TRANSCRIPT: Pioneering Educational Models
Episode 235 was recorded for the Reimagine Education Conference with Lumina Foundation and Bloom Institute of Technology (fka Lambda School). I am discussing pioneering new education models with Dr Courtney Brown and Austin Allred and you can read the transcript below. To check out the full episode info, show notes and references head over to the podcast page of our website.
Sophie Bailey:
Welcome everyone to this session for Reimagine education, which is looking at pioneering education models. A quick intro to our guests who we have today. So I’d like to welcome Dr Courtney Brown, who is vice president for impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. Welcome. The Lumina Foundation is an independent private foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all, with about 1.4 billion us dollars in assets and grants already allocated of over 250 million. Dr Courtney says the biggest misunderstanding in higher education is who the students are. Most people believe those who are in higher education are 18 to 21 fresh out of secondary school. The reality, at least in the US is almost 40% of today’s students are over 25 and financially independent from their parents, and many are employed full-time. And I had a quick check Courtney and in the UK, the latest data was from 2019 to 2020, but again, there were about 37% of all undergraduate entrants who were over 21 years of age.
Sophie Bailey:
So slightly earlier, but still, you know perhaps slightly different to what we would imagine. And just finally, the Lumina foundation works to ensure that 60% of adults will have a college degree certificate industry certification or other credential value by 2025. The next guest is Austin Allred, who is co-founder and CEO of Lambda school. Lambda School is an online coding and technical education program with an income sharing agreement model in which students pay tuition only after acquiring a job of a wall street journal article that stated that 28% of bachelor’s degrees do not have a net positive return. And that more than a quarter of students are in programs that aren’t worth the costs. Austin said it’s time to fix that. Lambda grads are hired by companies of all sizes, including the fortune 100 and the world’s top startups, including companies like Google, Microsoft, or Walmart.
Sophie Bailey:
So welcome again, Austin and Courtney. So this session is all about exploring new partnerships and models, which are challenging the status quo for the benefit of all. So, Courtney, we’ve got a relatively short time. I’ll jump straight in with you. You have deep insights at Lumina foundation into adult learning attainment across the whole of the US have been digging around and your data is really fascinating, how you’ve kind of compiled that and the transparency that gives us all, and this shows who’s benefiting and who’s missing out what’s that research showing you and with all this data, what are you actually investing in with Lumina Foundation as well? So which new models are peaking your interest?
Dr Courtney Brown:
Yes, at Lumina, we concentrate all of our efforts on ensuring adults, especially adults of colour, have access to programs that lead to meaningful credentials, that they have financial and non-financial supports along the way to ensure their success and that the credentials they earn lead to good jobs, higher pay, greater opportunity to learn and serve others. And at this point especially in the US, but about across the globe, even before the pandemic; higher education is in crisis for a number of reasons. And I think there are a few issues that we need to address to ensure that more people have access to post-secondary education. There’s a supply issue. There’s a demand issue and needed to have more opportunities to increase access. So let me just touch on each of those fairly quickly as far as the supply issue and the last 10 years in just the US capacity has grown 26%.
Dr Courtney Brown:
So that includes more institutions, more dorm rooms, more labs by 26%. At the same time demand, so those who are enrolling has only grown by 3%. So our current system, our current higher ed system in the US is functioning at only about 75% leaving roughly 5 million empty seats a year. And what that means is this underutilization means that we have empty classrooms, empty labs, empty beds, and those fixed costs have to be shared by fewer and fewer students every year. Our recent research report, which we just did with EY Parthenon shows that that’s the equivalent of about 50 billion US dollars a year, that we are wasting on, this mismatch between supply and demand. So one of the things that we have to address is the supply. Institutions are going to have to get brave.
Dr Courtney Brown:
They’re going to have to figure out who needs to merge, who needs to partner, and unfortunately who needs to close because they’re, they’re not, they’re no longer serving students. They don’t have, they have too much capacity to serve those students. Secondly, we have to increase demand. Currently, there’s a question about is higher ed even worth it? You quoted some, some statistics and talked about some of Austin’s work that, you know, people are, are completing and not having a credential of value. That can not be further from the truth. Data shows us that in the aggregate people that have credentials of value; post-secondary credentials of value have better lives. They make more money and have better jobs than those without post-secondary credentials. So we need to change that narrative. We also need to make sure that we are serving today’s students, as you mentioned.
Dr Courtney Brown:
There are a lot of students who are over 25 who work full-time, who had their own children, their own dependence yet our current system does not serve those students. And finally, we need to open up new funding models for students to find other ways that they are actually able to access this increasing cost with post-secondary education. So even once we figure out that supply-demand, get that equalized, we still need to find new opportunities to both help students financially and with some of the non-financial issues that they are dealing with.
Sophie Bailey:
That’s a fantastic breakdown of the issues and how you’re identifying what needs fixing. If I understand correctly, Lumina foundation also invests in some of these different areas. Are there any particular models that are kind of more attractive to your mission than others?
Dr Courtney Brown:
Yeah, so some of the funding issues that we think about is the difference between merit-based aid and need-based aid. So a number of the states in the US I think almost 23 states still focus other funding on merit-based aid; academic types aid, rather than need-based aid. And so we’d like to see that flipped, that it should be primarily about need-based aid. We’d also like to see that they are broadening, who has access to aid. Currently, that most of the systems focus on traditional-aged students. So it depends on how many years following secondary school. If you’re not directly out of secondary school, you don’t have access to aid. If you’re not a full-time student, you don’t have access to aid. If you don’t live on the campus, you don’t have access to full-time aid. And that’s leaving behind tens of millions of current students and future students who don’t have access to aid to actually participate in post-secondary education.
Sophie Bailey:
Austin, I wondered if you had any thoughts on the discussion around credentialing and the sort of value associated with either traditional forms of credentialing or new forms of credentialing as well.
Austin Allred:
I view it broadly as if you look at higher education as a whole, that is a very, very broad bucket. I think what Courtney alluded to is correct that by and large, the students who enter into higher education and get a credential are better off by a lot. But what we’ve seen is actually also what Courtney alluded to that there are some instances where the costs have become so high and the return is low in some circumstances. I think the wall street journal just published a report on, I believe it was a master’s program at USC where the median amount of debt a student took out was $112,000. And the median salary was something like $52,000. So, we view part of the problem as the incentive misalignment, especially in the United States. So USC in that instance suffers zero consequences of that being the case, and their only incentive is to enrol more and more students into that very expensive program.
Austin Allred:
And, you know, I have nothing against a master’s in social work per se, but I would argue, you know, going $112,000 in debt in order to do so is not a healthy decision. So we think that schools should be more aligned with the incentives of the student, and we built our financing model around that. So you know, probably what Lambda school is most well known for is, you know, we literally don’t get paid tuition unless our students get a high paying job on the other side. And that, you know, that focus is what we do as a school that focuses, you know, how much we focus on outcomes. I don’t think every program should be that way. And I don’t think every school should be that way, but for a subset of the students who are looking into post-secondary education, that is the perfect solution.
Austin Allred:
If you zoom out more broadly, what I think needs to happen is there are programs and institutions that don’t make as much sense for students. And there are those that make a lot of sense for students. And I think we need to do a better job of at a minimum, helping students understand what that looks like. And, you know, I view it as there’s kind of a missing trade school, the vocational school system in the United States. It exists in a lot of other countries and, you know, going to four years of university and taking out a hundred thousand dollars plus in student loans is not the right solution for every student. And we need to be cognizant of that and provide more appropriate solutions for what a student is actually looking for.
Sophie Bailey:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. The universities aren’t just one size fits all. Some are more focused on research, some are larger than others. And students are going there for a variety of reasons. Not all employer aligned, but some are, I guess, this session is all about educational models. And so I sort of having a think about the different models that, as you say, have been developing since pre-pandemic. So there are things like the income sharing agreements and online boot camps that you’re involved with with Lambda. Education as benefit partnerships between colleges and employers like Guild education, edutainment, like Masterclass or spoken word or audio and podcasts like Blinkist and then services are now popping up more and more around digital learning nomads. So understanding the social benefits of learning in a group, but perhaps in quite a desirable location. And obviously, all of this comes with a caveat of who can access these models. But I guess my question to you, Austin would be what are the main benefits of these new educational models? Are there any drawbacks or teething pains as well?
Austin Allred:
Yeah, I think, you know, broadly, at least in the United States, we have looked at the four-year university for an 18-year-old as the only solution for higher education. And you know, Courtney alluded to this in some of the research. And I think you did as well, Sophie that, the median student at Lambda school is 31 years old from an age standpoint. And there’s, there’s a kind of a bell curve around that, that the university system was not built to serve 31, 32-year-old learners in most instances. And I think, you know, there is a misunderstanding of who is attending universities. I fully agree with what, what you spoke about there. What we are broadly seeing is an unbundling of the university to where stem schools are focused more on certain things. And really what I hope it results in is a proliferation of options for a student where, you know, for one student fou nr years at a research institution, when you’re 18 is exactly what they want.
Austin Allred:
For some institutions, you know, we’re, we’re really focused on providing the most direct lowest risk path to a higher income that we can provide. You know, that’s not the goal of every student who enters university. There are many, many different things that a university offers that we don’t. So my hope is that a student can more exactly match what their needs are with what the offerings are over time. Instead of looking at everything as this monolithic, one way to do everything four years when you’re 18 years old institution. I think that’s pretty healthy. And I think I expect that to continue in the future. When we started out in 2016/2017, we were fully online. And at the time, you know, we would encounter widespread beliefs that literally you could not teach people certain things online. But we also found that done the right way, and with the right structure, you can have, you know, almost all of the benefit. Obviously, if you want to go to parties and go to social events and meet people, we do have, you know, meetups for our students, but we’re not the right place to go to if you’re looking to primarily socialize. The internet experience this broadly, if you think about, you know, shopping in the mid-nineties, there was a lot that the internet was lacking and people couldn’t imagine, you know, not going into a bookstore or not going into a clothing store. And as, as online solutions get better, you can replicate more and more of that or replace more and more of that. And there’s still going to be things that you may want to do in person over time. And we may not be the best solution for those things. I think the most important thing for education is acknowledging when and where that’s the case.
Sophie Bailey:
You know, you’ve got different credentialing systems out there. In the past, people have stressed quite a lot about how those stack up and whether you’re measuring apples and apples. What was your take on that in terms of value that we’re getting out of our education?
Dr Courtney Brown:
Yeah, I think one of the first things we need to focus on is transparency; transparency of all these credentials. I would say the four year and two-year institutions in the US have always had a little bit more scrutiny because they have had to be evaluated and accredited on a regular basis. Not that all of them are great, but there is a little bit more transparency there. The short-term credentials, the boot camps and whatnot are living a little bit more of a black box. They may be provided by an employer by a for-profit. And so we don’t have the apple to apple type of data. So we’re really trying to uncover that so that we can make sure that students because this should be a student-centred world that they have access to. You know, if I go get that credential, if I go get that master’s in social work at USC, what’s it going to cost me?
Dr Courtney Brown:
And what, what kind of salary can I expect coming out the other side? And are there people that look like me or have my experiences that actually participate there also? So we need more transparency. So at least people know what they’re getting when they go buy something. For everything else that we purchase, we have these types of data. If I want to fly from here to London, I can look at all my opportunities and pay anywhere from $200 to probably $300,000 and know how long it’s going to take me, how often they’re on time; those sorts of things. We don’t have any of that in higher education. So we need more transparency. We developed something called the credential engine that is beginning to pull some of this information together from all types of credentials, every credential that, that exists in the US right now.
Dr Courtney Brown:
So that’s one of the first things that we need to do. And, you know, I think that the pandemic has given us an opportunity to refine, improve the virtual learning experience. And I think many, four-year and two-year institutions who had never done it you know, dove in and I applaud them for giving it a try and working to improve that, that I hope that they don’t go right back to everything has to be in person. I hope they continue to innovate and work on that. I also hope that our option won’t be that you’re either virtual or in person. We already have in the US a huge divide between the haves and the have-nots and it’s getting worse and worse. And a lot of that is defined by who has access to higher education post-secondary education, and who does not, what I would hate to see is the have nots only have access to virtual education and the haves, have in-person education and all those things that happen kind of not, maybe not outside of the classroom, but beyond the parties and whatnot, but it’s the conversations that take place at the end of the class.
Dr Courtney Brown:
It’s the conversations that take place as you’re walking into the class or those sorts of things. So we want to make sure that people have the opportunity to access education in all kinds of different ways and have access to mentoring and guided pathways and other things to help them get on track and stay on track.
Sophie Bailey:
Yeah, it’s pretty interesting listening to you talk about that. It seems like there’s a shift from the university defining educational experiences, and obviously, that’s diversified out into these different models. Whereas now there’s a much stronger sort of student or learner voice in terms of being a consumer in all of this. So you know, we saw over the last 18 months that students taking universities to court because of their experiences online and, you know, there’s perhaps this greater scrutiny of the financial value of our educational experiences as well. And I know that other educational models are also under scrutiny and I guess, is this partly because we’re evolving out of sort of this one model where, you know, you paid a certain amount and now there are many different models, many different fees, many different experiences of what value is, but perhaps we’re quite new in this system as well. I don’t know if anyone had any thoughts on sort of new educational models, value and sort of consumer’s voice and all of that as well.
Austin Allred:
Yeah, I think what, what you referenced earlier is in terms of making sure students have apples to apple comparisons of what to expect, what outcomes look like all of that stuff, you know, we spend a ton of time and money and effort actually yesterday just put out another, you know, annual outcomes report. So students can look at that and can see what salary expectations are. They can see what time to graduation looks like. We have a relatively flexible model for time to graduation. They can see what job titles look like. And we also put out a diversity report. That’s, you know, what does our student body look like? Where are they coming from? What are their backgrounds? And, you know, you can map those two together. I think the best thing that educational institutions can do to aid in that is to produce data. I understand that it’s a very difficult and complex thing to do. And it, you know, it’s far more difficult than people would expect to just know where your alumni are working and how much they’re making, even for us where that’s the entire focus of our program. But I think the best thing we can all do is get more data, more clarity, and more options to, to all of the students.
Dr Courtney Brown:
I agree. Another thing we need to do is ensure that there is stackability with the types of different types of credentials. So often at times, a short-term credential is fabulous, and it could be one-stop shopping that, that short-term credential is going to lead to a lifetime of you know, great job and, and good salary. But oftentimes you need to stack that. And so we need to have more clarity about what is, what those skills are. I think Austin, you raised the importance of skills, understanding what those competencies are and skills are that are within that credential so that it can stack to the next credential. So no one should have a dead end. You know, we are constantly in the future going to need to up-skill, re-skill. Nothing that we have right now is going to lead us through a lifetime job where we don’t have to constantly learn. And so being able to stack on what we know and continue to learn is going to be absolutely essential. And that’s up to institutions of post-secondary learning to be able to unpack that and say, you know, here are the skills and competencies that you will be getting from these credentials
Sophie Bailey:
And as ambassadors or enthusiasts, for new models of learning, which, you know, increase accessibility and access to developing these skills. Are there any sort of limitations to some of these models being rolled out more quickly? So I’m thinking of examples here in the UK, where perhaps the regulation or the sort of state funding of some of these educational models, the existing legacy systems don’t quite match up with the innovations that are happening. So I just wondered what your experience was and what you’d like to see more of in terms of creating a fertile ground for quality new education as well.
Austin Allred:
I have a lot of thoughts. So much I can share, so much I can not. But yeah, certainly for us, you know, where, you know, we have a giant compliance team that is focused on just being in compliance with every state, because every state has a completely different regulatory environment for higher education. And many of the laws did not contemplate online, being a thing. There are very explicit laws around, you know, how many students are in a classroom and what exactly their instructor is like, and, you know, in an online world, so much of that is so, you know, even in, when you’re trying to comply with the laws, you talk to the regulators and the regulators don’t know how to adjust that law. For example, you know, in some states, it, there are laws around what you can teach across state lines for, from one state to another that was written to solve for a tax avoidance problem, or a student saying, you know, I am an in-state student in one state versus another.
Austin Allred:
And so we have to comply with those because we are teaching in some instances from one really every instance from one state into another or, you know, we have states where we have filing cabinets full of student data, despite the fact that we don’t have an employee in that state. So we have to go rent an office and put a filing cabinet that is under lock and key. And so the well-meaning regulation of, hey, you need to keep your student data available, but it needs to be locked down. You know, obviously, that’s written for an analogue world. So I think, you know, it’s, it’s difficult to do, but my call would be for regulators to take a look at the regulations for education and see, does this make sense in 2021? Or is this a law that’s still on the books from 1970 when, you know, a lot of what we’re doing was literally not an option? And I think, you know, land of school is lucky that we’re big enough and well-funded enough that we can do a lot of that, but for a lot of schools, I mean there are entire states, you just have to not teach in because the compliance cost of teaching students in that state is so high. So I think that’s the most glaringly obvious thing to solve for when it comes to, how can we enable new education models.
Dr Courtney Brown:
I was happy. I would also say, I mean, there are so many different groups coming on trying to sell their credentials and that’s concerning. It’s concerning to me for the students who are paying for them and not getting a value from those not being able to complete their credential or getting a credential of value. So we need to pay attention to that. And again, that goes back to the transparency, what is this credential? Because it sounds really good when you get a postcard for it, and they’re gonna give you a free laptop. It only costs $50 to enrol for your first class. You know, once you sign lots of things change. So we need to pay attention to that. We also need to make sure that these credentials are aligned with employment needs; not just for the next six months, but beyond that. And so we, you know, not that we need a crystal ball, but we need to have a little bit more thinking about the future and what kinds of skills are going to be needed in the future. So that individuals are getting credentials that are not going to just end in six months. Their employment’s not going to end, that they can have a greater lifetime with those.
Sophie Bailey:
I suppose if we were to leave the session and to leave anyone who’s watching back or listening in; what would you like to leave with our, with our listeners to kind of get them thinking deeply on this subject?
Dr Courtney Brown:
So I’ll start. So I think one of the things that people need to acquaint themselves with no matter where you are, or who today’s students are, so who actually are the people that are attending post-secondary education, whether it is at a university for your kind of degree, or whether it’s a boot camp or what, what it is to understand that, to dispel the myth that they’re all 18 or 19 years old and their parents are paying. So I think that’s really important in the US, we have information on today’s students, on our website, Lumina foundation. And I think that’s important for policymakers, universities, colleges, any post-secondary provider; to understand who you’re supposed to be serving. And then I would say the role of colleges is to begin to use that information, and they’re going to have to adapt.
Dr Courtney Brown:
They’re going to have to change. I, I’m not saying they’re all going to go away, but in order to survive, you’re going to have to figure out how to serve adults, how to serve the credentials of value that Austin has mentioned, and you were talking about Sophie because everyone doesn’t need a four-year philosophy degree. Maybe they need a short-term credential that can then build on into a four-year degree, or maybe they need a four-year degree. And then they’re going to need to top it off with a certificate or a certification afterwards. So colleges of tomorrow, are going to have to be more adaptable and figure out what students need, not at one point in time, but throughout their lifetime and figure out how to serve them better.
Sophie Bailey:
Great, thank you.
Austin Allred:
Yeah, I think I think the answer was broadly correct. Understand student needs better and adapt. I think a lot of colleges have been lucky enough to be in a world where with expanding populations and expanding, you know if you look compared to the eighties more and more students going to college, didn’t really have to adapt for a long time. And I think the role of higher education is shifting somewhat. The funding will shift, the population demographics will shift and, at the end of the day, the needs of the students will shift. And so I think that the schools that are most responsive to the needs of the student and the needs of the market are those that will win. And I don’t know that every school is going to be able to make that transition.
Austin Allred:
You know, for a lot of colleges, that’s an incredibly difficult transition and, you know one that has not had to have been made for a very long time. But I think at the end of the day, schools are going to come out stronger from this, educations are going to be stronger. Students will be better served now than they have been in the past. I expect that trend to continue. So I’m actually very optimistic for the schools that are willing to figure out how to become agile and respond to student needs. I think they’re in a great spot.
Sophie Bailey:
Well, thank you both so much for your time. If people want to go and find out more, so Lumina Foundation, Lambda school, thank you again for sharing your insights and yeah. Look forward to sharing this.
