Ryan Craig

• Ryan Craig is the co-founder and managing director of University Ventures, an investment firm dedicated to re-imagining the future of higher education and creating pathways from education to employment.
• He is also author of A New U: Faster and Cheaper Alternatives to College.
• His book is the first roadmap to groundbreaking programs such as bootcamps, income-share programs, apprenticeships, and staffing models which will lead to more student choice, better matches with employers, higher return on investment of cost and time, and stronger economic growth.

• https://www.benbellabooks.com/
• https://www.benbellabooks.com/shop/a-new-u/
• http://universityventures.com/
• https://www.luminafoundation.org/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/#4768263f61aa
• https://revature.com/

Glenn Yeffeth: Welcome to the Building Books Podcast. I'm Glenn Yeffeth, publisher of BenBella Books and on this podcast, we will talk about ideas, authors, and how publishing really works.

Glenn Yeffeth: I'm delighted to welcome today, Ryan Craig, one of our authors. The author of 'A New You: Faster and Cheaper Alternatives to College.' As a father with two kids in college right now for better or worse, I'm very excited to talk to Ryan. This book is truly eye-opening. It's really changed the way that I view education and I can't wait to discuss it. It's got favorable blurbs about Jeb Bush, ex-governor and Alan Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn.

Glenn Yeffeth: Just a little bit about Ryan, he is the co-founder and managing director of University Ventures, which is an investment firm that's dedicated to re-imagining the future of higher education and creating pathways from education to employment. The University Ventures portfolio companies are working to make higher education more affordable, pioneering new approaches to learning, and helping employers think differently about how and where they really discover talent. Ryan's the guy who's actually doing this and making it real for people. So, very excited to talk [inaudible 00:01:11].

Glenn Yeffeth: Just to get us started, Ryan, tell me how you got into the field of education?

Ryan Craig: Oh, it's a great question and honored to be with you. I went to law school and out of law school, I got a job working for Columbia University. This was the late 90s and I went to work for the provost and executive vice provost of Columbia helping them figure out what this whole internet thing was and whether it was a space that Columbia should play in. Spent a couple years there and one thing led to another and here I am.

Glenn Yeffeth: One of the things that you're up against is just the deep belief ... I know neither of my parents went to college. I grew up in the 70s and I was told, "You are going to college." It was the one route to success in America. Did that used to be true and it was always a myth or has something changed?

Ryan Craig: Well, depends on how far back you go. As of the early 1950s, only 5% of working adults had a bachelor's degree but that number skyrocketed until by 1990 it was like 30%. By that time, literally the year I went to college, there was a clear consensus, which is that if you wanted to have a good job and a career, you go to college. If you didn't, it was a crap shoot at best. As I say in the book, the consensus had emerged that it was either college or skid row. There was really very little in between, unfortunately.

Ryan Craig: We've been in this place now for almost 30 years where it's sort of college or bust. Really the point of this book is to try to burst that bubble and demonstrate that we're now seeing hundreds and thousands of alternative pathways that don't lead to jobs as plumbers and electricians and roofers. Good jobs though those may be, few families are excited about sending their children down those routes. These new pathways are leading to great first jobs in the industries of the future: technology, healthcare, and so on.

Glenn Yeffeth: One of the things that you make very clear in your book, it's just the tremendous disconnect there is between what students and their parents are looking for and what universities are actually delivering. So, do I have that right? Is that really true and in a free market, how does that happen?

Ryan Craig: Yeah. Universities have been around for a thousand years. Many of them move at glacial pace and what's happened is, over the last 20 years or so, which is just a blink of an eye in higher education time, we've gone from a world where only a fraction of students said they were enrolling college for economic purposes if you will, getting a good first job ... Today, if you ask that question, it's like 92% say that that's why they're enrolling.

Ryan Craig: Colleges and universities continue to espouse that old line, that adage, we prepare you for your fifth job, not your first job. Today's students, for a variety of reasons, recognize that if they don't get a good first job, they're probably not going to get a good fifth job. Careers are that packed. We've seen some new studies around underemployment that demonstrate just how persistent that can be if you don't get a good first job. So, you have this generation of students who are very pragmatic and universities just simply haven't moved in that blink of an eye.

Glenn Yeffeth: It really is a shift. I know when I went to school, people were very focused on the experience and the broad education. I went to a liberal arts college. When I went onto business school, I remember doing a little informal survey among my friends and every one of them said, "Oh, I would just pay the tuition and get out of here now if I could get the degree." It was all about the credential. It seems like that's moved to undergraduate as well.

Ryan Craig: Well, it has. I do make the point in the book of segmenting between selective universities and nonselective. Perhaps the most surprising thing, people who've read the book, have said to me that they didn't realize that they were only 200 selective four-year universities in the country, which I define as accepting fewer than 50% of applicants. So, that's 200 out of 4,000 accredited four-year colleges and universities in the country and represents less than 10% of all students.

Ryan Craig: You've got the vast majority of students attending non-selective colleges and universities who've really lived and thrived for decades now under the umbrella afforded them by the most selective school, the brand name schools. The view being that a college is a college, a degree is a degree. Of course, we know that a degree from UT El Paso is not the same as a degree from an elite, selective school. It doesn't lead to the same economic outcome. That's the challenge that we're seeing and it's where we're going to see the biggest change.

Glenn Yeffeth: One of the things that I loved about the book was that it wasn't a blanket condemnation, it gave actually the reader a route to, in this scenario, yes, you do want to go to college. In this scenario, you probably don't. And, in these scenarios, you want to think about it very carefully.

Ryan Craig: Yeah, that's right. I have a matrix where I say, "Given the emergence of these, what I call faster and cheaper alternatives that lead directly to the good first jobs that increasingly college grads aren't getting 'cause they're not getting the right training and preparation that employers are seeking, that given those choices, it should be a real decision." Whereas five years ago, 10 years ago, many families would just make it blindly and send their child to the best college, the best four-year college they could get into.

Ryan Craig: I try and break it down along two dimensions. One is selectivity and the other is affordability. If you're admitted into a selective school that's affordable, no one's going to be more excited about you attending a four-year university than me. That's a great outcome. Selective universities do so many things for their graduates, more than just the education. The signal of the brand, the network, the alumni network, and so forth, incredibly valuable. I have been a beneficiary of that and would not be where I am today if not for that. So, selective, affordable, green light.

Ryan Craig: On the other hand, if it's a non-selective school ... And, remember, that's 3,800 out of 4,000 ... is not affordable, which I define on sort of a technical definition of affordability where they should not be asking the family to extend more of their savings or wealth than a certain amount, then that should be a bright red light. Do not go there. Do not take on that debt to get a degree from a non-selective university and look for a faster and cheaper alternative that will get you to that good first job.

Ryan Craig: Now, the harder cases are, of course, a selective university that's not affordable and a non-selective university that is [inaudible 00:08:12]. We go into some depth but what I will say, you'll want to pay more. You should be willing to stretch financially to attend a selective university because of all of those benefits.

Ryan Craig: In the book, I use as my metric of affordability what I call the rule of 10, which is from the Lumina Foundation. For a selective university, I suggest maybe that should be the rule of 20, which is what you've been able to save up over 20 years as opposed to 10 years. The point is that there are millions of students today who are simply enrolling in four-year university, not recognizing they have a choice in order to embark on a good start to a career. They'd be better off actually rethinking that decision.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. I've observed that the more selective schools are actually more likely to be affordable particularly if you're below a certain income level. They actually have more resources to support talented, but not high-income individuals.

Ryan Craig: Yeah, absolutely. The ones at the very top, no question. Anyone gets financial aid 100% and then you're below that and some do, some don't it depends on the financial aid package. Many families find that they get wildly different financial aid packages from different institutions. Be wary. Recognize that if you're not getting the financial aid package that you think is affordable and an appropriate risk for your family, look elsewhere.

Glenn Yeffeth: One of the things, I remember studying economics and talking about how monopolies would love to price discriminate, charge more to the richer people, charge more to the poorer people, but, of course, it's hard for most companies to do that because they just have to set the price of their products. Colleges are the only good that I can think of where, not only do they get to price discriminate, they get to charge more for some people than others and they actually get you to release all your financial records before they make the decision. How did they manage that?

Ryan Craig: Oh, it's incredible. Lot of it comes from the fact that historically in higher education price has been a signal for quality. So, the higher the price, the higher the quality. You have a number of private, elite private schools in the Northeast that really try to distinguish themselves by charging literally the highest admission in the country. Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and so forth are famous for that. I scratch my head too. There are all kinds of practices in this sector that are irrational and it will change over the coming years.

Glenn Yeffeth: Ryan, one of the things you talk about in the book is the 'last mile.' Can you explain that?

Ryan Craig: Sure. If you take what I said that students today, as a result of what I call these twin crises of college affordability and employability ... The employability crisis is less recognized, but it's critical. This is not the fault of colleges and universities, but hiring has changed. The way employers hire has changed. That's a function of how technology has impacted hiring.

Ryan Craig: Every good job that a college graduate might want is posted online. Every online job posting generates 300, 400, 500 resumes. No human hiring manager is capable of going through, sifting through hundreds of resumes, so virtually every employer nowadays uses what's called an applicant tracking system to filter those resumes. The applicant tracking system is a keyword-based filter. It's just simply comparing the keywords in the resume that it's able to parse from the resume with keywords that are found in the job description.

Ryan Craig: That's a big factor. What's a complicating element is that over the last decade faced with this surfeit of resumes employers, particularly for entry-level jobs, have sought to tighten the net by adding skills in job descriptions to adding skills to job descriptions. There are only so many ways to say critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, but with the digitization of the economy, you can now add five, 10 different pieces of software or technology that are used in that job. Most employers have that done that.

Ryan Craig: College grads that come out that simply don't have any of those software, technology keywords in their resume or application, simply won't be considered. They'll be invisible. They won't be seen by the hiring manager. Employers have gotten so tired of not being able to now check all these boxes that they have on these entry-level job positions, that many of them have now taken to simply adding a work experience requirement.

Ryan Craig: You have entry-level sales positions that a decade ago might have been or were a great job for a new college grad. Today, many of those positions say, "Two years of Salesforce experience," which is crazy because if these employers actually looked at their performing salespeople, they'll see that none of them have experience with the Salesforce CRM platform before they started. Again, faced with 500 applications or resumes, what are you going to do?

Ryan Craig: So, what we mean by 'last mile,' getting to your question, is literally that technical training that gets the candidate in the door, gets them considered by the human hiring manager, past the applicant tracking system screen, by giving them those technical skills, literally, the technology that's used in the job. I'm not talking about just technology jobs. There are obviously lots of good jobs in the technology industry, but there are many, many more millions of jobs where you're working across financial services, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, you name it, where your job function, particularly as an entry-level employee, is managing some business function by using some software or SaaS platform.

Ryan Craig: If you don't have that experience, experience with that software, you won't be considered for that job. It's unfortunate and it's a function of Peter Cappelli at Wharton calls American employer's Home Depot theory of hiring, which is that every job description is like a part description. If you don't find the exact part, why would buy it? You don't buy a part that doesn't fit at Home Depot. So, employers, they wait for that part or they just don't buy it. The part description has to have that technology component.

Ryan Craig: The economy is digitized, yes, but so many applications for every open slot due to online job posting and hiring that employers have gotten very, very picky. Frankly, American employers have gotten out of the business of training for the most part early-career, entry-level employees. There's a huge free-rider problem. You train someone and 50% of new employees leave within two years and you feel like your competitors are free-riding on the investment made in the training.

Ryan Craig: All of that is a long way of saying, where our system of post-secondary education had broken down and what is the major cause in this crisis of employability where nearly 50% of new college grads come out into jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. It's the classic college grad working at Starbucks type thing. The solution for that is this 'last mile' training where we start with the job, with the employer, look at the actual skills in the job description, and work backwards from there. Primarily on digital or technology skills, but also some soft skills as well.

Ryan Craig: So, organization, teamwork, communication skills, punctuality, [crosstalk 00:15:54] showing up. All of these programs, well, the vast majority of them are on ground, immersive in a real work environment where you're working on real projects using the technologies that you'll be expected to use from day one at the employer. These programs can go anywhere from three months to a year or more. The longer ones are obviously going to incorporate other skills, [inaudible 00:16:20] and cognitive skills, problem-solving, and so forth, which college does. The longer they get, they more they become, what I call, the college MVP a minimum viable product, meaning they're really attempting to replace colleges as opposed to supplement.

Ryan Craig: These 'last mile' training programs have begun as sort of supplements to college. College grads come out and then they're coming into these 'last mile' training programs, which lead them directly to the good jobs they wouldn't find.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, these programs are a benefit to people who went to college, didn't get that 'last mile' training to help them get really the job they want, but talk a bit about the folks that maybe they graduated from high school, they weren't great students but obviously bright. They were a red-light in terms of going to college. What are the alternatives for a high school graduate that really involve not going to college at all?

Ryan Craig: Yeah, well in the book, we have a directory 250 of these 'last mile' training, college alternative programs that lead directly to good first jobs in growing sectors in the economy like IT and healthcare. Broadly speaking, we break these alternatives down into a couple of categories. There are bootcamps, there's sort of tuition-pay bootcamps, which are kind of like college just shorter. You pay your tuition up front and they're very employer, job-aligned. The outcomes out of these programs are strong, sort of 60-70% plus going into jobs that are $60K a year or more.

Ryan Craig: A lot of these bootcamps started in coding, but we see them across a range of areas, medical devices, for example, sales, and the like. You have those tuition-pay bootcamps. Then, you have what we call these income-share programs where they're not charging you tuition, but these programs have skin in the game. They're going to take a percentage of your income for a defined period of time once you graduate. Typically, no more than 15 or 20% probably for no more than three or four years. Those programs are gaining ground rapidly.

Ryan Craig: Many of those programs are longer. They can be 12 months perhaps. These income-share programs, these are what I was referring to earlier, these college MVP, minimum viable product programs where they're really trying to replicate as much of the college experience while making sure that ... They start from the technology 'last mile' training and then work backwards and make sure that these students who are coming from high schools do have the requisite skills. Some of the programs I profile in the book are Holberton School, the Make School. These are programs, again, preparing students for great first jobs in technology working in IT.

Ryan Craig: The third area, and I think actually the most promising, is these employer-pay models. These are models where it's entirely free to the student because the employer's going to pay on the backend. There are really two types of them. One is what we call a staffing-model where, in fact, you're hired from day one. Even before you start the training you're hired and paid. You paid an apprentice wage for the duration of this 'last mile' training. In return, you commit to work for that company for a period of time. That company's going to recoup its investment in your training by staffing you out to clients over the typically two-year time frame.

Ryan Craig: In that two-year time frame, they'll recoup their investment, but the great news for you is you're launched on a pathway where 90% of the time or more you're hired by that client at the end of that two-year period. So, it's a great first job and then your great second job as you launch into that client. We're seeing those models up in technology and in healthcare. Very exciting. That's the staffing model.

Ryan Craig: Then, you have the apprenticeship model and lots of people have opinions on apprenticeship programs. We suggest that there's a new model for apprenticeship that's emerging here in the U.S. We call it the outsource apprenticeship. It's like I was referring to, the staffing, where you're working for a service provider. Call it a digital marketing or a cybersecurity company or software development company that has clients and they will hire you, they will train you, and then you'll do project work for clients. After you've billed a certain number of hours, the client is allowed to and expected to hire you. And, they do and they love that.

Ryan Craig: The reason we like these employer-pay models is that if you think about what's sort of holding us back in terms of the skill's gap in America, there are two sets of frictions that we have. On the candidate or student side, we have these education frictions, which is why someone doesn't just go and get the skills that get them a great job. Well, it's the cost of getting the skills, the time involved, and that there's the uncertainty of an outcome.

Ryan Craig: Each of these 'last mile' training models that I was describing, the bootcamp models, the income-share model, they're all addressing that friction. The income-share model does it better than the tuition model in that it's essentially removing the financial risk for the student. But, neither of those models goes as far as the employer-pay model in addressing the other friction, which is what we call hiring friction, which is why employers are less likely today than they were 10, 20 years ago to hire entry-level employees with no relevant experience. The risk of a bad hire, the risk of higher churn, all of that.

Ryan Craig: The reason these employer-pay models are great is they allow employers to try before they buy. So, employers aren't being asked to make a hiring decision of someone who has no experience. These employees whether in a staffing-model or an outsourced apprenticeship model are essentially demonstrating their ability to do the job to the employer before the employer's being asked to make the hiring decision. That's great. That essentially removed the hiring frictions.

Ryan Craig: We see these employer-pay models as the scalable models here where we expect millions in five to 10 years to be opting away from a four-year college into these staffing and apprenticeship models as a first step on the career ladder. Doesn't mean that-

Glenn Yeffeth: Makes so much sense. In BenBella, over the years, we've had these year-long paid internships that in publishing often they're unpaid, but I never liked that. So, we do paid internships for a year. People get medical coverage and all that, but it's relatively low cost for us, but then you really see the people you want to keep and who are going to be long-term players and you can make that commitment to them knowing them. I've seen that model and it-

Ryan Craig: Yeah, I would say you're an enlightened employer because few employers are actually willing to make that investment themselves and organizing those types of programs. So, where we see growth here is in these intermediaries who absorb the frictions and take on the risk and where employers we know are willing to pay for the reduction of that risk. So, especially imagine if you had a service provider who's running that internships or apprenticeship program for you where it's entirely turnkey and all you had to do is just outsource the work to them. The work would get done and you'd be able to evaluate the candidates. You'd have a funnel of new talent every year into the organization. That would be great. That's how we see this working.

Ryan Craig: Fundamentally, we believe that over a decade from now, many, many, many young people are likely to start their career through these intermediaries that goes directly to the end employers if you will. American employers are famous for outsourcing everything they can and this represents the outsourcing of entry-level hiring. Many people in higher education here we talk about all this hiring nonsense and say, "Well, that's not our business." The reality is 20, 30 years ago maybe it wasn't, but today, with their customers, their students so focused on a good first job, I'd say they better get familiar with how entry-level hiring is working or not working today or they might not be in business for very long.

Glenn Yeffeth: You talk a little bit about the model of innovators dilemma, which is the process by which one, an industry gets, over time, usurped by new technology or new innovators. Do you feel that when you look at these, let's say the second-tier colleges and below, if you were put in charge of one of these, do you feel like you could turn it around or do you feel like the writing's on the wall and a lot of these colleges just need to go out of business?

Ryan Craig: Yeah. Look, I think there are strategies that I try to outline in the book because I care about colleges and we should all care about them. At a minimum, even if you don't care about the education component, there are thousands of towns and cities in the country who depend on them. These institutions are economic engines for these communities and it would be devastating. We've seen the impact what happens when [inaudible 00:25:35] smaller community, a college goes out of business. It's imperative they find their way.

Ryan Craig: Look, there are models if you're not a selective institution ... For example, Western Governors University. It's a public university that offers online degree programs for something like $6,000. Not only that, they're competency-based. You can go as quickly as you want to. Literally, in two years, if you are motivated, you can probably complete a bachelor's degree. That's probably the right price point, 12,000, certainly under 20. There are many at Governor's who try to get it under 10, $10,000 a year where, yes, if you can get a bachelor's degree for that price, it is worth it. I don't care whether it's a selective or a non-selective university.

Ryan Craig: That's very hard. You don't see too many schools there. There's another school that I reference in the book called Barclay College, which is a work college that manages to keep total undergraduate debt for a student under $10,000 by essentially making sure that every undergraduate is working full-time while there, in many cases for the college itself while they're in school. There are other work colleges around the country that have a similar model.

Ryan Craig: That may be too big of a transition. What I do think that is within the reach of virtually every university is this, which is as the economy has digitized, as technology has become critical for landing that first good job, it's likely that many of these less selective universities become disintermediated, if you will, by some of these new intermediaries that are much more of an employer-centered market and able to keep up with the technology that employers are actually looking for.

Ryan Craig: So, don't try to compete with those intermediaries. I don't think too many colleges and universities will be successful. They generally have a pretty terrible interface with employers in the labor market. It's called career services and it's basically broken across higher education with some exceptions. Where they can compete, I believe, is recognizing that for nearly everyone who lands a good first job through one of these faster and cheaper alternatives, they're absolutely going to require additional cognitive skill development.

Ryan Craig: Let's say you get that Salesforce training, you get that entry-level sales job, you're not equipped to become a sales manager or a leader at the organization let alone make a lateral move unless you have additional, post-secondary education. Just to be clear, we are not arguing in any way for a reduction, the aggregate at the capital level of post-secondary education. That would suicide in our global knowledge economy.

Ryan Craig: What we are saying is that there needs to be a radical re-staging in how that post-secondary education is consumed or removed from an all-you-can-eat in one sitting model which is what we have now to truly a lifelong learning approach where you do maybe six to 12 months to your first job and then you work for a couple of years and then you go back and maybe do a three, six, 12 month secondary pathway. Those secondary, tertiary pathways are really going to be focused on building up those cognitive skills, those executive function skills, those managerial capabilities, really the same sorts of cognitive skill development that the undergraduate, liberal arts curriculum delivers today.

Ryan Craig: But, I think it's going to happen after. I think will happen after. I think what colleges and universities, the opportunity that perhaps less selective colleges and universities have is to innovate in the development of those secondary, tertiary pathways, which is essentially, if you will ... Think of it like an unbundled master's degree but focused on a specific industry and building cognitive skill development within the context of that industry.

Glenn Yeffeth: No, that makes so much sense. I was one of maybe the last people to go to the University of Chicago Business School right out of college. They stopped doing that for what I think is very good reasons 'cause I noticed going there that people who worked for two, three, five years, they got more out of the program. It wasn't as theoretical to them. I do think that the logic of not having it all at once but over the course of your career makes so much sense.

Ryan Craig: Yeah, none of this would be happening if we didn't have the unspoken background here that we haven't talked about, but I talk about it in the early chapters of the book, is the college affordability crisis. If the average college graduate weren't coming out with $40,000 in student loan debt, none of this would be happening. It's the combination of these crises or affordability and employability that is propelling this revolution, this faster and cheaper revolution where you'll see millions of students in five years opting for these alternatives and then needing additional post-secondary education in order to fulfill your career goals.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now, Ryan, tell us a little bit about University Ventures and the way you look at the world as investors.

Ryan Craig: Yeah, sure. We started life seven years ago investing in a wide range of business that assisted non-traditional colleges. For example, helping them launch online programs. It became clear to us that the scope, this is in the wake of the Great Recession, the scope of this employability crisis really began to hammer on as we began looking at the data and talking to universities and employers and students, graduates. We really began to shift towards this education-employment focus where today, that is primarily what we do. We're rapidly investing in these new pathways that can be bootcamps or income-share, or, more likely today, these employer-pay models that we think have the potential to scale.

Ryan Craig: One of the things that as people think about the skill's gap and why we have nearly seven million unfilled jobs, almost 50% underemployment for college grads and nearly seven million unfilled jobs of which maybe 500 are high, middle-skill jobs that college grads would love to get. How do you square that circle? Our view, what we've learned from talking with employers is that any prescription here that starts with employers should do this or employers must do this, is bound to fail. Employers will only do what's in their immediate interest with a handful of exceptions.

Ryan Craig: There are far-sighted, benevolent employers but many of them are companies that need to make their quarterly results and they're going to do only what's in their immediate interest. We don't see employers somehow engaging in benevolent behavior at scale to close this gap. The key to closing it is actually the employer connection. The employers want to do it themselves but intermediaries that have strong connections with these employers already can do so. That's where these staffing and outsource apprenticeship models come in. These are companies that today have strong relationships with hundreds or thousands of employers.

Ryan Craig: In the case of staffing companies at least have their finger on the pulse of the talent needs of these employers. The companies are perfectly positioned to launch and grow scaled-pathways where they can take thousands of young people, as well as older workers who require re-skilling, each year put them through 'last mile' training and, in a friction-free way for both the candidate and the employer, place them into good first jobs in growing sectors of the economy.

Ryan Craig: One thing I want to add about the re-skilling or up-skilling point is that it is absurd in this country we determined that the only pathway for an older worker to a good job in a growing sector of the economy lies or runs through a college classroom, typically 120 credits to do that. Many of these workers are workers who were unsuccessful in that environment to begin with and the level of attrition you see when you push these workers back to college is extraordinarily high. That cannot be the only answer. We need to come up with new, real work-type, immersive training environments that is faster and that is more effective for these workers. That's what these models are in addition to being great pathways for younger Americans.

Glenn Yeffeth: How supportive are government programs to these models? Obviously, for a traditional college, there's all kind of government support, not as much as there used to be, but still a lot more than ... There's still a lot that still exists. Does the government help these maybe more productive or efficient programs?

Ryan Craig: Not yet. We're not seeing that yet. Certainly, with income-share models, there's some proposals on the federal level to try and regulate these income-share agreements and make them more widespread. That would be helpful, but that form of financing is growing regardless of government involvement there.

Ryan Craig: On the apprenticeship side, President Trump has a whole task force focused on apprenticeships. They're focused on some of the right things while trying to make a tighter connection between registration or certification or apprenticeships and actual funding of the cost of the training in these apprenticeship models. I would say that on the whole, what the government does or doesn't do is not going to change the trajectory. Not here. The trajectory has been set as a function of these crises of affordability and employability and colleges and universities' inability to adjust to employer needs.

Ryan Craig: These intermediaries, these new models are emerging and will continue to grow in popularity whether or not they're [inaudible 00:35:28] ... Certainly on the employer-pay side, largely speaking, there's no ... We don't need government funding in order to make those work. Where I think we will need government funding and support is that these models, one could argue that today they're working very well [inaudible 00:35:43] the employer-pay models. Because when you go to market and offer a value proposition to the students that says guaranteed job at not cost, guaranteed dream job at no cost, you get between 10 and 100 applicants for every open position. These new providers, these new pathways are being quite selective. Some of them are more selective than Stanford.

Ryan Craig: This selectivity is helping to drive the outcomes for employers because you're taking the candidates, the students with the highest cognitive skill sets. At some point, whether it's 30% selectivity or 50% selectivity, the model begins to break down. The talent is not what employers are looking for. At that point then, we have a more fundamental education issue, which is primarily driven by the underperformance of a K12 system writ large. Our point is that thinking about K12 school reform as many people so, that reform discussion has been driven entirely today by the view that we're preparing students for one outcome which is four-year college.

Ryan Craig: I was at a charter school event on Monday night, all they do is say, "We prepare 75% of our graduates go on and enroll at a four-year college," and that's the metric that they measure themselves by. Of course, only a fraction of those who enroll actually [inaudible 00:37:09], which is a huge problem and they're beginning to recognize that. The point is that as these new alternative pathways emerge, it's going to completely change how we think about school reform. No longer is there just simply one model preparing students for one outcome. There could be a dozen in a given city.

Glenn Yeffeth: I found the book overall to be so encouraging because there's this clear mismatch ... Colleges have become blissfully indifferent to the career prospects of their graduates. We live in a world where people constantly no longer have a career at one company. They're constantly turning over so no one has an incentive to train people, but the market is emerging with some solutions that your book really points out and explains very well. I found the book overall, even though you talk about some of the challenges of colleges, to be very encouraging, that these solutions are maybe in infancy but they're coming.

Ryan Craig: Well, thank you for saying that. I do want to point out though that we recognize that there's quite a few things that will be lost here. Now, keep in mind that the college experience certainly that many of the people listening to this podcast will have experienced will be from a selective. It's interesting that people who are most interested in the conversation of the future of college are people who've attended selective colleges who are non-representative of the college-going population. If you've attended a commuter, non-selective school and so forth that's really more representative of the conversation.

Ryan Craig: Even many of those people in college, they did have some semblance of campus life. As I say in the book, the antics that go on in the college environment where you have a concentrated population of young people experimenting and growing up. I'm afraid those elements, we'll need to find a way to replace those in some way. I don't think that we're going to be worse off in terms of social skill. I think that social skill development in a work environment is more accelerated than in a somewhat infantilized college campus environment in many ways. But, it's that and discovery and serendipity.

Ryan Craig: I do make a point in the book that I think discovery will need to move backwards into the high school level. There will need to be more career discovery resource because if you graduate from high school and you're thinking about college but you're also looking at one of six different faster and cheaper pathways in New York City that could lead you to a great first job in technology or healthcare or energy, whatever it might be, then you're going to need to be informed on technology and healthcare and energy and that's going to need to happen at the high school level. There's no question things will be lost that we currently get. I think it's a good tradeoff relative to the outcomes we're seeing today in terms of student debt and employability. It's primarily an economic [inaudible 00:40:00].

Ryan Craig: As I say in the book, I believe in triage. My wife is a television writer, used to write for ER. On that show, the patient is waiting out on the table. You do triage. You focus on the thing that's first going to save the patient's life and then you worry about the broken arm or the gash or whatever the patient has. I feel like the economic situation of Millennials, they are, by any metric, way behind prior generations in terms of wealth, in terms of income, in terms of home ownership, in terms of new business creation, in terms of living in their parent's basements.

Ryan Craig: It's bad news for this generation and, again, it's a function of these twin crises of affordability and employability and we need to solve that first. We need to address the patient bleeding on the table, allow our young people to get their foot on the first rung of a career ladder with no debt and with some economic security before asking them to think about investing tens of thousands of dollars in their education.

Glenn Yeffeth: Absolutely. One of the things in this book ... The book is interwoven with little vignettes of your life at Yale, which make college sound actually very appealing, but I went to a school that I had a great experience and it's easy to get nostalgic about people that might lose that. But, you're right. There are bigger issues that need to be triaged including the many, many students who graduate with a lot of debt and no degree that you talk about in the book which is truly tragic.

Ryan Craig: Yeah. That's a nightmare scenario as former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, said. Over 40% of students who wanted to take a bachelor's degree fail to complete one and that is a function of the fact that it takes a minimum of four years, typically five or six and if you don't come from a privileged background where you have this family support and network to get you through the bad times, I guarantee you, in a four to six year period, life is going to give you lots of reasons not to continue with that program. As we say, life gets in the way and life is going to get in the way.

Ryan Craig: That's a big bet. If you come from a privileged background and you have that support network and you have the resources and it's seemed affordable for you ... Again, I said at the beginning, no one's a bigger cheerleader for selective universities than I am. Go for it. You're going thank your ... I met my wife at Yale and my life would not have been close to the same without that. So, I'm incredibly privileged to have done that and I don't want to take that away from anyone.

Ryan Craig: Again, that experience is not representative. A degree is not a degree is a degree. A college is not a college is a college. There are different variations and gradations of value and unfortunately, it's not reflected currently in either the affordability or employment outcomes that we're seeing for college and grads. All that signals a pretty big change coming.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. Let's shift the conversation a little bit to why you decided to write this book. Obviously, you're a man with a lot on his plate, why did you do it?

Ryan Craig: Yeah. I feel like I have the best job in the world because I get to ... I sit at the intersection of all of these things. It's higher education, it's the private sector, it's policy, it's government. I have a bird's eye view on what's happening. Literally, it just came to me one day that this is a revolution. What you're seeing, here are all the pieces, and it came to me in two words, faster and cheaper.

Ryan Craig: Virtually every other part of the economy has gotten faster and cheaper as a result of technology. That hasn't happened in higher education. Why hasn't it happened yet and what will and how? This documents how the faster and cheaper revolution is upon us and will accelerate and will ultimately result in a pretty massive change to what is today a $500,000,000,000 industry, higher education, that serves 20,000,000 customers, students a year and employs 4,000,000 Americans and supports probably two or 3X that in terms of ancillary jobs. So, it's a big part of the economy and it's going to change pretty dramatically, more dramatically over the next 10 years than it has over hundreds of years.

Ryan Craig: To be able to be a witness to history and document that and share that and, frankly, help colleges and universities adjust because no one should be caught unaware. As these new alternative pathways emerge and students begin voting with their feet, I would hate for a college president ... Three years from now, it's like, "Well, what's happening?" They should be aware of what's happening and there are things that they can do to begin to adjust and at least reduce the impact of this change.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now, Ryan, do you have any tips for maybe other professionals who decided to write a book? Do you have a process that allowed you ... It's obviously a big undertaking.

Ryan Craig: Oh, wow. Well, I'm certainly helped by the fact that I write regularly. So, I blog and actually have a column on Forbes online where I have an outlet for sharing our thinking on higher education. I've been doing that for about five, six years. I did have a prior book that came out and I would say that that prior book was more of a mishmash assemblage of that writing different observations, but this one was really, I think from the beginning, a very coherent argument for what's changing and why it's changing and what we can do about it.

Ryan Craig: I did have the benefit of a number of core pieces on certain different elements here that I was able to build around, but this was a startup from start to finish and it took a good deal of time. Having completed it, I'm very pleased with it and look forward to the reaction.

Glenn Yeffeth: You've managed to do something that's really unusual which is to paint a big picture look at our society and what's going wrong and what's going right, but at the same time, made it a very useful and practical book for parents who are thinking about sending their kids to college, to high school counselors, to anyone who's dealing with the situation. It's not a theoretical book. It's very practical.

Ryan Craig: Well, thank you. Thank you. I hope we accomplished that. We started from high-level, what the macroeconomic challenges are and then we dive deep into ... I think we have 30 profiles of students who've pursued these faster and cheaper pathways and come out the other end and you can learn from their experience. Many of them didn't have a very positive experience in the traditional, post-secondary education system.

Ryan Craig: Then, we have at the end this directory that my colleagues at the University Ventures helped put together of these 250 programs. So, it really is a practical guide, but it's a practical answer to a very important and high-level problem.

Glenn Yeffeth: Absolutely. Just to speak personally, my daughter is actually majoring in computer science right now at a liberal arts college and she was complaining to me that the curriculum is ... She wants to program and the curriculum was so theoretical. I was like, "I'm sure that's not quite true." Reading your book I was like, "Oh, no. I guess it is true."

Ryan Craig: It is true. Unfortunately, faculty, they've been teaching for any number of years. They're so far removed from what's actually being deployed in industry and how applications are deployed. I can't tell you how many students we've spoken to were CS majors or minors who came out and were never exposed to frameworks or struts, which is how applications are developed today. They're, again, with the view that universities are preparing students for their fifth job, not their first job.

Ryan Craig: They're preparing them to learn new languages. There's no question. If you come out as a CS major learning .NET or learning Java, it's a lot easier than if you hadn't been a CS major. There's no question. But, are you learning on day one to be productive for a given employer? No. As a result, not only won't you be hired, you probably won't even be seen by that hiring manager as part of the process. I can't tell you how many people we've spoken to who had that experience.

Ryan Craig: That's why these 'last mile' training programs like Revature, which I talk about in the book, are so important. Because they take you from CS majors, they take STEM majors, they take non-STEM majors and they run them through this 'last mile' training. Out of that 12-week program, on day one, they are specifically prepared for that employer on that technology. Employers love that.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. Well, Ryan, anything else that I should have asked you and didn't or that you want to add?

Ryan Craig: I will say, maybe reiterate again, I hope that readers of the book can take away ... If they take away one thing it's that my pet peeve in the news, that the media continues to refer to anything less than college, anything less than four-year degree as vocational or blue-collar. There so many articles this year after [inaudible 00:48:52] the book, in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times and so forth where students pursuing alternatives to college and they're pursuing these alternatives to become welders or electricians and that's not the case.

Ryan Craig: These alternatives are not predestining your child to a blue-collar career. These are actually preparing your child for the entry-level jobs that will get your child on a career track in technology and healthcare and energy and the industries of the future. Just because it's not a four-year degree, just because it's not the same degree you received doesn't mean your child's prospects are limited in any material way.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wonderful. Well said. Well, Ryan, it's been a pleasure working with you on this book and I'm looking forward to the exciting part going forward of getting the word out about the book of which this is a hopefully a little part. So, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Ryan Craig: Glenn, it was super fun. Thanks for chatting.

Glenn Yeffeth: Take care.

Ryan Craig: Thanks.

Glenn Yeffeth: Thank you for listening to the Building Books Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you happen to listen to it or share it on social media. If you're an author who wants to submit a proposal or pitch to BenBella books, please go to benbellabooks.com, click on the 'for prospective authors' button, and I'll lead you through a little form that makes it real easy to submit to us. Thank you.