Expanding Access to Higher Education with Eli Bildner of Guild Education and Rivet School

funded by employers. Eli was also the CO Executive Director and co founder of rivet school, a nonprofit which simplifies college by pairing an accredited online degree with real world supports such as a personal coach, financial aid, a community of peers, career planning, emergency funding, tech support, and co working

space. Eli also led international growth and was a product manager at Coursera and earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Eli Bildner, welcome to Ed Tech insiders.

paper. I mean, maybe one person reads the paper you produce at the end of the but it's really for you. And I was just not very accustomed to having been the recipient of a lot of very kind of goal ambition oriented education to just being in a place where I had time space funding to just like, explore my curiosity. And I found that I just really didn't know what to do with it. And that was probably a little bit much to call it a radicalizing moment.

But it was a moment of recognition that I'd done a lot of learning, I'd become very nominally very educated, but I wasn't a good learner, and particularly self directed learner. And that inspired me to come back to the states working in early days on my first online coding boot camps. And then joining Coursera as an early employee, obviously, where we

work together. And then and I can talk more about this, figuring out the places where I really wanted to push and founding Ribbit school and now now coming to guilt.

meaningful. And yeah, you're right. It's especially folks without access to social capital without access to kind of a broad aperture on like World of Work like this is a big problem and providing those kinds of supports that bring together again, this like wealth of content that's out in the world with direction curation, mentorship is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about and working on.

founder of rivet school. And rivet school is all about trying to help students both enroll and graduate from college and get degrees that are needed to accelerate their lives, you know, based on what you're saying, what made you focus on this particular need and take this approach? Sure. So

But there's also merit to that critique, you know, because ultimately, like it matters whether people are able to learn what they set out to learn and derive some really tangible

benefit from that. And, you know, as I spent more time at Coursera, I took this critique more and more seriously thinking about the populations of learners that you didn't have the time and their days didn't have the support, academic support, socio emotional support, coaching, wraparound resources, technology to really take advantage of this, like amazing library that we built.

So I became interested in educational models that were holistic, and that really thought about this broader experience of learning and long story may be medium. I did some of this exploration in the context of going to business school in my second year of business schools introduced to the founder or a founder and Board Chair of an organization called kappler, which is a fascinating organization. And it's been gotten a lot of great

recognition. They recently received a grant from MacKenzie Scott, which was was awesome to see. And what Kepler was doing was they are based in Kigali, Rwanda, they were taking a US based online degree offered by Southern New Hampshire University, a competency based degree program, combining it with a lot of with a residential

college experience. So students would come to Capitol or they live in dorms while they were studying, going through this online curriculum with a bunch of both wraparound supports, and then kind of just in time teaching, and a lot of like career supports, every student of color is required to do an internship. And I was introduced, actually, in the context of a potential job opportunity went down there for a final round interview. And I realized one, this model is

amazing. And two, that, you know, I actually really want to do this work closer to home in California. And so it came back to California and was really fortunate to connect with a set of collaborators, including my co founder and Ben, co executive director of Ribbit school, Jackman. Acero, and a founding board a really visionary and committed founding board of directors, Ted Williams, Lauren and John Coughlin to found

Ribbit school. And, you know, our thesis, which I think, you know, very much, it's not like, you know, brilliant insights, like the way that the state of the world is that, you know, the reason that called persistence rates for traditionally underserved students are just abysmally low. But the truth is not just college persistence

rates. Also, you know, even students who do persist through to a degree, say, from underrepresented backgrounds, you know, time to completion could be 789, even 10 years, you know, the average time to a bachelor's degree for someone in California who goes through the community college system, and transfers to a CSU is around seven or eight years, just think of the opportunity cost of that

educational journey. And, you know, our thesis was that, you know, these students could complete, they could complete faster, they could complete in ways that better connected them to jobs with the right set of supports. The fundamental problem was not the content, not the curriculum, it was everything around it. And so we set out to build a college experience that was, you know, designed with a particular

student at the center. And that was just, you know, radically student first, and, you know, happy to talk more about what that looks like in practice, but that was, you know, kind of guiding philosophy of robot school.

afford a textbook? Do they have a computer, I do want to double click on the types of supports that you provide to rivet students because I find them really fascinating. So, you know, from a high level, there's things like financial aid, career planning, but I'd love to hear you just go into each of the supports you give, and why because they, in total, provide just an incredible roadmap for what it means to be student first.

across the country. The problem is still huge, you know, because you're thinking about everything from student financing to academic support to non academic supports, to career support, and particularly as a startup and particularly as a nonprofit startup, which we were and still are, in many ways. It's just a lot to bite off. It requires a ton of resourcing we're really very fortunate to bring on some really visionary funders in the early days, but you know, I'm

not Not gonna lie. Never had, you know, have not had today to $10 million a year budget, you know, we were extremely small organization are still resource constrained as many nonprofits are. But you know, with that said, we really did try to think about the entire student

journeys. So our supports include everything from supports around like, Do you have a laptop to even enroll in this program and submit your application and, you know, turning your first assignments we give everyone who comes In the door, if they need a laptop, we give them a free loaner laptop and practice, you know, basically, an entire school is lifetime laptops essentially free. We provide support around

financial aid application. And then we provide additional student financing options, we created our own income share agreement program, which as a side note, happy to talk more about this, we actually ran as one of the, as far as I know, only randomized control trials, looking at the causal impact of offering this is a program on kind of early student preliminary student outcomes, mostly kind of top of funnel things like enrollment, early persistence, we then you know, the core of our model is a

coaching relationship. So when Ribbit school coach works with a very small panel of reputable fellows, or students about 40, to 50, students, it's more often more like 40, and provides really like a full complement of supports everything from academic supports, to you know, helping students build their kind of productivity systems understand like the technology they need to use to be successful in school. And then as students go through their college experience, they continue to work with their

coach. And then as they think about career options, we have a whole kind of career program that includes things like facilitated micro internships, you know, obviously, job search support and stuff like that. And yeah, that's at least the big picture of the supports we offer. I want to maybe highlight a couple things, though, that are more like around guiding philosophies that I think maybe could be interesting for

listeners. So one thing that I think is really important, I mean, I'm sure many listeners will resonate with this, you know, handoffs are incredibly costly. When you think about any sort of facilitated experience, you know, if I, if I tell you, Alex, like, Hey, I think you'd love rock climbing, like you should check out rock climbing.

But I'm not available to teach you rock climbing, I'm going to introduce you to my buddy, like Tim, who's a great rock climber, like you should coordinate with him and find the time to go to Tim's gym, and, you know, learning this new skill, it's just not going to happen. But if I say like, Alex, you're my buddy, we already know each other, like, let's meet 3pm. Tomorrow at this place, I have all the gear you need, like, you'll probably do it and you may find out that you like it.

And education is no different. Like that level of hand holding is really critical to help someone who might not only have you know, limited or no college experience or higher education experience, but might have actually had like somewhat traumatic higher education experience and might be in debt, they might have felt a sense of shame from having to withdraw from a former educational institution. Some level handholding is absolutely critical. But it goes beyond

that first touchpoint. You know, it really, that needs to persist

through the entire journey. And so at the core of the rivet school model is this idea of a coach is a one stop shop, your coach isn't just an academic support, it isn't just a college success support, your coach isn't just a financial aid support, your coach is your ring master that might not have all the answers for you in full depth, but the probably of the headline, and they will walk across the hall with you to make sure that if you need to go somewhere else that you're

supporting in doing so. So that sort of meta point one, meta point two, there will be three, unsurprisingly, is that, you know, it turns out like that a lot of the frictions that lead people to pause or withdraw from education experiences are a really hard to see for people who have, you know, the curse of knowledge and have just been so swimming in the water that, you know, it's just like, I don't even How is this a thing, but at the same time, you know, are

very teachable. So just to give one example, someone who's doing you know, an online degree program, they're probably looking at a lot of text that's on a computer. Imagine if that person has never learned

keyboard shortcuts. And they have to like scan, you know, for one assignment, they have to scan like a huge block of tax to find some keywords and then define it, you know, imagine how much time it would take them to, you know, scroll through the page, like search line by line for that keyword, then go to a dictionary app and then define it. Now imagine if they literally just know Ctrl F or Apple, like, how much quicker

would that be for them. So one of the first things that we do at rivet school is actually give people like a 30 minute hour long lesson on keyboard shortcuts. And it turns out that kind of thing is extremely useful and important. Another thing we do is we install a password manager for students, I can't tell you the number of times that students have, you know, haven't logged progress for a couple of weeks. And then their coach will reach out and say like, Hey, what's going on?

Because of course, we see that on our data systems. And the student will say, Oh, I forgot my password. And that yeah, I'm not sure where to reset it. And then a point three and then I promise I'll stop and I'm talking a lot is that one of the in my mind that big failure modes of higher education for the types of students that we work with primarily road school traditionally underrepresented and underserved students is that it is the students have an incredibly complicated lives,

very busy lives. They're working at least one job, oftentimes multiple jobs. You know, half of our students are kids, they probably have other responsibilities outside, you know, kids and work to if at best education is their third priority. And I think we can all speak from experience and something's a third thing on your to do list in the day you're probably not going to get

to it. And so because of this like it's just not realistic for students to And, frankly, stay enrolled in a nominally four year education program, straight through for four years or two years or even one year, like students need breaks, you know, they need breaks to reprioritize to focus on other things in their lives. And then, you know, if you're successful, they'll

come back. The problem is that traditional higher education has no model, financial model staffing model for engaging people who are not actively enrolled in your educational institution, you know, if I'm not enrolled, you know, if I go to one class and my local community college, and then I'm not enrolled the next semester, you know, maybe I'll get an automated email that says, hey, it's time to register for classes. No one's going to call me, no one's going to check in

to see how I'm doing. No one's going to text me if I'm, like, you know, six hours before the registration deadline, and I haven't submitted you know, a class list. And you need those things. And that's a big thing that we do at Revit school too, is that we think a lot about this experience, what we call PA students, so people who are in between are not actively enrolled but still need support, so that they can come back and

continue to be successful. Okay, sorry, and rant, but hopefully they provided some visibility to what we do

much time later. It's interesting to hear you talk about the sort of idea of a one person ringmaster, because it reminds me you know, Tressie McMillan, cotton's book, lower Ed about the for profit education industry, they had the exact same realization, but with totally different incentives, right, they realized that if you have the same person walking for profit student, through their whole experience, always point they're much more likely to enroll, they're much more likely

to jump over all the, you know, the financial aid homes, and they do it, you know, in a way that is a little bit sinister, you might say, or I certainly has a profit motive behind it hearing you talk about that ringmaster model, that one touch model from that incredibly positive perspective of having a guide and a coach and somebody you can rely on to get you the answers. And to call you when you're falling behind is really

inspiring. I'm sure our listeners find it, you know, wish they had somebody like that for them when they were in school. And it's even more important for you know, underrepresented groups who don't have the cultural capital and don't know some of these

things. So it's very inspiring to hear you talk about this, you know, I wanted to drill down because one of the things that can get lost, and I know you, you stay so close to the students, just as a rule wherever you go, but one of the things that can get lost when we talk about this type of strategy, and planning is the actual stories of students, you're mentioning students with kids, students with jobs, multiple jobs, I'd love to hear you speak, you know, obviously,

don't use any names, but some of the lived experiences of some of the rivets students who you and your team have worked with, that's that really stuck with you?

picture. So actually, I'll start with the not successful is that, you know, one thing that's been inordinately frustrating to me is seeing challenges around articulation and transfer credits. And we don't have an articulation system in this country, it's all essentially institution by institution. You know, obviously, that's a little bit glossing over a lot of

nuance. But, you know, I'm thinking of one particular learner who had maybe 80, transfer credits, 90 transfer credits, and for a variety of reasons, and I didn't really go into the particulars of our model, but we basically partner with a couple of accredited rivet schools, a standalone 501 C three nonprofit, we are not a college ourselves, we partner with currently too soon to be three institutions of higher education to enroll students in their programs and provide the

sort of layer of wraparound supports outside of beyond that. And for this one particular learner, you know, it was like a year long saga of trying to collect transcripts from you know, five or six different educational institutions, you know, some of those transcripts not counting because of GPA issues, others because, you know, she had a bunch of elective credits, but didn't have, you know, general education credits to transfer

in. There's, again, a lot of like complexity here, but there's basically a block transfer system, she needed to meet a certain threshold of credits to transfer in. And, you know, I remember speaking on the phone with the student and her basically crying, you know, realizing that, you know, she'd spent years of her life accumulating these credits and they just weren't gonna, you know, enable her to transfer in or articulate, you know, into

our program. And you shoot, she couldn't even get in the door because of, you know, some of the obstacles in higher education that, you know, we weren't able to solve. So that's a failure mode. And that's kind of top of the funnel. A student who sort of maybe like, embodies a more like average or middle of

the road student experience. I'm thinking of a student who came to RIT at school, who, right out of high school went to a semi selective, it'd be even more than somebody selective four year degree program in the UC system, and came from a background where no one in her family had ever gone to college, didn't know what to expect, you know, was prepared academically, but was not prepared for the environment and just found herself feeling incredibly lonely, isolated, unsure why she

was there purpose less, and, you know, dropping out probably makes it seem like a more active decision, I'd say faded out from that institution, and then returned back to her hometown and worked for four years in food services, learned about rivets school, because actually, she knew a staff member at Ribbit school, and enrolled and made a fair bit of progress out

of the gate. And what I've seen from this particular student is that the biggest challenge for her and we touched on this even talking about PA students and how you need to support them has been consistent motivation and the complexity of her life. And, you know, she's made for years where she's, you know, basically completed, you know, a third of her degree in one year, and then the next year, she'll have completed, you know, a 10th of the degree or, you know, made

very little progress. And, you know, what we've had to do to support that student is just provide really consistent coaching and support high cadence of touchpoints, even when there's really nothing academically to talk about, but just that to maintain that

tether. And then a high flyer, and this is like, really, the beauty and the promise of competency based education is that you can have someone come in to rebut school, who would otherwise have spent, you know, eight years, say, going through community college transferring to a bachelor granting program, then maybe going on to a master's, one of our early students at rivet school came to us she hadn't gone to college, she done a little bit of community college right out of

high school, and then returned to community colleges a little bit of an older student and felt like, Man, I feel old here, the teacher is talking to us, like we're five year olds, this is just not the place for me learn about rivets school, came to us and within two, two and a half years and completed a bachelor's degree from scratch coming in with basically no transfer credits, and then went on to do a one year master's and completed that, and I think really drew on a lot of teaching

that we've done around self efficacy and self directed learning at Ribbit school. And, you know, over the course of three years, had a bachelor's degree master's degree paid very little out of pocket for the entire experience, basically got a full scholarship for all of our Revit school. And that's the promise of, you know, ribbit school for students who are able to latch on to that competency based environment and really take advantage of it.

And, you know, their likelihood to make it through a relatively bureaucratic, you know, system as much of higher ed is, you know, sort of assumes that they can overcome whatever they're dealing with, and often without much support, and I think it speaks to the Revit model, and, you know, and models that really, really go out of their

way to support students. I mean, when you mentioned having a cadence of check ins, even that are non academic, I mean, that almost feels like therapy, or social work or mentorship in the traditional sense. And I can imagine how valuable that must be for a student.

about you. And it Ribbit school like we do, the grand gestures I'll talk about in a second we do small things like every student on their birthday gets a little gift card on Mother's Day, we send her father's day we send out gift cards to mothers and fathers we send out swag kind of key milestones. And you know, it's funny, you mentioned the for profit college example.

I write as I was starting rivets while she spoke to a bunch of I forget what kind of term of art is, you know, enrollment coaches or counselors come from for profit institutions really understand this, I think they do a masterful job oftentimes do not create ends to go around this kind of stuff. And we're obviously trying to purpose it in the nonprofit and deeply mission focused context. But this stuff really matters. You know, just to give one more example of kind of where rubber

hits the road on this front. We have a student who came to us, she's an employee in a school district hoping to become a teacher, I needed a bachelor's degree to do that. And she was doing great making a lot of academic progress. And then she got diagnosed with a really serious illness and potentially life threatening illness and

issued a pause. She was really emotional about that and felt a sense of not failure, but like real disappointment that, you know, she had this goal and she was tracking toward and obviously there's a whole, you know, emotional side of her illness and the scariness and seriousness of that, and, you know, like, I don't want to oversell what we did to support

that student. But we did through a connection of mine actually managed to find In the health supportive chef was able to put together a week where some meals, and then also some recipes for the student and the student, you know, did a lot of things I'm sure in their journey to heal. And again, like we were not responsible for curing them or healing them. And I wouldn't

make that claim at all. But I do think, you know, in that moment, we were able to show that, you know, through thickens, then we stand by our students, we stood by this particular student, and that student later came back really, thankfully, ended up healing and being able to re enroll and completed her bachelor's degree and in the graduation ceremony cited that as a defining moment for her.

And you know, you can spend 1000s of dollars on students supports, but if someone doesn't actually feel like you care about them, it's really not worth much.

And they sort of serve a marketplace model between education providers, and those who are seeking education who don't always know how to get it. So what gets you most excited about guild's approach and mission?

occasions you mentioned. And what I find really interesting about guild is that, you know, one of the obviously, the biggest challenges across all of education is finding the students who can benefit from what you're offering. And guild has this incredible route to doing that through these partnerships with some of the country's most iconic employers, like, you know, Walmart target, you mentioned a bunch of folks.

And you know, this isn't just convenient from a guild perspective, or from the perspective of the learning partners, the academic institutions that guild works with. It also ends up being a real interesting opportunity for guild to deliver a better Guild and its academic partners to deliver a better experience for students. Because you can think about the entire employer and learner lifecycle you can think about not only like, how do you

find learners? How do you socialize this benefit, or make them aware of this benefit and help them find a program that works best for them. But you can also make sure that programs are offering are actually aligned with not just jobs generically, but the very jobs that exist that are, you know, higher paying or better benefits or whatever it is within their current employer, you can work with your employer partners, to help them think about frontline workforce as a talent pipeline.

So to not only prioritize hiring from the frontline training and hiring from the frontline, but also thinking about changing your culture and your systems to make that kind of hiring process work. So like, do you have roles that are stepping stones to higher skilled roles that are accessible for someone who is coming from the frontline who's just completed an academic

program? So guild by virtue of its employer partnerships, really has the privilege of thinking about this entire lifecycle in coordination with its employer partners, and academic partners. And I found that really interesting and compelling.

or Chipotle are five guys. And these are enormous employers, Walmart alone has over 2 million associates and all of these places hire in huge numbers of people, and then matches them. It provides education to the frontline workers with online education providers like Southern New Hampshire, E. Cornell, Penn Foster and a

number of others. So like, you know, I think one thing that I've always been curious about is, it's pretty clear why learners, you know, would want to do this, and it's very clear why schools would want to have more learners. But the case to make to a Walmart or Taco Bell about why they should support the restaurant workers are their frontline associates in getting full degrees. I think it'd be interesting to hear, you know, what is the big benefit for

employers of this? And what are the sort of different flavors of it?

sustainable. And so it needs to drive business value to our employer partners, in addition to you know, the value obviously provides to members and it does this in a bunch of different ways. You know, obviously hiring

is incredibly expensive. If you're a able to take someone who would otherwise you know, an employee would otherwise, you know, stay at your company for a year and help them stay there for three or four years, the time it takes to finish an educational program, like that's incredible value to your business. And it's incredible value to that to that worker employee. I mean, there's a real, you know, dual benefit or

win win there. At the same time, and this is something we're increasingly pushing on, you know, it's particularly hard for a lot of these huge employers are gonna have to fill not only a ton of frontline roles, but a ton of middle skill roles and higher skill roles. And oftentimes, they're looking externally to make those hires, there's no reason they could not look internally, and many of our employer partners already have like amazing programs set up to facilitate that kind of work.

But Gil wants to supercharge that, you know, we want the front line to be the talent pipeline for the largest employers in this country. And we think it's entirely possible, we know it's possible. And that's another benefit that we can drive both our members for our employees of our employer partners and for employers

themselves. So yeah, the headline is, obviously talent acquisition, people out there learn about this benefit, Americans aren't just looking for a job, they're looking for opportunity, they want to know that, if I come work at your company, you know, outside of a paycheck, what will this bring me? How will this help me, everyone, no matter where you are, where you come from, it's hungry for that deserves that. And then talent retention, you

know, am I valued? And do I have opportunities to learn and grow at this company? And then, you know, is there a future like, is there an opportunity, for instance, to get a better job, and, you know, obviously, that'll bring me value, and that'll hopefully bring value to my in my employer as well.

Walmart that has higher pay more responsibility and middle skills role that is designed specifically for that use case, that becomes a very interesting ecosystem. And it sort of puts education and employment into closer alignment than we usually see.

education. We live in a country right now, where, you know, college attendance rates have after increasing for a long time basically stalled out to about a third of the population, that's pretty much where we see them flattening, but where having a bachelor's degree has basically become the main predictor of of many things in life of health outcomes of life satisfaction of

income. And it's in some ways, the only really reliable ticket to the middle class, let alone high powered jobs in business or government. So I'm curious, from your perspective, you've studied this a lot, you know, how do we get to the state where basically, two thirds of the population of the US are basically locked out of the middle class because of their

educational requirements? And what do you think we can do as an edtech community to ensure that we are not condemning the majority of Americans to all sorts of, you know, health and income problems that come with the lack of education right now?

to see that. And, you know, looser job markets, and as the job market has tightened over the past year, you know, I think you just saw earlier Jeff forgot what state it was. But a large state announced that they've removed a bachelor's degree requirements for all state government jobs, and you expect to see things like that. And

that's great. At the same time, requirements requirements, that's a basic threshold, but then there's like, a hiring manager and whatever heuristics they have in their head, and you can tell them, hey, don't factor in a person's where they went to school. But if they still still see a school on the resume, then they will. Yeah. There's really interesting literature on how much additional education

actually drives value. You know, the economic framing here is to what extent does education build human capital versus function as a signaling mechanism? There's a lot in this book I don't agree with but I think Brian Kaplan's case against education. I think I'm getting the title of the book right is is a really helpful framing of that debate.

So one of the most interesting articles I saw on this recently, it's not new, I think it was a study that was done in 2016 actually looked at whether mafiosos showed a benefit from additional education and looked at this really interesting data set from the like mid century mid 20th century educational attainment for basically it was able to see how many mafiosos had gone to college versus hadn't compare that to other non mafioso types and the sort of an analogous demographic groups in

the population. And they estimated that actually, it turns out that mafiosos, who got more education actually had higher lifetime earnings, which you wouldn't expect that a college degree is a particular important credential in the mafia, at least in the mid 20th

century. So you know, the case they were making was that this puts a little bit of weight on the on the scale in favor of the value of education and human capital development versus pure signaling that's neither here nor there, but a really

interesting study. But I think like at a high level, over the past couple years, it's been really interesting to see public opinion polls that look at American attitudes towards education towards degrees in particular, you know, one thing that, you know, we started seeing as early as 2019 2020, was increasing skepticism around full degree programs and preferences for shorter form programs like boot camps, certificates, credentials,

shorter form credentials. At that time, I was sort of agnostic on whether that trend would continue. And it has, and, as more research has come out on the why, you know, one thing that's been really interesting to see is that it's not that Americans are skeptical of the value of a degree, they're skeptical of the relative value of the degree, the total package, essentially, the ROI, and the ROI incorporates a number of things and

incorporates costs. So as the cost of traditional degree has soared, you know, ROI goes down. It incorporates benefit. And I think, you know, we've seen college wage premium, it's really hard to measure, but you know, at least be somewhat stable. So I don't think that there's necessarily a huge change there, despite, you know, some efforts to, you know, remove college degree

requirements. But I think the big one is people have realized that, you know, what, man, four years long time, let alone eight years, I don't know, if I'm going to complete this thing. Like, I just don't know if I can do it. So better do something where it's like, I have a clear line of sight toward completing this, even if it's not the same as a bachelor's degree, at least it's something it's cheaper, you know, the ROI calculation is

positive. So I think my push to our community would be to really think about your stackability for sure. And I know, that's a buzzword, but it's really important, like, how do these programs, you know, knowing that every individual unit of education in of itself is not

going to be enough? How do these programs combined to form meaningful pathways, and there's a huge difference between that and just, you know, getting some articulation agreement where like, if you have a bootcamp, you get like eight credits for it, because like, I think we all know that more often than not

those credits mean nothing. It's thinking about, you know, going back to this idea of like, you know, taking someone's hand and walking them across the hallway to their next stop thinking really rigorously about handoffs about how you know, whatever educational experience you're creating, or facilitating feeds into the next thing. The other push I'd have for, you know, our community at large is just to make sure that we're designing for, you know, a full range of

student experiences. And, you know, it's hard because there aren't great public funding sources for continuing education, you know, it's hard to access PAL and television, even that, you know, that much money relatively, you know, it has not kept up with inflation in any meaningful way, interestingly enough, relevant to our world that build the you know, tax deduction that employers can get if they choose to contribute to an employee are the tax deductibility for contributing to employee tuition

has remained frozen in 1980 levels, you know, that has not gone up in 40 years. So we do tremendously under fund education for students who need the support and what that means, from a, you know, an entrepreneurs perspective is like, if you can't get someone else to pay for it can't get the government to pay for it, you know, who can pay for it, so

companies can pay for it. But you know, it's easier to get companies to pay for their own employees, it's easier to get companies to pay for employees who already are coming in with a high level of educational attainment skills, or you can have, you know, the end consumer pay for it. And you know, who's most able to pay for education, it's the people who didn't already have a lot of it. So not

easy, but it's so important. And there's some great organizations out there that are really innovating to support traditionally underserved and underrepresented learners. You know, I'll give a shout out to my my good friends and our mutual friends at Merritt America who built a really interesting program to support students to short form credential with a lot of wraparound supports, you know, that are very similar to rivet school. You know, generation USA is another great organization.

You know, Europe has been doing this work for a long time, climb high. There are lots of good folks, Co Op careers. Lots of great folks out there doing this work and you know, we just need more of it. That's a

our guests. The first question is, what is the most exciting trend that you see in the ad tech landscape right now that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?

sure an amazing audience. Maybe this will feel a little basic, but I would say coach, and it's just amazing how many companies nonprofits, government programs have really identified coaching, like as the thing I think will be interesting to see is how coaching, how that kind of taxonomy around coaching develops, coaching is not just one thing, a lot of different types of coaching, to coaching and provide at Ribbit school, which have obviously, given some Colorado is really different

than the coaching say, you might see it in another organization or company. And I think we are at the early days of defining what coaching is, what it can do, how it integrates into a broader and more comprehensive system of wraparound. So for brevity, I'll pause there, and I'll just name that there's a lot more to see these big coaching.

you could think about it. And I think, you know, when you describe that ringmaster model at rivet boy, you know, I wish I had had you know, I had an academic advisor when I was in college, I talked to them probably once every six months for five minutes. And, you know, the idea of having somebody who actually cares not only about your academic outcomes, but about, you know, anything that is keeping you from succeeding.

It's an incredible idea and something that I think we're gonna see more and more of, so I think I don't think it's a basic yet. It's could be transformative. And then final, final question, what is one book, you can also mention a blog or Twitter feed or newsletter that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today?

that I'm going to mention. But what I love about this blog is that it's so generative, and I find like what's oftentimes most helpful in spurring my thinking around education, alternative forms of education, future of education, is actually just like thinking about different parts of our society and economy and then kind of laying on top of

that and education layer. And one person who I think does such a great job of thinking expansively like one of the most broadly erudite and interested and interesting people that I read is Noah Smith, the economist who used to write for Bloomberg and now has a sub stack that I'm forgetting the name of, but if you just search for know, as I know, opinion, is the name of his Twitter handle and substack. I just love

reading him. He's the one to actually get a good blog post a number of weeks ago about skills first human capital, he mentioned that mafioso study which was really fun. He thinks a lot about labor economics, but I don't actually know if that's his field, but he thinks just very expansively about lots of things that then have you know, educational balances to them and highly recommend it.