report everything. So if you look at that, whether it was Grand Canyon or Phoenix when they were public, because they’re public again for a quote unquote affordable mass market higher ed degree, typically the cost of student acquisition is around $3,000 right there. So that’s a chunk. It could be more, but it usually is about $3,000. For the very expensive programs. I think I looked into 2U public filing. I think they were looking at 10 to $12,000.

Michael Horn

I was gonna say 10 to 15 was my memory.

Joe Ross

So 10 to 15,000. All right. So if you want to disrupt with affordability, that doesn’t work. But if you leverage the workplace as your learning place and employers as your partners now you have virtually no marketing spend. Everything is partnership based. I think the biggest vendor for WGU, if you look at their 9/90 is Google. And so they’re spending tens of millions, millions of dollars on advertising. Even at WGU, I think it’s over 90 million a year last I checked.

Right. It is really expensive to recruit consumers on the Internet. Work based education skips all that. Right. And this is what I tell higher ed partners.

Michael Horn

So you just need a way to make the partnerships line up though.

Joe Ross

You just need, you just need to sign up the partnership. So you have a couple of partnerships folks developing relationships with employers. And I’m not competing for AdWords. Right. And so if you’re not competing for AdWords, if you’re not doing billboards, if you’re not doing radio, your cost of acquisition goes way, way down. That’s a huge driver of cost savings. There are other drivers around the process. Right.

Streamlining the curriculum

Joe Ross

One of the things that we did is say, you know what, we’re going to have no electives, we’re going to have a prescribed curriculum and business speak. Much fewer SKUs. We just had one simple thing to offer from beginning to end. This lowers costs in so many ways, including all our advisors know exactly where people are, what they did last semester, and what they’re going to do the next semester. They don’t have to look anything up. They just know, oh, you’re taking a social science semester. We know that next is math.

We know that. Right. Everybody knows that. And so there are a number of things that we realized in kind of the environment of constraint that we faced in starting Reach University are really unusual in higher ed and they lower your cost dramatically. And that was a huge driver. That’s why A is first in my ABCs. Affordability is the first thing we had to debate should it be access or affordability. And we’re like, access can be with debt, like, let’s name it, it’s affordable.

Now it’s really, really, really fashionable to talk about affordability in American politics. But we were talking about it before it was cool.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And you were talking about real affordability. Because that’s the other thing. Allowing people to afford what is still expensive is not true affordability. And that’s, I think that’s what drives me nuts about a lot of the ROI calculators out there is that they’re not taking into account the full cost of attendance.

Joe Ross

No.

Michael Horn

Meaning the government cost plus the student and in your case, the opportunity cost. So, like, those are three big things.

Joe Ross

Right? Right. If people don’t need to leave their job, leave their home, leave their work and go into debt, the barrier to entry gets way way lower.

Michael Horn

All right, well, it’s time to get. As we wrap up here, it’s time to get Matt Groening to write or to draw a cartoon saying, who needs college anymore?

Joe Ross

I love that. Exactly. Who needs college anymore?

Michael Horn

That’s the next step. But you have split a lot of the false dichotomies, it seems to me at this moment. So final thoughts as we wrap up here.

Joe Ross

Well, I think that I’d say maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question. Right. It’s not who needs college? It’s how does college need to change?

Michael Horn

There we go.

Joe Ross

I think if we think about it that way, maybe all the obituaries for higher ed will look like famous last words In a few years,

Michael Horn

There’s going to be a lot more to watch and unpack. But, Joe, seeing the signals before the data. Appreciate you joining us. Joe Ross from Reach University. And we’ll be back next time on The Future Of Education. Thanks to you all.

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