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In 2022, Heather Combs was appointed CEO of StraighterLine, one of Ed Tech's fastest growing companies, a leading provider of high quality, affordable online courses that help learners earn college credit and meet their professional goals had this led the company through its first acquisition of childcare education institute, one of the largest online training providers for early childhood education professionals, and this acquisition is a company's first step to significantly
expand its course offerings and grow. Heather has more than two decades of experience in scaling high growth companies before StraighterLine. She was the Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Operations Officer of digital product development company three pillar before three pillars she led revenue strategy and product management as the Chief Business Development Officer at the HR
Certification Institute. She was the Chief Sales Officer at Hanover research and spent 13 years at Corporate Executive Board, a business advisory firm that was acquired by Gartner in 2017, Heather was named a 2018 female disrupter of the software world by medium, and she's dedicated to women and
leadership. She's a founding member of chief, a network to connect and support women executive leaders, and a member of the Advisory Council for STEM for her an organization that empowers girls and young women to pursue education and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. straighter line is all about high quality, low cost online courses that
prepare students for success. It combines a $99 a month course subscription with guaranteed credit pathways to accredited degree programs so that learners can save up to 60% on the total cost of a degree. Heather Combs Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Hi, Alex. Thanks so much for having me today.
I'm so happy to have you here. Heather, you have worked in a lot of different places more than most of our guests. You've been in product development, you've been in business advising HR certification, and you are now the head CEO of straighter line. Tell us about your move into edtech and student success and what drew you to the mission of the company?
Okay, fair question. I have been in a lot of places. The real theme is that I love to build companies. I spent so I got to DC from a route in politics, but I'm in love with the city and not with politics and so moved to the nonprofit space and then into the private sector, and spent you 13 years with a company called CTV now sold a gardener
so it doesn't exist anymore. But while it went from 400 people to 5001 location to seven countries and just this incredible growth run where during that time, I got to work in a lot of different jobs across a growing company that just rounded out my sort of love of the pace of growth, and the opportunity that comes with trying new things.
And when I left CB in order to go try those skills in other places that led me through Conville wild set of companies that were each trying to either enter a new market or change their pricing model or launch something new. And I just worked my way through them and, and wound up with incredible opportunities straighter line
being the most recent. And so I knew when I when it was time to look for the next opportunity that I was going to want to work in some fast growing industry, some awesome company that had a lot of potential. And then Switzerland kind of hit me in the heart. For so many angles. The idea of helping with the education and college journey just was very real to me. First of all, most immediately relevant at the time I took the role. I had a daughter applying
to college. I have five teenage daughters, the oldest of which just finished her freshman year but for morons across high school and middle school. And so the college pressure and the cost of college is an ever present conversation in our house today. But that doesn't even reflect my upbringing. I am in my family, first generation college on my mom's side, my parents married young. And my dad went to college and my mom stayed home to take care of us
kids. And then my father died when I was young of leukemia, right about the time I was turning 10. And so my mom, who now had three children, and no college degree, actually went back to nursing school while I was in high school. And so I saw, I lived the plight of the adult, parent working learner, from all of the things that means time commitments, financial commitments, the stress and pressures that come
unexpectedly of family. And the idea that I could spend these otherwise, business building skills in an industry that I could care about, in so many ways, just really appealed to me, I was like, No, this is something I can get out of bed and do every day,
that experience is so valuable. And you've really seen the business world from different angles. And when you bring that kind of mindset to straighter line, it's really exciting to see where it could go, you know, as you talk about your mother going to nursing school, and then your five daughters going to college, it strikes me as you know, it's such a difference in price. Let me just know that, of course, the one to five, but also, the price of college has just continued to rise over these
last decades. And it's just such a wildly different space. And, you know, that brings us to straighter lines, real mission straighter line was founded in 2009. And it was really founded on the observation that the prices for online courses were the same or even higher than those delivered face to face. And that just didn't make sense to the founder of Burke Smith. Right?
That's right, in about 2008 Burke, who is a serial entrepreneur, and just oriented towards the disruption of higher education. I mean, that's that's his love and effort, the work of his life. And his idea long before this was a well accepted idea was that he would make fully online, asynchronous and affordable college classes for students to take and transfer into their
degree programs. So the idea was to find a way to make and deliver courses at such a price point that students did not need federal financial aid in order to take the classes. So one trying to reduce that cost barrier. And then by being a synchronous to really lean into flexibility, and the optionality to control time and place. So you could be anywhere in the world at any time of day, taking
your college course. And this just in 2008, was not a well accepted idea that even when colleges were trying to make courses available online, they were often just video outlets to an already live class happening. So that was a step in the right direction, because it eliminated commute for some people and extended the reach. So now someone in a rural area might be able to take that class. But it didn't allow for that working adult parent to take it at
midnight. Or for the person who only has a single day a week off work who wants to spend that day dedicated to classwork, it still required you to be available at an at what would otherwise be the traditional class schedule. And this really solved for those two problems at once.
The value proposition for StraighterLine is really wide, you know, as you're naming some of the different things that it offers these mostly non traditional students, but not exclusively, there's a lot of things that students get from straighter line that they just can't find elsewhere. And I want to dig into a couple of them and just hear you sort of articulate what these things mean to your
students. So one of the core value propositions for straighter line that you don't see in a lot of other offerings at all is college credit. And it's you know, low cost, low cost of delivery low price for students, but they can get college credit. Tell us how a straighter line gets to the point where it can offer accredited courses, and how students tend to use these credits. What is the sort of mechanisms by which they can use the credits in their educational journey?
Yeah, you know, all props to Burke and the team at the time that had this idea of they really built their original college classes in conjunction with universities. So it was asking In the universities, what classes do students need? And what classes will you accept in transfer, and then building them with a methodology that they would have the right credibility and rigor to transfer into those universities. So all of the courses are designed with
current teaching models. And the process by which the course material is laid out is very similar to any other college course. They all go through the American Council on Education, Ace review process and recommendation for transfer, which gives schools their first level of comfort in these courses, they know that they've been made in the same methodology, and they're taken through the same qualifications. And then we do things that the
students may not love. But certainly the schools feel more comfortable with, for example, we use live proctoring for our exams. So the students have to register for a video proctor to watch them live, take the final exam. And that's a little bit of a logistics hurdle. That certainly is another sec. But it allows the class to have the credibility that counts for a
college credit. So we in order to take it even the next step to make it easier for students, which my goal is to make it as him salutely pain free as possible, as can be, and in the college methodology for these students to transfer it, we've gone out to schools and signed 160 Direct articulation agreements with some of the largest schools in the country, and many of the schools that our students say they're transferring their credits into.
So those students can actually see before ever taking the class, that there is an an articulation agreement for the exact course, that they're going to take with StraighterLine to transfer into their degree program, so there's no risk for
them. So we go through great pains on the front end to make sure that doesn't happen, and continue to welcome articulation partners to this day, if there are universities listening who would like to be one, call me, we think that that is such a path to smoothing out some of the hurdles for students to get degrees. And we want to make it as possible as we can.
Absolutely. And navigating those credit transfer processes on your own as a student can be incredibly complicated and difficult and disheartening, because all too often people do find themselves in situations where they have a number of credits from one school, often a community college and then when they go to a try to transfer to a four year they only accept some of their credits, or even none of their credits. And they get, you know, it's really a huge waste of their time in terms of how the
system works. So doing that work on the front end, getting the articulation agreements in place is a major benefit to your student body. And you know, another benefit, straighter line came out years before the MOOC movement, it came out before student debt surpassed credit card debt as as the sort of the second largest source of debt in the US. So it was ahead of the curve in terms of where everything was going in an online Ed. And one of the ways it was was stackability.
stackability means that students can use individual courses to enhance their careers and get credit for those even before they fully completed a degree or a certificate. That's really important StraighterLine calls that the Earn and Learn model. If I have that correct. Tell us about that model and how it works. How does stackability help your student body?
Yeah, I think this gets right back to the heart of trying to make sure that we use a student's time and money as efficiently and effectively as possible. So if I think of being responsible for them, laying out the dollars that are going to be required to get through a class, that burden then is on us to make sure that they do that thoughtfully
whenever we can. So one of the really hard things in the class and credentialing and college space is there just are hundreds of options of the courses that you can take. Well, we're working to do and I think we can still do it much better. So we're working on it every day, is to figure out how to help students pathway really clearly into which courses you take in what order so that they have the most value for you at the time.
So if you're a student who needs to be earning prerequisites to get into a program, why waste your time on classes that won't count for those prerequisites, let's focus you on the handful of courses that are going to demonstrate your capability to either get into your school or to get into the specific department in your school and
get there and be successful. And then for our newest pathway in this early childhood education, we're trying to be even more more specific than that, which is how do you help a person get their very first job into a childcare center preschool
classroom. And then how does each subsequent class help them move up in their earning potential, and in their employment position, such that the class itself is supporting the job they have today is working them towards the job they want tomorrow, and it's counting for perhaps a degree program they ultimately want to
work for. And so for example, our CDA, the Child Development Associate, now can transcript into college for college credit, helping a student already be on the pathway to a degree should that be where they'd like to go. And then they can also ensure that those years that they're required to get a continuing education credit to keep the job they have today counts towards a college degree plan, so that each time they spend time or money in one of these classes, it's stacking towards a higher
outcome. So hopefully, we're getting people to the point that they have degrees, but not always, there might be credentials along the way. Or they may be moving from a specific degree program into you skilling, for example. And we're happy to be there along that journey, but just trying to make it as efficient as possible.
Yeah, and that addresses yet another one of these common gaps in navigating this complex higher ed system in the US, which is people don't always finish their degrees. And when they don't, they often walk away with no credential of any kind in, in a traditional school, which means that they can't apply to jobs that require a BA or associate's degree, this idea of sort of all or nothing has always been a little bit
silly. But stackability, and especially as you mentioned, ordering the classes so that they support your working learners careers as they go is such a service to your learners who tend to be working adults. Another benefit for working adults that we've seen in online classes, as you mentioned, is flexibility, not only flexibility in terms of access, and you know, distance, and you can work and learn from home,
which is a big one. But students can complete StraighterLine courses completely at their own pace. And from my understanding, the average length is about five weeks, which is much faster than traditional college courses. So tell us about the flexibility in that sort of self paced model of
learning. This one, I didn't want you to spend the rest of the day right here on all the reasons I think that pacing isn't such an interesting part of the complication, maybe unnecessary complication of college in general. And we'll talk about all the pieces there.
But but in this piece, I think you mean, if you're an individual learner going through a class in the asynchronous model, so this is separate from say, the OPM model or from taking your college classes online, where the class still meets every Tuesday, Thursday at 10. All the way to Asynchronous means that you can start this class anytime you're ready to start it. And you can move as quickly or as slowly as you'd
like. This allows a student who is really familiar with a subject matter to move really quickly, if you will have been working in the accounting field for a very long time. And you're now taking an accounting class and you can whiz through that fantastic. move as quickly as you can take the classes, finish the assignments, get through the grading period, great. If this is your first ever accounting class, and it is coming painfully hard to you can tackle
it one bite size at a time. And you can stretch that out for months if you'd like to, or while you're working with a tutor, or while you're doing other life events that happen if you have a couple of months, you need to entirely take off so that you can care for your aging parent, you can do so this really takes some of the burden and the risk out of it for students who think what if I start in August, and I can't get all the way to December because something in life happens or
because this class really is moving too fast for me? Or the flip side? Why? If I've got this, if this one is not my Achilles heel, why would I spend the next four or five months in this topic area when I could be moving on to the next class. So this is one of my favorite parts about asynchronous I recognize asynchronous as a learning model doesn't work perfectly in for everyone. But for the person who values flexibility over some of the other components that come
with good learning models. This one is probably the one that our students value the most.
So the combination of you know stackability and credit and flexibility really does a lot of things for these working learners. It lets them avoid, you know, accidentally taking The wrong prerequisites are not having their credits transfer allows them to earn while they learn and continue with their
careers. And it allows them to self paced they can whiz through, they sometimes call this, you know, mastery based learning or competency based learning, they can zip through a class, if they already have a background in it or already are just motivated to do so which I'm sure they often are. Or they can take their time and make it work with their busy lives, which we know working adults
always have. So that brings us you know, we've mentioned your student body a couple of times just in passing here, but I want to dig into it, because it's a really important set of learners that a lot of traditional schools don't think about enough. They used to call these the non traditional students, but they're really fast becoming the normal students and the demographic of StraighterLine. So 79%, female, that's a pretty high percentage, even more than traditional college, which is
also majority female. At this point, you have about 43%, non white, so a little, basically half and half there. Almost half of your learners are parents, which there's actually more parents in traditional schools than people realize. But this is a higher percentage even than that. And more than half are between the ages of 23 and 40.
So, you know, we've talked on the podcast about how people still envision the you know, the student on the quad, who's 19, and a sophomore, when they think about a college student, but this, this learner is everywhere. And he's very motivated, you know, people who are in their 20s, and 30s, often female, often have kids already, and they're trying to advance
their careers. Tell us about supporting this audience, you know, this demographic, and you have a, you know, a long dedication to supporting women's career education. So this, this majority female audience, I'd love to hear your talk about what it means to you.
So I share a little story of my background. So you, you probably can guess where some of it comes from on this side of both growing up, you know, being really in awe of a mother who did this. But then also, being a mother now, of these five girls, I feel a great deal of calling to making sure that I'm paving the path forward for women, whether that's in their careers, or in their education, or just in their leadership opportunity ahead of them. So it's always been a
passion part. And then StraighterLine has given me this new place to work on the puzzle that is sort of life of empowering women along the way. And so I love I love our statistics, especially when I then think about this was just Mother's Day recently, right of the moms are out there and sort of envisioning that when it's working, and going to school and taking care of children and and maybe for many people sort of in that midlife range, also, perhaps helping with it with
older family members. So the sandwich generation, as they call us, I think. So first of all, just love it and see where
it comes from. But then I think that maybe the biggest change in the way that I think about this is that when I went to college, and very many of the people you described in that that box that the 18 to 22 year old who goes to college for four years on a campus, the idea is that the world stopped, you go to, you know, college or and do your higher ed, as a point in time you take out loans while you do it, you don't do anything else. And then you sort of check the box, you graduate, and life
restarts. And you you have this credential that takes you on. And for those students who can do that wonderful. That's a fun experience. I had that in many ways. So I don't, I don't want to discount the good that can come of that. But for the rest of the world, I think that we should think about learning as a more continuous journey. So at what point are we not learning in order to get better at our jobs, I still in this job, go very regularly to classes to
learn something new. Oh my goodness, I certainly don't know how to use AI anybody else taking all the AI classes to figure out how to do it. When I was mid career, I went back to sort of an exec MBAs program that helps me learn how to to be a partner in our m&a work to really, really dig into that financial skill set that I didn't come with a background
heavier in the liberal arts. So I think that if we all imagine that our lives require a journey of learning skills, applying skills in either relearning them or mastering them or improving upon them or changing skills altogether. For example, I talk with my kids all the time. I certainly am not digitally native. I had my first computer that one that I actually owned
post graduate school. So trying to tell my kids that I like walked to the computer lab to print a paper that you had the one time option to print and then Walk it to your, you know, professors mailbox to turn it in, they just can't fathom because even now in elementary school, they're turning in their work on an iPad, the evolution is going to be there, all of the skills are going to be there.
And I think we have to stop thinking about we're going to pause life, we're going to do school for four years, and we're going to go and so the changing the model and changing the thinking, I think empowers these, especially women, parent, working individuals to believe that it's they didn't miss an opportunity to learn, there's still an opportunity and and for all the rest of us there is to
absolutely, and as you're picturing this, quote unquote, non traditional learner in their 20s, or 30s, they may have children, they're a majority female have multi racial backgrounds. You may be thinking about some of the mega universities, that places like Western Governors or Southern New Hampshire University, which we talk about, you know, pretty often on the podcast as disruptors, you may even be thinking of these sort of Challenger universities that are starting to come out now.
Because people are really, really starting to wake up to what StraighterLine realized in 2009, which is that there are a lot of these learners around and they have very different needs
than others. But one thing that makes StraighterLine very different than most of these is that StraighterLine does not offer degrees, it's really not about that it's much more about filling these targeted gaps, sort of catching learners at those points where they often fall out of the process because of prerequisites or because of not having enough credits to graduate or being stopped out and needing to go back. There's all of these different holes in
the system. tell our listeners a little bit about why StraighterLine doesn't offer degrees and doesn't plan to offer degrees, which I personally love as a strategy.
It's a great question. And I would start from that setup that you even asked about to say, I am so excited about how many schools there are working on modern models and innovating in this space. I am a huge fan of all the brands you talked about in WVU and Southern New Hampshire and UMass global and UMBC are just some of my favorites to watch what they're doing in this space to make learning more available, and more flexible for more students.
So the idea in my mind, and I think this is what gets to our decision on to our degrees is we want more individual learners empowered to have the degree or the job that they seek, period. So the more options and more alternatives there are, the better. I sort of the mental picture I have is the same thing with feeding people, the more options there are, the more price points, the more availability, the more options, all the better, because what we want are people who have access
to more food, right. And so this is how I feel about education.
And so StraighterLine has taken the position that rather than offering a degree, which would put us in competition with those amazing progressive schools, where we would be trying to retain our students or to limit their choice, we are going to go the opposite direction, we are going to empower the individual student, we are going to try to make sure that every class they take, and every dollar they spend can then go with them into their career or into their degree program wherever they
want to go and whatever is right for them. So if you take nutrition with us, and then you would like to go into a nursing program, we wanted to go with you. If you take nutrition with us, and you are going to work as a K 12 teacher and wanted to make sure that you were able to teach that subject, we wanted to go with you. If you are taking it because you are already in one of those fields, and you're taking it as continuing education, we still want it to be the best possible class that
we can offer. So we think about how do we make sure the class is what you need, at the time that you need it at a price point you can afford it that. So it is really about ensuring that flexibility. And that value for the dollar and time that this learner sends to school is the grant degrees, our office, obviously a necessary part of the ecosystem. And we're so glad to have as many partnerships as
we do. We just think it would limit our students or our optionally or, frankly a bit of our our priorities and our incentive structure. If we thought differently, we want to make sure that were in the middle is the student
and students, especially adult working students have all sorts of situations that they need to, you know, use StraighterLine classes and credits to remedy you know, almost half of your learners are there because they have admissions prerequisites, meaning they can't get into the institution of learning that they want to go to unless they've completed certain classes. And they don't want to pay a ton of those ton for those classes. They want to do them quickly. get what they need and
then move forward. So that's a big chunk, you also have people trying to graduate on time to graduate faster, or in credit during breaks. So they don't have to go by the traditional schedule. It's, as you say, you know, it's about putting the
student at the center. And I think that's a real through line of a lot of these progressive, you know, universities, there's this change of instead of the university doing things, the way universities have done them, there's this feeling of these learners are have very specific needs. And we're not always serving them there. Our graduation rates are not always that high, Nick, sometimes walk away with dead no certificate, how can we really meet them
where they are? So one of the things that StraighterLine does, that's really, really cool. And I think a lot of newer universities aspire to this is that they also teach where the jobs are. So you just mentioned, you know, if you're taking a nutrition class, you may be going into an education program for it, you may be going
different places with it. One of the verticals that you've been really looking at, and you just acquired a company to support this is education, especially early childhood education, StraighterLine, acquired childcare education institute, end of last year, and that is clearly a strategic acquisition to be able to support education.
Tell us about that acquisition, and what other verticals, what other sort of high need job categories, that straighter line is serving to put the students at their center of their own experience?
We did we completed that acquisition, we've been integrating the two companies has been a blast, there's so much opportunity in this space. So excited to work with it. But you're right, the idea is to lean into the places that have the largest skilled worker gaps. So where there are lots of jobs that need to be filled, but there are not enough people that have the the education, the credentials, the degrees that get them into those
jobs. And then we'd like to layer another lens on it, which is, what about the places also that have low ROI for your traditional four year college experience? So teaching doesn't always pay student loans very
well. And so how can we support creating more teachers without creating teachers with debt, which is, you know, so we're partnered with the American College of Education on this, they also very much have that same philosophy, they do a pay as you go model and, and in both cases, the idea is to help students and in this partnership, be able to step on wherever they are, to work in a daycare center, a preschool a K 12 setting, or go on to get their master's degree or working
in administration, anywhere along that journey. And by taking the content that CCE I had that really focused on that early childhood educator, together with the content that StraighterLine has, right at the Gen Ed's of your teaching degree, when it's these universities, and then partnering with the American College of Education to get teachers through a degree program in the thing models, low cost, totally flexible, and really targeted right at the teacher was just a perfect
match. We are having so much success in that space and being able to serve the community that we were aiming to be able to provide services for, we are now working on that also in the healthcare space. So a significant part of our population comes in looking at a self described Nursing Pathway of some kind. So perhaps they're starting in X ray tech, or they aspire to be a surgical tech, or they're working on their CNA, the number of prerequisites and the order in which they take
their classes. And they apply for these programs, fairly important. And then many of them are already employed, or would like to be employed in the field. And then of course, the field, having been the daughter of a nurse, like we talked about, there just are not enough
nurses to go around. And if we can do anything to help the healthcare institutions, both hire people who are prepared, or even better to retain their workforce and upskill them into the next jobs rather than needing to cycle through employees. We feel like that's just a higher calling, and a great place that we can impact the world positively. And then there are a few other places that make good sense in this
face. You think about you know, my previous world before straighter line was in software development, and there are more digital products being made than there are individuals who can code them into existence. And so can we help with that there are more people who need general business skills then currently exist and need to be able to move up through their degree. So
what can we do about that? And so there are some places we really feel like we can, can look at clearly but education and then Nursing our chief among them, and we've got a big soft spot for it.
For some of our international listeners, the ROI comment that Heather is saying here is so important because we have a very, very strange higher ed system and credentialing system in the US in many ways. And one of the aspects of it that I think you and I both find very bizarre, you've talked about it very directly is that some of the job categories that are incredibly high need for society, and really important, require lots of educational credentialing, which is expensive, and then
aren't paid very well. So you're putting people like teachers and health care workers and social workers. And there's a number of other fields, many of which are caregiving fields, many of which are dominated by women, you're putting people in this incredibly strange situation where they've worked really hard, they've gone through all the steps to educate themselves, and then they're underwater in debt for years. It's really,
really strange. And it's nice to hear really good to hear that, that a straighter line is thinking about this. I also think that COVID made us see this more clearly than we had in the past, because you may notice that nurses and teachers were two of the job categories, extremely hard hit. During the pandemic, we've seen major teacher shortages over the last
couple of years. And when you mentioned, you know, retaining workers, those are both hard jobs in the best of times, they're extra hard jobs during a global pandemic. And we're really short now. I mean, we do not have enough people with the skill set, yet, we're still charging them the same price as the engineer next door, or the person learning, you know, management, or the person learning robotics, or it's just
a weird system. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about it, because I'm sure you have strong feelings about that.
I do. I don't really understand it. It is one of the few places where so often and they college face that a college credit hour is the same price, regardless of what it costs to teach that hour or what the return for having taken that
hour. If so, why liberal arts class and a heavy lab equipment intensive class are exactly the same price, I don't understand why we would charge the same thing for somebody who's going to have a very lucrative career that we do for somebody who's willing to dedicate their life to social work does not make
great sense to me. So I do think we this is one of those areas of disruption when we start thinking about this, what needs to be rethought and in education, higher education in general, I think these are the spots that all of it should be put on the table. And we should rethink the country spends a lot of time getting caught up in that who should pay the bill. But we don't talk near enough about what's on the bill in the first place. But why is the bill
what it is what's included. And then really, is there any way to make it less and to give alternatives and try different models. And that gets us into an entire space where you see quite the debate between the idea that we want there to be innovation in education, and yet we punish the private sector for leaning in and trying to fund alternatives and options and
experiments in the space. It feels a little like unwinnable at the moment, we need to disrupt all of it and just rethink the time that we allocate to education, whether or not it needs to be on the system that it is today, on the dollars that we spend on what you're buying for those dollars, the points in life that you're supposed to take it whether or not you can do it while you work, or you have to stop working in order to complete
those kinds of things. There's so much we could redo and certainly the element of return on the individual investment needs to be rethought
other countries that sort of think maybe a little bit more broadly about social engineering, and I mean that in the most positive way, you know, helping their population prepare for the jobs of the future. I know Singapore just announced an enormous upskilling initiative. And they've been great at this for a while, you know, they see the relationship between what the government and what you know, big nonprofits like universities in the US can do to, they can actually benefit society in all
these ways. But they need structure to do so they can't just, you know, continue to use the same structures they've always used as the world changes more and more and more, and they can't charge the same for every I mean, they do they keep it simple for themselves by charging the same for every credit hour, but it doesn't make
any sense. Just as you say, another aspect of the higher ed world that has been sort of I think, taken for granted for a long time is the prevalence of the four year degree in the US the fact that it takes four years to get a bachelor's degree if you stick to the standard schedule and it's summers off all this silly stuff. That doesn't make any sense especially for working learners. We've seen some movement recently, what experiments in
that realm stand out to you? And I'm curious, do you see that change coming?
Absolutely. So you I mean, we've talked a little bit about it, you know, this one, I couldn't believe in more. I, myself did my undergraduate degree in three years. That was a well before that was cool in the 90s, largely because I was coming from this, you know, single parent home where my mother was, you know, going back and earning her own college degree. So there wasn't just, you know, extra money for me and my siblings to go to school. So I was taking
out loans and working. And the faster you can get through school, the more you are saving. And so once I started, I was going full speed through the program, which meant I also took class all through summer. And when I did two internships, they were internships that counted for credit, I took a number of AP exams that gave me credit, so credit by exam, and just went continuously while working. I think we should make that
option, the norm for students. I think this idea that you go to school for nine months, and then you take three months off, is a bit absurd. You know, I regularly asked myself, Where did this come from? And of course, I think most people point back to the system of agriculture when we need people to go home and work the farm during the summer. But that doesn't seem to be the case for most college students today that their families are awaiting
their return for the harvest. So why are we having students take months off, where they're not progressing towards their degree at a cost, where they're also usually not employable at a breakeven dollar amount. So some students might work during the summer, but not at the kinds of jobs that are returning on their college investment. My own daughter, you know, she had two months offer for the holiday break in the middle of the year as well. And I thought that's a very long time to essentially
not do anything. Now, I would argue as her mom, that's a great time to take straight online classes. You know, there are ways to fill the gaps today. But I think if schools could start thinking differently about how do we not just in the StraighterLine asynchronous model, but even on the more traditional campus, how can we start to shorten down the time
requirement? Why are we unnecessarily adding two month breaks and three month breaks, and doing things that are making it difficult for students to roll through it? And I think I'm not the only one asking this question. Right there are there lots of people out there starting to talk about the three year degree? I think it's coming? I think it's one of the things I absolutely support that extra year is a lot of money spent time spent, that I think
that we can bring back. And then all the other mechanisms for making sure that we're not taking someone unnecessarily through extra time, just because so if we can do credit by exam, if we can do prior learning assessments, if we can do competency based models, if we can have classes that are move at your own speed, if we can have asynchronous as an option, if you do all of those things, I think you start to make a package that can be right for a much wider audience and the
person who just somehow has four years or more and invite current statistics to just sit out the rest of life and wait on the next semester to start.
Great points. You know, we have seen, as you said, some movement towards three year degrees. We just, you know, saw last week, Georgetown and a whole set of other, like a consortium of universities are testing out some three year degree models. Right now, we've seen some competency based models, we've seen some recognition of prior learning, we've seen innovation from the private sector, but it's a hard habit to break. People are just really stuck on this idea of
what college is. One thing I just want to bring up as it is my final question for you. But you mentioned these folks who yourself included who sort of work the system who understand that, you know, college costs a
lot of money. So if you do it faster, or get credits for things that are less expensive, you can accelerate the process and I know that you see that as one of your personas one of your sort of types of learners on straighter line the I think you call them the hackers right or some version, people who like get that it's just about getting
that number of credits. And that's going to be your key to getting to the next part of your life so So however you can get the fastest and least cost possible, they're going to make it happen. I think that is amazing. And I it's we live in a world where that type of hacking is probably possible in more ways than than ever before. Tell us a little bit about the learners you see a straighter line who are doing that kind of optimization model of education.
I love these learners there is there's like a movement like a like a hack
education movement. There's also a earn your degree for under $10,000 movement and if you get into the social media worlds and into like Reddit, there are students that will help other students with this about where you can take your classes, how much they cost were their options you may not have thought about, there are entire initiatives behind doing things like this for say that trends as people are transitioning out of the military, how do we go back in and give them credit for all
the amazing work they've done, and not start at the beginning of a traditional college journey. So these students inspire us, we've we've got a number of testimonials inside the StraighterLine space where you have individuals who will tell you their full transcript of how they got each of those classes and added them up into a college degree for the under $10,000. And for not having either taken up as much time or landed it. So I get all excited, I think we should do way more of
it. I think that those of us in the innovative side of the tech industry ought to make those opportunities really transparent. I think working on the transfer ability is probably the key place that we can impact students here is to make sure that they get and keep control of a complete learner record that they own, and that they can take everywhere with them to just continue to build towards the endpoint they're working
for. In this case, we're mostly talking about degrees, but or it could be certifications, could be classes, could even just be a badge towards showing an employer that you're ready to work in a specific field. But in the degree world, the number of universities that turn down a student's credit from another accredited university is so disheartening, and this is hurting from the person who's not currently taking the class. Now imagine you've put in the time and effort and dollars to
take that class. And your receiving institution rejects it, because certainly the business model makes more sense. If you haven't read ticket at your institution, I think there's so much we could do in that space, and hope that we will and hope that the industry will lean in and get really accepting watch the success stories of the graduating degree students who have come from a wide variety of backgrounds and and try to help them get through.
Yes, I love that sort of call to action from the innovators. The innovation community in higher ed coming from all different directions. The apprenticeship models are hot right now our skills based learning or competency, and there's so many great ideas around and they're all trying to sort of nip away at a system that is just doesn't work for way too many people. StraighterLine, of course, has
been on this for decades. So it's really exciting to see you and VR and StraighterLine continue to lead on this brand. So as we end the podcast, I always end with two questions. The first is, what do you see as some of the most exciting trends in the EdTech landscape right now that you think our learners should keep an eye on?
Well, I think we just talked about some of the ones I think are best, the three year degree, Let's all watch and let's all do everything we can to get that one as real as soon as possible, increasing transferability finding some set of the ecosystem in which we can make this more possible for more students more easily, which probably involves transparency, it probably involves some kind
of acceptable standards. I love when people talk about, you know, one company accepts another company's audit, you know, because there's a standard by which we believe that audits are right, which get right to probably one of the coolest ones watching develop this idea that complete learner record or medical records for students, right that that somewhere it would exist, that the you could see all of my education, my skills, my experiences in a record that I have, and can show
you, rather than a school sending you the name a number of a course that you have no idea what was inside that course, or for me giving you a job title I had previously and you have no idea what skills I did, what could we create that is so much more granular, where we tell you what our blood pressure is, and our pulse rate is so that you have a sense of the employee or person that you're looking at
really is. And I think we start getting into that granularity and the level of ownership where the individual is the person that we're giving this empowered list of capabilities to we're going to have as a society gotten so much further and then we can have all those conversations in a more meaningful way about what jobs don't really require degrees and what is an apprenticeship worth and where you know, our internships and what's the difference between social capital and alumni power and
what are all those things like let's find out what the person can do. And if we can't move around some of these other systems
that move from the credit hour as the sort of common currency I have higher add to the skill to the capability. Josh Burson and workforce called the causes sort of capability academies, like how can you build skills and somebody in a way that they can showcase those skills and transfer them anywhere. And that's such a better measure than just a piece of paper, you know, no matter what that paper represents. So let's talk about
resources. You've been in this space, looking at it and from a lot of different angles, what are some resources you would recommend for people who want to go deeper listeners who want to go deeper into the topics we discussed today?
There are so many and I spend every morning reading for a little while, it's sometimes can be hard for me to transition to the doing the job or reading about the job. One, we are buddies with whiteboard advisors, they are one of our great resources, and they send out a list called what we're reading. And it's on my list, you know, and I go through it each day and it's broken down by the different categories. totally recommend that Jeff Slingo has all kinds of stuff that he writes about in the
world. And a number of books out there and interesting, newish one on who gets in and why. There's a book that we got very excited about having worked on this transferability question and the online education space that we're so deeply in, there's using ROI for strategic planning on online education kind of academic, but Kathleen Ives and Deborah Seymour. And then one of my just fun favorites, because I really like his sassy attitude on top of the content, Matt tower is right to daily, pay us
daily at this point. No, it's weekly. Maybe he should write a daily tell him that this is our daily call the N tech dots. And he both represents like what is happening in the industry and then has like some commentary and some questions usually on it, where he's like, I don't know why they did this. And it was good. And I just really enjoy it because it often asked this sort of like, thoughtful question that makes you go hmm, yeah. So those are a few of the
ones that I read. But man, there are so many good ones out there. And so many good podcasts like yours, Alex that, then I can both exercise and learn about the faith and
waiting a long time for somebody to recommend this podcast as the resource as you cracked the code. Yeah, we love Matt tower. He co hosts episodes pretty often here with us and great suggestions across the board that book using ROI for strategic planning of online education. That is cool ROI as the core planning mechanism. That is definitely something people don't think about enough.
So we will put links to all of these resources that Heather is recommending in the show notes as always, Heather combs, CEO of straighter line, thank you so much for being here with us on Ed Tech insiders.
Alex, thanks so much for having me. These are the most fun topics to dig into. And I cannot wait to see what we can team up and do together about him.
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