Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies.
Hello, everybody, it is celebration festivity time we are nearing ASU GSV. Eve. We hope we're finding you somewhere around the world, perhaps taking a spring break before the final push to the school year begins. Thank you all for tuning in. I'm Ben Cornell. And here with my co host, Alex Sarlin. Welcome to another week in edtech. edition. Alex, before we dive into the headlines, what do you have going on at the pot?
Yeah. So next week, on the podcast, we have a little bit of a celebration of ASU GSB with a conversation with the two past winners of the ASU GSB cup. That's Opay Buccola, who is our good friend on the podcast and ARAVA from simba.io. That does internship and apprenticeship management, it's a great conversation and a great lead up just to get your energy going for the conference, or if you're not attending or if you're attending virtually just to sort of get a little taste of it, as we're heading into that conference season. And speaking of the ASU, what is going on at the conference, Ben? Well,
we're going to cover everything you need to know in this episode about ASU GSB, including the EdTech insiders event on Monday, the 17th, please go through our LinkedIn posts or then shownotes here to sign up. We are at waitlist only at this point. But we're hoping to let some folks in. If you happen to know a funder, you know, more sponsorship means that we can have more room at our party. Without further ado, then let's jump into No,
there's one more further ado, which is that the ed tech product management class is filling up fast and going to launch in just a couple of weeks. And I wanted to make sure that everybody who listens to this podcast has the discount code insider, if you put insider in, you will get a discount on that class. It's going to be a lot of fun. We've updated all the case studies. And it's a really great group. So if you're a pm or you have PMS on your team, or you're an aspiring PM, looking to break into edtech check that out. It's on the CO lead platform. That is my last further ado, let's jump into headlines. What do we think Ben?
Well, of course, in our current world, we're going to start with AI beat. Alex, let's just run through the raft of headlines and then what to make of it.
Yeah, so Chad, CPT is just on everybody's lips in ed tech. Right now we're seeing headlines like is AI enabled Chad GBT a boon or a bane for the ad tech industry coming out of the India Times. ad tech experts urge caution on chat GPT student data privacy, that's something we've addressed on the podcast from K 12 dive. J there's one about Forbes chat GPT will not replace teachers but could act as a teaching assistant and we have heard a number of different really interesting startups and entrepreneurs starting to think about AI as teaching assistants. This the case for Luddism against chat GBT and Inside Higher Ed, there's the pushback is started. There's why we need to ban chat GBT in elementary schools. There's, you know why some college professors are adopting chat GPT AI as quickly as students we talked to a couple of weeks ago how to chat GPT has been banned in the entire country of Italy, over privacy concerns. There's Inside Higher Ed talking about Chet GPT magnifying a long standing problem. And of course, that problem is cheating and people and talking about how Higher Ed does not understand the cheating problem. There's an EdSurge guide all about chat GPT. There's 51 Talk, which is a Philippine based tutoring program for saying that AI is about to transform online education. Texas was saying it's going to restart revoking degrees if people cheat. And that includes cheating with AI. So we're getting across higher ed K 12. Asia, US, Europe, people are just everybody's trying to figure out what that next thing is in terms of chat. GPT so we don't have to follow any of these threads. We've been talking about chat GPT and talking to some amazing people. Then I'm curious what's on your mind this week when it comes to AI and chat. GPT
yeah, thanks so much, Alex. And what an amazing list. And I also think we're all probably bombarded with the LinkedIn Reddit social media posts. With all the lists of tools, doing new, cool things every single day, and so it's this Cambrian explosion as you've coined it, it's really happening. So, so fast. You know, one piece of news that I think may not make a lot of news in education circles, but should get a lot of attention is Bloomberg has announced its own LLM, which is based on training of their proprietary financial data. And there is a argument to be made that it is going to be a much better, much more tailored system to financial decision makers. But also they're making the claim that it's also more secure, more safe, because they're using, you know, proprietary financial data, which is quite sensitive. And it really got me thinking about the unique use cases and needs in education. And, you know, is there room or is there an opportunity for an ed tech specific LLM and Ed Tech specific LLM would have a ton of advantages in terms of, you know, COPPA compliance in terms of anonymizing student data. It also could be smaller in that the use cases could be more narrow. And then paired with this news. There's also news around Stanford training the alpaca LLN model, they basically used an open source LLM from two years ago, they put in, you know, a few months of training, and have achieved similar results to GBT three and 3.5. And believe that they can approach GPT four. So you know, what that begs is the question of, if you were to have an ad tech specific LLM, would you build it from scratch and train all the data? Would you take one of these open source models and really finely tune it? And also, what kind of performance levels are we going to be expecting going forward? If GBT comes up with 56789? At what point does the kind of incremental value of a new version not move the needle anymore on Ed Tech? And is there an opportunity for smaller, specialized LLM to be players? I think that's a really important and fascinating question. And, you know, to build an LM even subscale, even the alpaca style, you would probably need like $100 million to do that. So where would that funding come from, but something I'm really interested in and talking to a lot of people about. So that's one big one. The second big one that I'm thinking about, is really around use cases and human in the loop. And so a lot of the kind of our theme for the week has been backlash. It started with the letter with a bunch of signatories, you know, there's some things to critique in the letter itself. But it called for a pause for six months of AI development. And it's really picking up a theme in the media and the press around AI could be dangerous. And the two strands are, you know, there's AI alternative or artificial general intelligence AGI, which basically is kind of the science fiction movie come real life where the computers are smarter than us and self perpetuate. And the other is like the real risks that are going on today. And that would probably be really close with Italy thing. It sounds like Germany, maybe next to bench LGBT. So as we think about all of this blowback, really human in the loop models actually solve for a lot of these things for kids. And so we're seeing a bunch of people pivoting their products from a direct to student to a suggestion engine for educators or suggestion engine for teachers or some other adult. And I think that that's going to be a really enduring theme. And then the third thing I'd say, you know, I kind of cover the funding space here, I'm actually seeing a pause in one we're seeing a general really, really cold fundraising market since SVB. That was kind of like an additional nail in the coffin and our ed tech winner. I have talked to dozens of great founders who are trying to raise money and they're struggling, but also the kind of AI pace of innovation is causing many of the venture firms to just wait and see, because they really don't know what's coming next from the big tech, open AI and Bard and etc. anthropic and they also don't know how these business models are going to be able to capture defend value. So at the same time that we're seeing this like incredible explosion of new tools, incredible game changing opportunities, we're also seeing that ad tech specific company needs that are looking for funding, even with the AI are struggling. And you know, I think that's a recipe. All of this is a recipe for consumer products to eventually be the norm in the tech space, which has all of the issues that we talked about related to an ad tech specific LM. So that's what's going on in my mind. And as I kind of read the tea leaves here in these headlines, what about you out?
Yeah, I definitely agree that there's sort of a bifurcation, there's a big backlash, contingent there, some of whom are futurists thinking about artificial general intelligence, others who are just saying, this is causing cheating, this is causing confusion. This is not, you know, it's throwing our jobs as educators into weird places that we're not comfortable with. And then there's people on the other side saying, this is here, it's clearly here to stay, we really have to figure out what to do with it. And I mean, a couple of the articles that jumped out to me this week, there's one from the MIT Technology Review, a really pretty thorough walkthrough of all the ways that Chad GPT has been, you know, changing education, and a lot of quotes from Richard colada, who is a major ed tech muckety muck, he's the head of ISTE, talking about how we shouldn't just give in to the backlash, we should kick the tires as a quote, you know, we really should make sense of this and think about how it can improve education, rather than thinking about how it should, you know, end education how, why we should end it. And you're seeing more and more all of these funny stories with you know, one professor at this college, one professor at that high school, one professor at that college, who are embracing it, who are using it for interesting things and actually incorporating it into their classroom. So you're seeing this sort of split. I think one of the sort of slightly hidden stories here is that, you know, chat tipici came out, then being tried to power itself with it or started powering itself with it, then Bard came out, just right now, Ali Baba is about to come out with their big LLM. And I'm gonna mispronounce this, but it's like Tang Yi Qian, when truth from 1000 questions. It's in beta right now. But you know, there's obviously a huge race among all these big companies. At the same time, we're still basically saying Chad GPT, almost as synonymous with this type of AI, with generative AI, and they're really solidifying their place, you know, at least so far, as you know, the posted or the Kleenex of AI, the one that sort of synonymous with the space, whether or not that'll continue to happen, I think is a big question. And then, you know, to your point about investors, I have heard nothing but you know, excitement, at least theoretically, from any article about edtech investing, and there was a big one from Holland IQ about how far down it's been since last year. But any article about edtech, investing dimensions AI, everything I've read says people are very excited about it. What they don't quite know yet, and I think this speaks to your loop model is, you know, what is the middle there? What is the actual circumstance? Or what is the set of circumstances, a set of conditions that need to be in place for AI to truly be used in true educational environments in higher ed, in K 12 classrooms? In, you know, tutoring that is sponsored by schools? Like, how can we ensure this doesn't go purely to the b2c and then you know, exacerbate inequality and things like that? How can we actually get this into schools in a way that doesn't promote cheating, that doesn't create, you know, racial bias that doesn't expose students to inappropriate content or is not COPPA compliant? from a privacy standpoint? These questions are so paramount, I mean, I think we're going to start to see answers sooner rather than later. I agree with you that that Bloomberg article is a really interesting, sort of, you know, precursor, like harbinger of where LLM 's might go, you might have very specialized models for all sorts of use cases. And education would certainly be a core core use case for so it's coming and that middle layer is coming, it's just who's going to do it until then teachers got to stay in the loop is my opinion. Well,
and you know, this is not a one or the other either. That's the other interesting thing for each company, you can actually have multiple layers of the cake, and you kind of make the stack, whatever you want it to be. So it could be an open AI stack with another LLM on top of it, filtering it down or to fine tuning it. A lot of what I'm seeing online too is the AI talking to other AI and kind of going back and forth ping pong back and forth to refine code or to refine data sets. And so people are building almost like circuits. So if you think of this as electricity, they're basically building circuits and then circuit breakers that would essentially protect the kind of end user from something malicious or inappropriate or harmful, inaccurate. And so if we think about that electrical design, we're going to just see a lot of innovation on the back end infrastructure. Sure. And that might not even be apparent to an end user. So there's this market question of, you know, who's going to be discerning and care about what the right architecture is. But I think it's a fascinating time for the inch part of the space. And meanwhile, also like real questions around productivity of engineers, if you can create more AI driven coding, and so on. So at the same time that we're innovating on business model, we're also experiencing pretty large workforce disruption.
My last thinking on this is that, you know, one of the things we're seeing in terms of those lists of AI tools that are coming out, and I don't know about, I think, you know, it's always the top 100 new AI tools, or, you know, the 100 AI tools that came out in the last two weeks, it's really, really growing fast. More and more, they're getting really specialized. They're becoming like one specific thing that today I can do really, really well. And to your point about building circuits, which I think is a really are stacks is a really interesting metaphor here. I think it might be a really smart move for people who are in education, you know, in any context to sit and basically map out their process flow, like what are all the pieces of the work that they do on a daily basis to get things done, because more and more, each step is going to have a specialized tool. I mean, you're seeing it already. In design, you're seeing, you know, tools that do nothing but make logos, there are tools that do nothing but make UI patterns, there's tools that do nothing but create copy for websites or tools that create mobile app, you know, things and you're like, oh, each one does one piece. But if you have all of them, it does a whole lot. And I think that's about to start happening in education. You have these teaching assistants, these tutors, these content creation engines, these personalization engines. If you put them all in a row, you can start to see how it could do a lot for education. I just think we should all start thinking that way. Because not that one tool necessarily do start to finish. It might have to be a series, like a little Lego pieces of tools where AIS talk to each other or people are in the loop. And you know, how do you get the input? Or how do you get from wherever you're starting to a really meaningful output from an educational perspective. I would also go up a Hartman's work on this. She's doing really, really interesting stuff if you haven't been following her instructional design and AI.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is also could be a disaster. Like death by 1000 ai chat bots. This also shows the value of curation, and maybe even services layers, I was talking to faculty.ai. It's based out of the UK, and they have a product plus services that essentially allow you to stitch together multiple AI instances, pre chat GBT launch, they were working on open AI, but they were also agnostic, working with some of the other third party MLMs. But now they've even you know, it's this idea of, do we need a marketplace like an app store? Or do we actually need a kind of all in one service provider who basically can set you up or hook you up with the right circuitry for your system? And while I know from a venture capitalists standpoint, we've all had it beaten into us that it's like products scale services don't, there's actually quite a lot of opportunity for services here. And, you know, most of education is around CAC, and LTV, right. But if there is an opportunity to cut your costs, such that you can make the LTV work for you that like any of these AI systems that aren't customer facing, but just are more efficient workflows. That could be a real boon to our industry, which already has kind of thin margins. One last thing on the funder front before I move on to K 12. The other macro thing we're seeing that I think our listeners need to understand is that big investors, we're talking like institutional players, university endowments, retirement funds, all of this kind of stuff. They are rebalancing their portfolios away from venture and this kind of era of like every year, doubling the amount of capital available, that is over and what that does when you're rebalancing. It means that for the existing VCs, one, there's more competition for the dollar coming up, but to this idea that we're going to raise the fund every year and that we're going to keep it going, that is going to slow down. And so what you're seeing, you know, because they're going to have to be more choosy, they're going to need to, like protect their funds so that they have the opportunity to double down they also want to have their fees and once you deploy your fund, your fees start ratcheting down. So while I think you know, as an entrepreneur, I was always like, Man, I don't understand why the venture capitalists are behaving this way. While there's a lot of pressure on us in the EdTech space, I think there's concurrent pressure on the VCs around their capital allocation. Now, that is fundamentally different. And many of their funds are currently underwater due to, you know, investing in High Times and now being a low time, so I just painting that picture comes back to, can AI be revolutionary? Can AI be harmful? The answer is yes to all of these things. We also have to admit that what we've been doing hasn't been working. I mean, it really hasn't been working, basically, for learners, for sure. And it's definitely not working for teachers. So I almost feel like we're on a burning platform anyways, we have to take the leap. And so my hope is that people will funders, entrepreneurs, and tech specific purpose built products will kind of step in here and help us realize that full upside, but I don't think this is one of those where we really have a choice to just close our eyes and say AI doesn't exist and like keep it away.
Yeah, I agree, especially when you consider that, you know, students, sort of by definition, and I include students of all ages, but let's focus on K 12. Here, are always going to try to use the new tools and always try to push the boundaries, or at least that they should. And they should, that's what they're here for. That's what they're all about to keep things moving and changing. And the idea of just because we as a group don't know whether to feel excited or afraid of AI, depriving the students of you know, all of the different ways in which it might work. I mean, I've been playing with chat GPT and asking it to, you know, teach me about the Boxer Rebellion, and then teach me it again, at a different grade level, and then give me metaphors for it. And every education use case I've thrown at it, it's done quite well. It can obviously write lesson plans. It can obviously write curriculum can write rubrics, it can create multiple choice questions at different difficulty levels, it can do a lot. And if we, you know, miss the forest for the trees and only focus on the scary things that it might do. You know, I think like you're saying we're doing a disservice to the entire education industry, and especially the students, and Ed Tech has to take the lead on this. Yeah, two
funny stories on that front. I was at a school board meeting last night, you know, I'm on the San Carlos school board. And we're doing facilities master planning, and we're talking about what the buildings and the infrastructure needs to look like. And one of the questions from one of the other board members was, so this is a 10 year plan. How do we imagine this evolving over time? How do we make a living document and one of the assistant principals at one of our middle schools said, Well, you know, one reason why this is living document is we just don't know how AI is going to change learning. And I thought, wow, this is it. Chad GBT released in November. Yeah, we have an assistant principal at our board meeting talking about, we might need to rethink this whole thing because of AI. That's a pretty foundational shift in mindset. And I was very, you know, it was interesting to hear that come out at a board meeting. And the second conversation I had was with a Google veteran who was at Google for like, 20 years, you and I both know him. And he was telling me that he's hired a couple part time developers who are sophomores in college, and they're doing an AI video product. And he was telling me that these sophomores, they don't know so much of what the more senior team knows. But man, are they creative? And do they, they have access to all these cutting edge tools that many of the team I've never even heard of. I think there's like a new generation of developers coming. I mean, like, watch out the Carnegie Mellon classes coming in the next three or four years to meet some kick ass people. Because they're not thinking about linear design. They're thinking about AI leveraged development, coding products design. And one of my predictions is we're going to enter this era where like 10 person teams build $10 million businesses, this 10 by 10 concept. I think that that is going to be a really common thing in ad tech. And it's just fascinating to see. There's like the old guard of here's how we build products. It's like getting disrupted right in front of us. All right, well, that's actually a good transition to K 12. My story about the school board meeting, and thank you all for bearing with Alex and I and our soapbox moments, this is pretty unprecedented time. One of the big topics in K 12 is really around the teacher shortage. And what are we going to do about it? A lot of speculation around AI and those pieces, but we're also seeing a bunch of new moves around Teacher trainees stepping in and filling the gaps. And so in Arizona, we see some innovations around undergrad teachers stepping into teach classes, Fast Track certifications for military veterans in Nebraska. And the Kent State University really dug into this data around under qualified teachers and created this incredible map, really around the density of under qualified teachers. Now, one thing that shouldn't be a big surprise is areas of high poverty disproportionately have under qualified teachers. What the data also showed is places like Louisiana, or Vermont. So rural areas also had disproportionate none of that seemed to be surprising. What they were showing, though, is that some of the outcomes for the quote unquote, under qualified teachers, were not actually lower than the qualified ones. And if you look at the states, states, like California, appear very low on the list of under qualified teachers, and yet their results trail behind a place like New Hampshire. So it really does raise questions around, you know, certification qualification, raised questions about salary and level experience, as well as you know, outcomes for learners. As you saw some of this data, what stood out to you, Alex,
I feel like my understanding of the teacher certification landscape is not as tight as it should be. I know there are these all all of these amazing alternative models that are out there for you know, what they call irregular, provisional emergency certification, temporary certification, all of these different things. I think the thing that is being asked in one of these articles is from EdSurge. And I think, you know, we've talked to other people in this space. I think, one big question here that this all raises is like, what exactly do we really know what qualification means for a teacher, maybe it's actually set to end by qualification, I don't mean skills, qualification, like credentialing, right, it's like maybe the traditional path to getting a teaching certificate, maybe it actually, you know, requires more of people than then it should, you know, often it requires master's degrees in education and are expensive, you know, but at the same time, we want to professionalize the teaching, industry and professional industries tend to have certification pathways, and, you know, pretty strict barriers to entry and things like that. So this field sends me in sort of circles philosophically, because on one level, you want to reduce the credential barrier and have more teachers have people coming in, like you say, undergraduate teachers, teaching assistants, teaching aides, people coming in, who are really care about this and want to make you want to become the best teachers, they can, even if they don't happen to be holding the credential. On the other hand, for years, I've been hearing and reading and thinking that, you know, it's so sad that teachers, at least in the US have such a low status, and part of why they they do is that it's not always considered in the same breath as other professional careers, like law, or, you know, medicine or a lot of different ones that are all basically defined by credential. So it's a, I don't know, maybe you can unpack this for me, Ben, because I, there's news about okay, teachers who have less certification might be doing just as well in the classroom. What does that mean for the rest of the teachers? Like, what should we make of that?
Well, two pieces of that first on the credentialing side, it could be that it's overly onerous, and there's, you know, maybe a lower bar, that would be sufficient. Or it could be that the credentialing system itself doesn't measure the right things. And so that we need to kind of tweak or redefine and, you know, one of the things that we've seen in a lot of education circles is moved to competency based performance assessment with like examples of student work. And this idea of like a assistant teacher or student teacher and a practicum is actually like age old in the profession. And so how do you actually count that as credit towards a credential and you know, you and I have talked about maybe it was like a month ago and Alabama they were basically enabling people to get credit if they were a paraprofessional for evidence of their work as a paraprofessional towards a degree, a teaching degree and certificate. I guess the other big takeaway is this idea that they're the unit is teacher and that that is one finite unit. There's like principal and there's teacher. And really, you know, most other professions at this point, have degrees of difference between like an earn an entry level, and like a stack of how you can walk up that ladder. And there are, you know, Master Teacher certifications and people that can, you know, submit a portfolio of their work to prove that they are to get the distinction of being a distinguished or master teacher. And so I just think that we Have a systemic challenge, which is we've got a real shortage. And so that's causing districts and states to think about, you know, in the most negative light shortcuts. And then we also have union negotiating units, which really don't like to differentiate based on quality, because the idea of keeping your Union together is that we're all in it together, and we're all fighting for the same thing. But I do think there's some off the books kind of stuff that people get bums for a masters or they get bums for teaching extra courses or units. There's ways in which the higher performing teachers are already getting additional compensation often, what might we do to think about teacher pathways to excellence, and how might we use AI to bolster and kind of raise the floor, as well as enable the really strong teachers to spread their impact beyond just a classroom of 20 students to many, many more, outside of this in K 12. A lot. Also going on around SR funding will let you read all of that. But basically, the story is, no one really knows what's effective, every state is doing their own thing. And this is our, you know, non federal, highly local system at work. And so that is more of a story that's in the works. And we'll be bringing it back to you. So moving from K 12, to higher ed, what's on the top of the radar, and the higher ed be Alex?
Yes, at top of the radar. And the higher ed beat is a little bit of a continuation of some of the things we talked about last week, which is, you know, higher education continues to raise its prices in many different ways, or at least to try to optimize this is also an AI story, by the way, because more and more schools are using artificial intelligence based enrollment systems that give offers to students based on exactly what it predicts there'll be willing to pay. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in there. But while those universities continue to sort of move in their business mindset, people are just continuing to fall. There's the two different headlines about this this week, fall out of love with college degrees from Time magazine, and losing faith in the college education from the Wall Street Journal. Really, there's just this continuing drumbeat. And it's been years now, but I think it's really been, you know, post pandemic of people, not assuming that higher ed traditional in person four year, you know, sticker, not sticker price, but you know, normal price, higher ed is the only way to the, you know, the only way forward anymore. And I think that was assumed for so long. And now you just, you know, seeing more and more stories about alternative pathways about students who regret their loans, you know, spend the next 30 years paying off their student loans. And it's really showing up I mean, the numbers are really starting to get a lot bigger than than you might think, in this Wall Street Journal poll. It's a new low in confidence about people thinking that you know, college degrees are worth the cost, it's switched from more than half of people in this survey, think that he's 56% Think earning a four year degree is a bad bet. And 42% retain faith in the credential. That's not where you want to be. If you're a college president right now, or an enrollment person, you have more than half of people who are your potential audience, you know, our demographic or people you're trying to reach, think you're not worth it. I just think this chasm continues to open and the schools I mean, we've seen it already with the mega universities, I always like to cite them. But I think the schools that really actually embrace this and realize that maybe the era of four year, full cost, you know, all of that stuff really might be coming to an end. Finally, and if you as a college, introduce a three year degree or introduce stackable degrees that you can do a year at a time or anything, just try something different. You might find a very hungry ready audience of learners of all ages. We saw it with Wu Gu. We've seen it with Southern New Hampshire. And I think schools should really be reading these polls with great interest, and I'm not sure they are. And then you know, the other headline is interesting one, I think it's relatively fresh off the presses here is that to you, the large online program management company is suing the US Department of Education over the third party guidance that they've been putting out we've been covering for the last couple of months. And you know, that guidance is very specifically, you know, sort of targeted at the online program management space. And it basically redefines you know, serving third party service providers in to you is suing them and you know, even though it's just guidance, it's not actually law yet it's saying that the department overstepped its power by rewriting the Higher Education Act definition of the you know, of a third party service and trying to legally strike back against it. So that's interesting news and Pretty dramatic for edtech. And I think this is going to be, you know, a lawsuit that we'll have to keep our eyes on. They also mentioned how you know, too, you had bought get smarter, which is a South African company, too, that does executive education. And because it's South African, the rules about foreign owned subcontractors would be affected there. So basically, you know, to you would have enormous, this law would have enormous effect on to you as much as any company out there. And they're basically trying to fight back proactively. So we'll have to follow this. I'm just catching up on this story. But it's really interesting.
Yeah, and this is also a way in which the landscape of higher ed is just so uncertain. And so as you're on the one hand, having your consumers really questioning the ROI, on the other hand, you have your fundamental business model, which has really moved to this combination of core University provider. And then outsourcing features. You know, if you look at a hospital, they actually always do cardiology, they always do neurosurgery. Those are the big moneymakers, but then every other floor, it's actually a third party company running most of your hospital, anesthesia, kidneys, all that kind of stuff. Universities have kind of built the same stack. And so I almost wonder whether the department realizes that it's actually undermining the institutions that it's trying to hold up and protect. And at the same time, we're also preparing for 2024 election, that could totally flip the guidance in a different way. And so I think, you know, the acceleration that we're seeing in other parts of edtech, we're actually seeing some self inflicted damage here in in education caused by, you know, misalignment with Department of Education, and what's going on in the ecosystem.
What are your thoughts about the ROI situation? Like, what would you do if you ran a college right now, sort of a middle tier school, and you saw a number, like 56% of people think four year degree is a bad bet?
Well, you know, ultimately, this is where we move to a singular product, a one size fits all product, which was a four year degree lockstep, choose your major, all this stuff with a kind of services layer, the country club experience. And that's really what you know, the what you chose, like, you want to go to college, here it is. And granted, before that there was a lot more openness and acceptance of community college as a pathway to four year and kind of where we've been is that those community college to four year graduation pathways were just broken, in part, because the four year college had just gravitated to serve a clientele that really thrived in that, you know, these are the best times of our lives experience is not purely academic, I just think that the colleges that are stuck in the middle, you know, you're not the high, you know, elite tier, and you're not the kind of mass market tier are really going to have to find their niche. And that niche could be a subject area, expertise area, you know, we were just talking about Carnegie Mellon, it's probably even more in the elite tier anyways. But part of how they've gotten there is by leaning into, like, being freaking awesome on the technical stuff. And, you know, I don't think that the ROI around English majors is going to cut it anymore for a lot of places. So I just think it's going to end up, we're actually going to see more fragmentation, more specialization. And I don't think that most of those mid level colleges can afford to disaggregate. But I think that they're also going to need to defend against people who are more modular, like the other thing, too, though, I will say is, if you have an innovative university president, an innovative faculty and an innovative board of directors, this is also like an unprecedent time for creativity, and are willing to be, you know, ironic way, taking risk is less risky right now than not taking risk. And so I really, if I were sitting with one of those individuals, I'd be saying, hey, how do you own your state? Or how do you own this industry that's in your state? Or how do you create like a center of excellence that allows you to really be known for this particular set of career pathways and the related ecosystem? That's the kind of stuff that I would, you know, be encouraging them to think about? So I guess entrepreneurship meets the chancellor's office.
And, you know, I mean, you mentioned Community College, and that used to be a really more of a viable pathway. There was a terrific article highly recommended by John Mark is one of the best journalists in education about how community college enrollments have gone down by three 37% Since 2010, how at this point, almost a fifth of community college enrollments are actually high school students doing dual enrollment that how we've always talked about the incredibly low completion rates, you know, they're incredibly, incredibly low, nearly half the students drop out within a year. And you know, six year graduation rates is still under half. It's really a broken system. I mean, I think, you know, it may have worked at one point, that sort of classic California three tier college system, but I just don't think it does anymore. And I love your your line about you know, it's riskier to not take a risk to continue to sort of buy into this existing system and think it's going to somehow write itself, I think, is a really bad bet. And the people who, who try different things and try to make it a little more learner centered, you know, and actually have an experience that's actually going to get people what they're there for, are going to really win. And you've already seen it starting to happen. But it blows my mind when I just see these headlines about college admissions being the same, and college tuition is going up, because we are in the middle of a big change. And it's been happening for years. And still very few schools are have really, really jumped into doing alternative options. So, Ben, we are, you know, on the road to ASU very soon. What is your expectation for the conference.
So let me walk through a little bit of what to expect out of the conference. And then also some pro tips on how to navigate it. So ASU GSB is an annual conference has been going on for almost a decade now. And you know, it started off with, like, 400 of us getting together. And now it's in four to 5000. It is probably the world's preeminent conference for specifically at Tech as an industry, you'll find folks from early childhood K 12, higher ed workforce, from the US from all regions around the world, also all the different backgrounds, from investors, to entrepreneurs, to large scale tech companies, mid tech, and also a healthy number of people in administration in universities, and K 12. The way the arc of the conference usually follows some sort of theme. And I can say with confidence, the theme this year is really around AI themes in the past, I think last year was a real focus on India, and pre pandemic, there was one that was really China focus. So you get these kind of flavors of what's going on in the market and so on. On Monday, most people kind of fly in and there's the opening salvo Mondays also really heavily back to back with all the kind of welcome parties, please come out to the Ed Tech insiders 168 30 PM. And you can sign up with the link in our podcast. But there's also the kind of iconic event is really the aircraft carrier party. It's a historic worship that's parked in the harbor in San Diego, and you can basically party with your friends, and also see some really cool fighter jets and, you know, stand up on the deck that's hosted by Cooley. On Tuesday, the big event is Bill Gates is going to be talking and you know, the age of AI is his latest missive. And I just think there's a lot of interest and buzz around, you know, how will the Gates Foundation and philanthropic players play? How will Microsoft, Google and you know, by the way, Facebook also unveiled Sam, which is their artificial intelligence. So how will big tech play in this space? And then how are we seeing incumbents and startups playing in the space? So Tuesday's a great day to go around on the floor and in the kind of showcase area where people will be doing demos of all the newest tech, you'll expect a flurry of announcements on Tuesday, and then the big event with Bill Gates in the evening on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, there's a raft of parties often these parties go late into the night. You know, my pro tip is pace yourself, please. We're all professionals here. Don't get sloppy. But then Wednesday, usually things calmed down a little bit and it's a great day for one on ones. We also have our amazing founder and an illustrious podcast co hosts doing a session at your monitoring session on AI believe that's at 11am. Is that right? On Wednesday?
Yeah, it's gonna be really, really interesting. And we have provosts. We have the new incoming Chief Operating Officer at ASU who is absolutely fascinating. We have the CPO of turn it in. Really, really cool panel of people who know a lot about AI so it's yeah 11 o'clock on Wednesday.
So just some pro tips here as we wrap To the show a couple things. One is, it's always great to set up a Calendly specific or scheduler specific for the conference, just block out your times for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And then people can book a spot. It's also great to get a location where you can kind of squat for the day and just have people come to meet with you back to back. I would also say breakfast is an underutilized time to meet up with people and connect. And then in terms of the parties and so on, you know, I think one of the main things people get overwhelmed with at ASU GSB is just the sheer magnitude and quantity and so really targeting, who are the people that I want to meet? Or is there a category that I'm really excited about exploring, so I tend to try to pick the strand or theme that I'm wanting to push over the three days or each day. And that way, you can kind of have focus for your meetings. Last but not least, always include text or cell phone info in your calendar invites, it can be hard to find people and always easier to text. So a little bit of your BEN Cornell guide, ASU GSB. Back to
you, Alex. Well, and the last thing I'd say is if you see either of us at the event, whether it's at our Monday night event, or just wandering the halls of ASU or chatting with people come over and say hi, we are always It's the nicest thing to meet other people and new people in the tech field if plenty of our former guests will be there. So yeah, we're looking forward to meeting many of you in person for the first time at ASU. So it's going to be a blast.
Awesome. Well, that wraps our show today. We can't wait to see you all this upcoming week at is UCSB. Thanks for listening and if it happens in ed tech, you'll hear about it here on the weekend. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.