Tuesday, November 12, 2024 - While college-going rates have increased over recent decades, completion rates have hardly budged. On this episode, Michael and Jeff sit down with one entrepreneur working to change that. Mike Larsson is the co-founder and CEO of Duet, an organization collaborating with an online university to provide on-the-ground coaching and physical space for students. They discuss the role wraparound supports play in supporting more students towards graduation, the keys to reengaging students who have stopped out, the nationwide spread of hybrid models like Duet’s, and more. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Philanthropy and the Gates Foundation.
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College Reimagined by Jon Gabrieli et al.
0:00 - Intro
02:12 - The Founding Story of Duet
08:53 - Reaching Students with “Some College No Degree”
11:23 - A Personal Trainer for College
13:17 - Duet’s Outcomes
17:07 - “The Hard Policy Answer”
21:00 - The Growth of Hybrid College
24:39 - Affordability, Flexibility, and Disruption
29:46 - Leveraging Public-Private Partnerships to Better Serve Adult Learners
33:26 - Improving the Outcomes of Community Colleges
Mike Larsson:
Higher ed, for whatever reason, there's this idea that something that you should do by yourself, right? Even though other hard things where the payoff is down the road, like trying to stay healthy, like trying to stay fit, it's commonplace to have someone with you to help set goals for you, help stay on you, right? Like, line I always say is, I know I should go for a run every morning and I don't. But if there was like a guy who came to my house to go with the run with me, I would go, right? That's like a natural thing. We have that same mindset, you know, with school, because school, especially for working adults, have the same sort of, you know, components in that the payoff is down the road, right? The value of getting a bachelor's degree is not going to happen tomorrow for you.
Michael Horn:
That was Mike Larsson, co-founder and CEO of Duet, an organization that works with Southern New Hampshire University to provide on the ground coaching and physical space for students in the Boston area. Mike's our guest and this partnership, the launch of what's been called hybrid college, is our topic today on Future U.
Jeff Selingo:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student educational success. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, send it along to a friend so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
Michael Horn:
So Jeff, back In the early 2010s, I caught wind of something happening in Boston that really grabbed me: Match Charter School - so this is my K-12 hat - was starting to do something in higher ed. And just as background, Match is one of the original, quote unquote, no excuses charter schools. It disproportionately serves low-income students and it gets results for them. Today it has three campuses in Massachusetts with a pretty unique tutoring model. Even among the charter schools like the tutors actually literally live on the campus and they were taking this tutoring model and starting to explore how might it work in higher end. My read on it from the outside was that they were looking around, seeing all these high school graduates they had helped produce said, you know, go realize the college dream. There's banners everywhere in the classrooms, right? And these Students they were going to college and then just not having the success that Match had expected or had told them that they would. And so the folks at Match, I think, concluded that college, for many of their students anyway, was broken. So they partnered with Southern New Hampshire University just as SNHU was launching College for America, its online competency based, low cost learning model. And Match brought its own secret sauce to the table with SNHU's flexible low cost thing, which was this no excuses mindset, along with this unparalleled one on one in person support. And I was thinking this gets exciting because now we've got disruptive innovation, but with a real focus on outcomes. Low cost and accessible, but finally a commitment to student outcomes, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo:
And around this time, a similar model was launched in Austin, Texas, Peloton U. And not Peloton, the bike company. We always have to remind people of that. And since this so called hybrid college movement has really started to grow across the country in small ways, but in many ways it's been an outgrowth, as you said, Michael, of charter schools, basically saying we need a better option for students. And so today, the founder of MatchBeyond, which ultimately turned into Duet, Mike Larsson, is joining us on Future U. Mike actually worked at Match Charter Public Schools and then the parent organization Match Education, most recently as the COO. And he co-founded and now leads Duet, which is its own nonprofit. Mike, welcome to Future U.
Mike Larsson:
Thanks for having me, Jeff and Michael. Nice to see you.
Jeff Selingo:
Great. So, Mike, as much as our listeners do, or maybe they don't read Michael Horn's writings on Disruptive Innovation players, they should follow, I suspect most of them probably don't know necessarily the history of Duet or what it is today. So can you give us a brief description of your origin story?
Mike Larsson:
Sure. So the idea for Duet actually started in the alumni office at a charter school here in Boston called the Match School. And so our job at Match was to go out and help people earn college degrees, right? So they went to this very difficult high school and the idea was they would go on and be able to get the college degrees and the economic growth that comes with it. And we found that certainly not as many students as we believe could were getting the college degrees. Right? So we went out and built this college coaching office to support students while they're in college. And we said, can we help them while we're in college increase their chances of graduation? And you know, what we found was we really couldn't. Right. And so there were a couple reasons for that. One was the design of college just did not work for a lot of folks, right? Too costly, lack of flexibility. And then on the coaching side, it was really hard to coach students in college because we didn't really have any idea what was going on. Right. A lot of coaching comes from this idea that you know where a student is and you know where they want to go. Think about personal training and trying to get healthy and things like that. You have no real visibility into how a student's going in traditional school, right? It's like, how's class? Good. What the professor say said, I had to pass the final. Okay, it's September 7th. What do we do now? And so, you know, well, it might have been easier just to kind of stick with it and try. We said, could we try something different? Right? And I had a colleague at the time, Bob Hill, who ended up being the co founder of Duet, who went out and tried to find lots of different models to try to find a new path for our alums. Excuse me. And one day, sort of 2010, 2011, he came and said, hey, listen, there's this new program at Southern New Hampshire University. It's asynchronous, it's competency based. You can only enroll through partnerships. And I called them up and said, hey, can we be a partner? And they said, sure. And so, which was not, quite frankly, our experience with other colleges as we tried to work with them. And so we enrolled a group of 13 Match High School alums that had stopped out of school, that were working, that were in careers where a college degree would help them, but they just couldn't get one right because they were a little bit older and out of school already. And we found very quickly that this program did a couple things at Southern Hampshire University. One, it broke down some of these barriers, particularly around flexibility and cost, right? Low cost. It was completely asynchronous. Project based online allowed a student that may have different work hours have to take care of their kids to still fit in school. And then we found a couple other things that we weren't expecting. One was students were learning a lot of stuff, right? It was like, how is it? And they're like, I'm learning, I feel good. I'm like getting skills. Which was not something that we were hearing, quite frankly, talking to other alums in traditional colleges. And then the other piece of it was we found that coaching could be highly leveraged in this competency based online program because we knew where students were every single day and they were on sort of a set path. So we went back to Southern New Hampshire University and we said, hey, how about we become a community partner of yours and we'll work with non Match High School students, which we quickly did, and sort of at that point decide to spin out and to create our own nonprofit called Duet. Sort of fast forward now to today, we're still partnering with Southern Hampshire University. We'll work with about a thousand students this year. But they look generally like those first set of students. Sort of what people are calling today's student. So people who are working. Most of our students work full time. 30% of our students have kids that they're taking care of. And 75% of our students tried college previously. And so those, the students were largely working with today.
Jeff Selingo:
So the 70. So 70% have tried college previously. What's interesting about that, Mike, as you know, is that, you know, there's these 40 million American adults who have some college and no career. I mean, sorry, some college and no degree. They have a career. And you know, in every college now is trying to figure out how to serve those students because they think, well, that's kind of low hanging fruit because they've already started, you know, they started college at some point in their life. But, you know, we know the success rate of colleges and trying to get these students back hasn't been great. So what do you think your secret sauce has been? Because if 70% of your students have tried college before and have some credits, like, what's working that you're doing that others may not be doing?
Mike Larsson:
So at a fundamental level, the model is just very different. Right. So it is designed for a working student. It's low cost, it's flexible. And we have this coaching with Duet that's really personalized and geared to help people get that college degree as fast as possible. That's what you want when you're a working adult, right. You're not. Not the coming of age experience. You're not trying to find yourself. You are largely stuck in your job and you're not going to college because it's fun, really. Right. You want to get ahead. And then the second thing that we've really sort of thought a lot about the last couple of years is how to reach these students. Because to your point, 40 million students have some college and no degree. Only 2% ever return out of that 40 million.Right. So 39.8 million don't return. And despite sort of being pummeled with ads and all sorts of other things. And our experience with that is because students are making a very rational decision. They tried college, and it didn't work for them. Their data point is college didn't work. They may own money, they may feel bad about that, and so they're not looking at the ads because they don't think college is for them. Right. It didn't work when they were 19. Now they're 25. Like, why would it work for them now? So when for us, as we try to reach these students, we found that it's really important to reach them, really, via trusted partnerships. So organizations or human beings that care about them that will say to them, hey, go take a look at Duet and Southern New Hampshire University. This is a path that could work for you.
Jeff Selingo:
And you provide this support through their entire degree experience, this kind of wraparound coaching that you provide, this personal training type of coaching. I'm just thinking about this. I was at the gym this morning, and I do much better when. When I have a trainer with me. So I'm assuming that this helps in this process as well. Right?
Mike Larsson:
Yeah. You know, I think higher ed, for whatever reason, there's this idea that something that you should do by yourself. Right. Even though other hard things where the payoff is down the road, like trying to stay healthy, like trying to stay fit, it's commonplace to have someone with you to help set goals for you, help stay on you. Right. Like, the line I always say is, I know I should go for a run every morning, and I don't. But if there was, like, a guy who came to my house to go on the run with me, I would go. That's like a natural thing. We have that same mindset, you know, with school, because this school, especially for working adults, has the same sort of, you know, components in that the payoff is down the road. Right. The value of getting a bachelor's degree is not going to happen tomorrow for you, and it's not really that fun to do, as I mentioned earlier. It can be painful in some ways, and you need someone to remind you why you're doing it Right. And to help you get through it. And I think this goes more broadly to online education. Online education creates a lot of opportunities around accessibility. That's really special. But what we've seen at Duet is we think that accessibility needs to be paired with coaching support that can help people stay on track when it's sort of human nature to kind of fall off track often.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, we all enjoy that. So, Mike, you and I had a lot of conversations early in the history of Duet about the actual outcomes or the return on investment, the ROI, if you will. And Stig Leschley, who of course ran the Match Charter Schools and had a big hand in founding what has become Duet from its origins and Match Beyond, obviously learned so much that he's now trying to start up an accreditor around outcomes, the Postsecondary Commission. But I'm just, I'd love you to update us. Like, what's the ROI for students that start at Duet? What are the outcomes today? And as you give us that, help us understand what's really driving those outcomes. Is it that the competency based model really lowers the time to degree? Is it that it's low cost and give us a sense of how much it costs the student and then the upside? Right. On the other end, what are the benefits? What's the graduation rate? Really, really help us understand what's driving those outcomes?
Mike Larsson:
Yeah. So, you know, from an ROI perspective, for an individual student, as they think about this as their college option, it has a few, so powerful, powerful characteristics. One is it is low cost. Right. So for a student who enrolls at Southern New Hampshire University with Duet coaching this year, it costs $2,600 a term, whether it's for associates or bachelor's degree credits. No extra stuff, no extra books, no hidden fees. That's what it is. And it is a subscription model. So if you do five classes, six classes, seven classes, it still only costs you $2,600. Then there's the opportunity cost, which is really important for ROI. Right. So for our students, they have to work full time. One of the things holding people back from going back to traditional colleges, they can't quit their job. So our students are able to continue working full time and they're able to fit their school into the free time that they have throughout the week and throughout the year. The other special piece on the ROI is the time to completion. So our average student who starts with zero credits in the associate's program gets their associate's degree in about 18 or 19 months. So, much faster than a traditional model where the average associate's degree time to completion is about 67 months. And that is meaningful both because you get into the job market faster, but then particularly for associate's degrees programs, one of the big values of the associate's degree is you're halfway done with the bachelor's. Right. Because that's really what unlocks the potential salary growth. And if you spend 67 months getting your associate's degree, it's very difficult to then sort of climb up that mountain again and get the bachelor's degree. So that's how we think about it really a lot from the ROI perspective, from an individual student's perspective. On the outcome side. A couple years ago we gave data from our first 554 students to a set of researchers at Harvard University led by Marty West, who I'm sure you both are familiar with, and had them look at all the data. And so for our first 500 associate students, the three year graduation rate for those students was around 50%, which is the traditional first time full time student, three year graduation rates, about 20% at most community colleges, certainly higher graduation rates across all racial groups. And this time to completion number that I referenced as well. We're now going back with the next set of associates grads or associate students for the researchers to look at as well as our bachelor's cohorts, which is an increasingly large group of students who are coming to us and we anticipate those numbers will be about the same as they happen.
Michael Horn:
Super helpful, Mike, and I love that you're continuing to grounded in the research and have, you know, third party researchers continue to look and build these models to really understand the outcomes. I'm curious from that analysis and you compared to say, you know, average time to complete an associate's degree elsewhere and so forth. As you think about the policy landscape around higher ed more broadly, what do you think is missing right now? What would most help low income students who are struggling? Maybe they have some credits, maybe they don't in the workforce, whatever it might be, how would we help them navigate toward options that are most likely to produce the best return on investment given their specific circumstance?
Mike Larsson:
Yeah, I think there's sort of two separate answers to that question. One is for 18 year olds who are looking for that coming of age experience. I think the hard thing there is while we want students and families to think about that from an ROI perspective, when they're 18, they're often not right. And so there's like a culture thing there and it's complicated. But for working adults, right, 25 year olds who are actually looking sort of for that ROI, right. They need to get that college degree that can work in the workforce for them and do it as quickly and as affordably as possible. I think the hard policy answer is there's actually not a lot of good options. And I think there's sort of this belief that if we just put more data out there, it'll all work out and people go to the right thing. But if you're a 25 year old, the only option you have is to go to something that actually probably didn't work for you when you were 18 in the policy world. And there is, I think policymakers struggle to both look for better outcomes, but also to keep kind of things the same in the way colleges are designed. And I think sometimes, for whatever reason, their commitment to keeping things the same holds them back from potentially changes that would be good for students. Yeah, it's really interesting, Mike. We had Allison Griffin on years ago on the podcast and you know, mostly on Capitol Hill, a lot of policy is being made by 25, 26 year old staffers. Great people, by the way. But most of them went to traditional age institutions, right. Where they think, well, most people go to college at 18, they go full time, they live on campus. Right. That's their vision of college. And to create federal policy different than that is really tough.
Jeff Selingo:
I also, just listening to you, I realized just how much this makes sense. Right. Like, especially when you think about adult students in terms of what they need, affordability and flexibility. Like if you're a college, could you just create something that's affordable and flexible and you would suddenly have a whole bunch of students you don't have today. It just, it just shocks me how simple this is and we can't figure it out. There's not necessarily a question there.
Mike Larsson:
I agree. I mean, I would say, you know, one of the reasons we love partnering with Southern New Hampshire University is because they have designed something here. You know, and I know you know them both well, you both know them well, but they, you know, the thing that they have designed, this asynchronous program, this low cost program, it's fully accredited by NECHE, it's approved by the federal government. Right. What they designed is not some like out there thing that's outside the box. It's actually in the box, this thing that they're working with. And, you know, why other folks haven't chosen to do it, I don't know.
Jeff Selingo:
So, last question as we wrap up here, Mike. You know, the creation of Duet just, you know, isn't just the story of hundreds and hundreds of students you're serving in the, in the Massachusetts area. You've also helped kick off really a broader category that's now termed the hybrid college. Wraparounds, really, around Southern New Hampshire in most, but not all cases. Right. We have Peloton U and Austin, Texas. And for our listeners, that's not to be confused with Peloton, the exercise bike company. There's DaVinci's dual enrollment model, of course, there's, you know, Southern New Hampshire, obviously. ASU, where I have an affiliation, has also made a play in this space. There's the Trio Network, with sites in Connecticut and Newark and Detroit, with more on the way. I'm sure I'm missing probably some others here. You know, what are the linkages between these different hybrid colleges? What are the differences and where do you think this movement is going, in your view? Because if we do have 40 million American adults with some college and no degree, scale is going to, at some point matter here in some big way, correct?
Mike Larsson:
Yeah. So I know all the folks that run these organizations well, all really good people. And I think while among us, we feel like there's probably differences among us, we're all largely following the same model, which is pairing this asynchronous model with some level of wraparound coaching and support. We reach different segments of the population somewhat broader than others. The exciting thing is, collectively, we're larger than we ever have been. And so we are continuing to grow in that sense. And, you know, I do think, you know, there is an opportunity for us to grow much, much larger collectively as a group, given the number of people sort of with without college degrees. I think, you know, we've been around for 10 years now, and so much of our work has been head down in how do we do right by the students who we have in front of us and how do we, you know, if we do right by them, then they will tell their friends and family and then we will continue to grow. Right? And we've kind of been heading in that direction, and that's worked thus far. But certainly here at Duet and I know some of the other organizations, we're also picking our heads up now and saying, okay, what are some other strategies that we can undertake to grow faster and to reach more people? Both because, you know, mainly we want to help as many people as we can, and then also, too, we do want to contribute to this story and to show the world that, you know, students have exactly what it takes to get a college degree. There's so many hardworking, smart students who've already built resumes, you know, in hard jobs, and they just need that bachelor's degree. And, you know, we want to show that those folks do have exactly what it takes. They just need a different path.
Michael Horn:
Mike, thanks so much for coming on Future U, sharing the story and where this might all go. And for all you listening, we'll be right back on Future U.
Sponsor:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student educational success. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Jeff Selingo:
Welcome back to Future U. Michael. I know Duet is something you brought up several times on the show and it was fun to learn about it firsthand from Mike because I really didn't know much about it beyond the few things you told me. And in fact, I'll admit it and I'll be honest that when you first suggested we have them on the show I was a little skeptical. And then I went looking for data on Duet and what I found was impressive. But then just in talking to Mike, it really made me more convinced on two points he made. One was on affordability and one was on flexibility. You know, Michael, as we're recording this, it's a day after I was at a SHRM conference here in DC, SHRM being the Society for Human Resource Management. And as you know, during the meeting I sent you a text from there yesterday with a picture of a slide that was given during a presentation from Bank of America of an issue, frankly I know exists, but I didn't really think about it as much as I should. And that's the caring crisis, as they put it, that we face in the US and there's so much of course of us caring for kids. And there's a lot in Gen X like me, who are also caring for aging parents as well. It's the so called sandwich generation, the kids and the parents. And I bring this up because the slide I sent to you yesterday was just incredibly revealing to me. It showed that just among Bank of America employees, one in four a quarter are taking care of both children and their parents. And get this, 71% of their employees with some carrying responsibility make under $40,000 a year. Now some might say, well, you know, Bank of America should pay them more and provide them more benefits for caring. Whole separate episode that we could talk about that. But you know, as I was looking at this, these slides that they were showing yesterday, it just really brought open the point to me that especially among adult students that we continue to talk about over and over again as this huge segment for institutions to be considering re enrolling or enrolling for the first time, they just simply don't have time or money to do it. And the model really has to change for them. It has to be more flexible, it has to be less expensive. You know, we just keep trying to serve all students, even though they have different needs, with the same model that quite frankly, you know, doesn't even really work for 18 year olds anymore who have a lot more time than adults. And, you know, so as Mike told us, most of his students work full time. But then he mentioned, you know, 30% of them are taking care of kids, 75% of them tried college previously. I also wonder, you know, how many of them, maybe you should do this research, are also taking care of parents. But the point being, you know, we need more models. We need different models like this to show, hey, we can actually succeed with these students if we just offer them something different than the product we've always offered everywhere else. So what about you, Michael? What caught your attention? What grabbed you?
Michael Horn:
Well, I'll say out of what you just said, right? It's flipping the question from are they college ready to are we student ready? And student ready means in their circumstances. But you know, look, maybe it'll be obvious to our listeners. Jeff, I'll go down my checklist. First, disruptive innovation, right? The things you said, affordable, flexible, accessible. And it is not easy to do. But by partnering with SNHU's competency-based model that, let's be clear, it was separate from SNHU's traditional on campus one. They've done that. Check. Second, it's not enough. I love that, yes, it's disruptive, but I love that it's much more than that. It also has this commitment to outcomes. They're really redefining performance around economic growth for students, students that are working, as you said. But there's this no excuses mindset that no matter your background, no matter how many jobs you have right now, you can do this. And for a long time I've said, not on the show, but elsewhere, that I think K-12 seems to be constantly playing with its learning model and higher ed. We see all sorts of new business models come in, but neither one seems to really want to do both. Look, there are exceptions to that, but I like that this is an example of higher ed doing both. The third one on that vein is our audience knows I love competency based learning and you got that. And then fourth, to me, maybe this is the most important one is blended learning. Like the learning is online and through projects. But then you've got this in person coach who is helping you stay on track who's keeping you accountable, who will, like, literally, you know, I've heard panels with their coaches where they talk about showing up on the doorstep when they aren't responsive to your text messages. That is different from all these online models in really important ways. I think online getting better in many ways, but in ways that matter for these students and these coaches. They believe in you. And together with the other students and coaches, they create the sense of community and belonging and what Paul LeBlanc, SNHU's former president, would call mattering. And from what I see, like, the combination of all those things, Jeff, is really magical.
Jeff Selingo:
Michael, I really like the coaching piece as well. I'm kind of suffering from recency bias today in my comments, but the day we interviewed Mike, I had just come from a training session at the gym with this trainer I have, and Mike's right. It's really hard to shift your habits as you get older. I have a whole shelf of books at home and there's a whole industry trying to get people to change their habits. Right. And it's clear to me the coaching model has to be a significant part of this for it to work, especially for adults who are kind of out of exercise in terms of learning. But we also know those wraparound services are expensive. And while colleges can obviously partner with external partners on a piece of that, it's really about, in my mind, getting over their history and tradition here. So, again, Michael, recency bias. The same day I went to that SHRM conference, I also spoke at a gathering of municipal bondholders here in D.C. who work with higher ed bond issues. I know that sounds really boring. But right now, given the financial issues facing higher education, it was actually fascinating to me. And there was so much discussion at this gathering about small colleges and their future because so many more, to be honest with you, than we think are struggling right now. And many of these colleges, as we know, have small scale. And that just kept coming up over and over again. You really can't run a college on 1200, 1500, 2000 students. So there's a lot of talk about partnerships. And I was really getting frustrated sitting in the audience because everyone's talking about back office operations and all this stuff. We've been trying for years, right? We need to do something different. You know, most of these colleges we know are also in the industrial Northeast, the Midwest, where there's a huge need for upskilling and reskilling right now. We're going to have an episode coming up on the CHIPS act for example, and the need just in upstate New York, for example, where there's a new microchip plant being built. And as these bond analysts were talking about the small colleges in upstate New York, I thought, well, why can't they add some of these Duet type of students? Right? And I think there are three things that are huge hurdles for them right now. One is the operational playbook. Many of these colleges don't really have a full senior staff in place. In fact, at this conference, many were talking about interim this and interim that. Interim CFOs are all over the place. So they can barely operate, to be honest, with what they have, let alone take on something new. So something. So someone needs to create an operational playbook for them. And that's where I think a P3 can be really helpful. You know, at the P3 conference that I was at in Denver, there's, you know, one of the things they talked about as an advantage is not only the money that they can bring, but they have this technical expertise about how it's done everywhere else. And they could walk in and help you have that expertise. So that's number one. Number two, I think you really need a mindset shift. You know, thinking of their students as these ever changing multidimensional people. You know, even 18 year olds. I'm still shocked at how leaders think of that they're serving the students of 2010 or even 2015. I mean, you're not even serving the adult students of 2019. Pre pandemic, they're already different. And the economic needs of these adults are completely different. And the time needs that they have real time poverty going back to Bank of America. Right? They, they just don't have time to go to school. So how do you fit that in for them? And then three, doing this on some sort of scale with multi campuses. So I wish a philanthropy would take this on. Take a group of publics and privates, say let's do it in Central PA, upstate New York, middle of Michigan, Wisconsin. Take a state, take a group of 500 adults in that area. Let's try for a year, report back and then scale it up. Because at some point somebody just needs to do something.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? It's like the Craft Education, right, that Western Governors has now done. Could that be part of this? Could you imagine Southern New Hampshire has that big fund, I think, to come work with schools that are just about failing? Maybe I think you're calling for a more aggressive version, frankly, because I think SNHU's is still we're going to help your back end. Right. Something more aggressive. I think it's fascinating. That would be a big idea. And that could maybe move the puck on this. Just one last thought on this though, Jeff. I was talking about how the commitment to value and outcomes really grabbed me from the start. And I just think it's a value proposition that they didn't just talk about, but they've largely delivered on. And I just think the delivering piece is so important if you're going to turn this around. And just to repeat Mike's points briefly, $2,600 per term is what they charge. You get to keep working while you're in school so you do not lose out on earnings. No opportunity cost. And then you don't suffer the plight of part time learners. Because the students can get an associate's degree on an average of 18 to 19 months. So as we know, if you're a part time learner, like you're talking years before you get a degree, this is a year and a half effectively to an Associates. That's versus 67 months or almost 6 years on average for a part time student. That is an astounding difference that I think you talked about time poverty. That changes the game. You can be working and get it in a year and a half and their three year graduation rate is 50%. Now, I know you and I have gone back and forth on how community colleges actually perform and I think it's fair to say we both do not like the traditional metrics. We think that they probably don't capture all that's going on for community colleges. But I think this points to community colleges needing to put forth a different measure backed by research. Because on the traditional outcomes they're really bad. Like Mike, he's getting in at 50%. 18 months to graduation, they're coming in at a 20% or something, three year graduation rate on average. These are just really stark divides. And I think community colleges either need to be clear about what is the value proposition and put some research behind it, or they need to rework it and step up somewhat.
Jeff Selingo:
And now we're going to hear from all our community colleges. And they're going to be great because maybe they will look at this as an opportunity.
Michael Horn:
If they could do something like you just described with a bunch of community colleges in a bunch of rural areas, reshape the model, bring some philanthropy in. Let's do a moonshot here. Let's do it.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, I agree. I think at the time of talking about this, especially about serving these students, is over and let's start to do it. So we're going to wrap up there. Michael, thanks for all of you for joining us on Future U and we'll see you next time.
