Week in Edtech 5/21/2025: Duolingo CEO Sparks Debate, Google I/O’s AI Tools, OpenAI’s Codex Launch, and More! Feat. Senan Khawaja of Kollegio and Rebecca Taber Staehelin & Connor Diemand-Yauman of Merit America

Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the latest developments in education technology, from AI breakthroughs to new VC investments and edtech reports.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:02:10] Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn says AI is more scalable than teachers, sparking debate on the future of educators
[00:10:45] Google I/O 2025 introduces Gemini 2.5, Project Astra, and real-time AI translation with broad implications for edtech
[00:18:30] OpenAI launches Codex, a cloud-based AI assistant transforming coding education and developer workflows

Plus, special guests:

[00:33:40] Senan Khawaja, Co-founder & CEO at Kollegio, on using AI to reimagine and personalize the college admissions process

[00:51:04] Rebecca Taber Staehelin & Connor Diemand-Yauman, Co-Founders & Co-CEOs of Merit America on bridging the skills gap with affordable tech career pathways

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🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:

This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars—but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, then helps you turn them into personalized outreach—fast. Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That’s how top edtech teams stay ahead.

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

Chapters

• 2:41 Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn says AI is more scalable than teachers, sparking debate on the future of educators
• 11:16 Google I/O 2025 introduces Gemini 2.5, Project Astra, and real-time AI translation with broad implications for edtech
• 19:24 OpenAI launches Codex, a cloud-based AI assistant transforming coding education and developer workflows
• 34:34 Senan Khawaja, Co-founder & CEO at Kollegio, on using AI to reimagine and personalize the college admissions process
• 51:58 Rebecca Taber Staehelin & Connor Diemand-Yauman, Co-Founders & Co-CEOs of Merit America on bridging the skills gap with affordable tech career pathways

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: They're talking about things that may come to pass in five or 10 years as if this is eminent. This is happening now and I worry that we're in a spot where we're not only eroding trust in public institutions and schools, but we're also, I. Setting up the technology to be a failure or a disappointment as well.

So I think you mentioned before, this is something that no Ed tech founder would ever say publicly. I think everyone's trying to walk this dance. I. At the same time, our systems need time to change and evolve, and the technology's moving so quickly that it's hard to imagine our schools and school systems being able to keep up with this pace.

[00:00:51] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it 

[00:01:04] Ben Kornell: all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events.

And back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

Hello, EdTech insider listeners. It's another week of the week in EdTech, and here to bring all of the EdTech, AI Tech, tech Ed, ed news. I've got my friend, partner, and co-host Alex Arlan. Alex, what a week it has been in ed Tech. Welcome to the 

[00:01:49] Alex Sarlin: pod. Yeah, it's a big week for tech Tech. It's always amazing things happening in education in ed tech.

I'm happy to be here with you, Ben. Let's jump right into it. I. Let's do it. 

[00:01:59] Ben Kornell: In terms of events, we don't have much going on because we're wrapping the end of the year, but we had over 250 people out at our happy hour last Thursday. Special shout out to Reach Capital for sponsoring that happy hour, and I'm super grateful that Tony from Reach and Haley from Al Ventures have made a commitment for the 25 26 school year.

To be hosting these happy hours in the Bay Area coming up. So thank you so much Haley and Tony, how about on the pod? What do we have? 

[00:02:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, on the pod we have Justin Wenig is the CEO of a company called Starbridge ai. That's doing some really interesting work around sort of helping EdTech companies understand what's going on on the ground in districts and how they can use that information to help breakthrough and sell and get ahead of the RFPs.

We talked to David Blaker from jotted. That was a super interesting conversation. And today on our weekend ed tech pod, we have Rebecca Taper. I don't know her married name yet, but Rebecca Taper and Connor Daymond Yeoman from Merit America. And we talked to Sunan from gio, which is a really hot, new, exciting college admissions ai.

Platform that's doing really interesting work and just got a large round. So you'll hear that at the end of this podcast. We also do have an online event. It's for June 13th and it's a co-design in ed tech webinar, all about co-design. We have the Joan Ganz Cooney Foundation there. We are gonna have people from Play Lab.

We're gonna have folks from UX and Ed Tech, which is an amazing working group, all about this. It's gonna be a really good event, so check it out on the newsletter and sign up when you can. Co-design is a very hot topic in EdTech. It's how you design with your end users, educators, often students in the loop the whole way.

So what stood out to you this week in terms of the big stories in EdTech? 

[00:03:47] Ben Kornell: I mean, overall, I think there's. EdTech news, but there's mainstream news, and the mainstream news in the EdTech news is quite intersecting. It is, and I know we're gonna talk a little bit about the Google IO announcement. There's so much happening in the AI space that is really connected with use cases in education, but we've also had a couple of news stories.

The biggest one that's popping right now is Luis Fanon, our favorite EdTech, CEO of a publicly traded company continues to crush it at Duolingo, but on a recent podcast, he talked about the future of teaching and the future of education. Basically making the claim that AI and computers should be able to teach basically anything a kid wants to learn in the future.

And that the role of the teacher really, he imagines it shifting to childcare. And the role of technology is really shifting into the instructional. Component. So it is a very attention grabbing headline when it's like Louis Augh says that teachers aren't needed to teach anymore. I encourage people to actually listen to the podcast.

We'll include it in the notes. It's much more nuanced than that, but I think it connects to a series of media moments, including the Esra Klein podcast, which we covered last week, that is really mainstreaming and normalizing this idea that a. Our current education system is not serving kids. And we even covered the bellwether data from, I don't know, two months ago, where it was clear across all income levels, across all ethnic backgrounds.

Parents don't believe that schools are teaching their kids the right skills for the future. And then we have second, the role of the teacher needs to dramatically change. And this is like really permeating the zeitgeist, not just from a conservative angle, which has been coming at it from a culture warrior standpoint, but now we're having these liberal leaders like Ezra Klein really questioning like.

Why do we teach the way we teach? Why is our system set up this way? And the drumbeat of data is just showing us that no matter what we're doing in terms of interventions, we're not really moving the needle, especially those furthest from opportunity. And then third, we have these new developments in AI that continue to get these audacious claims that in the future teachers won't be teaching.

They'll be childcare channeling our good friend Dan Meyer. I think there's a lot of caution to throw in the mixer around a, all the value that teachers provide in terms of. Not only pedagogic and instructional delivery, but also relational and engagement and so on. But the AI itself is just not ready yet.

But I do think that we're experiencing a societal shift in norms around K 12 education and what that might look like. And the other trend that I'm seeing at the same time is also parents regressing from screen time. Just basically feeling like time in front of a computer is not effective for my child, or it's leading to all these negative behaviors.

And so the multimodal nature of the AI also seems to be kind of. Rising to a moment where now voice enabled or audio or visual or non, like super low tech AI enabled is in ascendancy. And so I just, I think having come from A-S-U-G-S-V where we saw, okay, those with channel, those with distribution advantage are adding AI integrated natively into their tools.

Now, the startups that are native born ai, there's some consolidation around a few of them. I think now we're starting to actually have systemic discussions around are we really just solving things on the margin and do we need a fundamental rethink of how school is designed and delivered? That's where we're headed.

I'm really excited about that kind of conversation. I'm also very cautious around what tech can and can't do and what people can and can't do, and so I think we're in a moment where. The national dialogue is kind of unifying around a burning platform where we need to move to a new model of school. 

[00:08:26] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's very well put.

I mean, a couple of ideas that come up for me when I think about this complex interplay between the education system and the perception of the education system, especially K 12, but that higher ed has similar issues, the tech. World and the idea that this confidence of the tech soothsayers of all kinds, and then the concern around ed tech and the concern around the future of what education and teachers look like.

It is a complicated topic with a lot of nuance in it. But some of the things that I think are worth thinking about is a lot of people who listen to this podcast are EdTech founders or their district leaders. Any EdTech founder who sells to schools and works with schools and works with districts is very, very careful whenever they get anywhere near the topic of will AI replace teachers?

And we've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of such AI education founders and they're all very thoughtful, both because of the politics of it and often because they also believe it that the tech has a very specific role and it doesn't threaten the core education system. And people talk about it amplifying teachers, supporting teachers, getting rid of the administrative load of teaching, which is significant, but they never say.

It will replace teachers and they certainly never say the kind of thing that we saw Luis Von say in this podcast, which is really Impolitic in the ed tech world. And Luis Von is a fascinating guy, right? I mean, he's an incredible background. He's a computer scientist. He was an AI guy before. It was cool.

He invented the CAPS system. He's a really, really sophisticated. Computer scientist, and I think in computer science circles right now, in tech circles, anything that AI touches, you have to ask these questions very bluntly. Will AI replace humanity in this? What role will AI play? If Luis Fanon worked at a company or was a CEO of a company that sold directly to schools, which Duolingo really is not, in most ways, in almost any way, he would never have said any of these things.

He would've had a different media message. He would've been careful. And yes, there is more nuance, I'm sure in the podcast. I haven't actually listened to it myself, but the quotes that are pulled out of here are pretty intense. And these are the kinds of things that, this is exactly what. Education and ed tech CEOs avoid saying, I mean, quote unquote, by the way, that doesn't mean the teachers are gonna go away.

You still need people to take care of the students. I also don't think schools are gonna go away because you still need childcare. That's a pretty demeaning view of educators, I mean, to say the least. And I do think that some of the pushback and the sort of inflammatory nature of this should be called out.

And again, if at least Van on was the head of Magic school, this would be a very different story. The Israel Klein piece is really interesting as well, because personally I think the pandemic was a real turning point for the perception of K 12. It had a long while of sort of seeming a little less in step with the times, a little less able to keep up with tech, a little less relevant to modern skills or ROI.

Computer science degrees have been overbooked for many years and they continue to be, but K 12 has always had this, like you've said, Ben had this sort of political divide to it. There's been a lot of champions of it. A lot of people who, you know, were very supportive of the system and would always fight against vouchers or school choice programs on the basis that the public school system is a prize jewel of America and we don't want to defund it.

And I agree. I think that during the pandemic, when the sort of wheels came off the bus, in some ways, and frankly this is Ed Tech's fault as well, and we said this at the time, this is not a pure education problem. It's an education and EdTech issue. I think when. Things changed that radically, and parents got this very deep view into what was happening at the schools.

They had a little bit of a continuation of the backlash to the common core, and they basically said, I don't like what's happening in these schools. When I sit in on these classes, when I look over my kids' shoulder and they're doing their online lessons, I don't get it. It doesn't seem like it's changed enough.

It doesn't seem like it's up to date. It doesn't seem like it is relevant or meaningful. And then when you compare the. Glacial pace at which schools often change to the incredibly lightening pace at which we're seeing our society change. It's becoming hard to, with a straight face, maintain that our school system is working.

The American school system is just doing what it should do. And of course, in ed tech circles, we've said this for many years, this has been almost the parody of EdTech founders, is that you always have your slide on the deck that says the education system is broken. We've said that forever, but I feel like that message is now, like you say, it's sort of almost becoming a default accepted piece.

There was an interesting article this week about how Blue states have spent all this time fighting against school choice, but it may be a little bit lost this fight because at this point it's sort of the way things are moving and there's just very few defenders left of the status quo, let's put it that way.

Even Randy Weingarten had a big editorial in the Times the other day about how we had to rethink the college for all movement and start thinking about more of a skills-based thing, and it's like. Great. But it still feels a little bit like whistling past the, I think people realize that the size of the change that's needed to our education system is a lot bigger in scale than we previously thought, which is I think a different way of saying what you're saying as well.

And it seems to be more accepted now. And frankly I think it's a great opportunity for all of us in ed Tech. Of course. It's also a little scary for a lot of people. I think it's scary for educators and rightfully scary for educators. If you don't know what kind of changes are coming down and there may be more mandates or more pushback against your work or even status issues.

It might affect your pay, it might affect your status. You don't know what's gonna happen. But I think for our society, I'm positive that there is a sort of wake up that we can't just say, Hey, school is school. We trust it. It works the way it's supposed to work. People come out of it and they know what they're doing and teachers know what they're doing.

Schools know what they're doing and we don't have to worry about it. Like we do have to worry about it. And I think we've had to for a while, and now it feels like that's common sense, commonly accepted. 

[00:14:32] Ben Kornell: Yeah. One of the things that I'm concerned about is we've got this disconnect between where we are today and some future state, and so we have a lot of these visionary figures talking about they're mixing present tense and future tense.

They're talking about things that may come to pass in five or 10 years as if this is eminent. This is happening now. I worry that we're in a spot where we're not only eroding trust in public institutions and schools, but we're also setting up the technology to be a failure or a disappointment as well.

Mm-hmm. So I think you mentioned before, this is something that no Ed tech founder would ever say publicly. I think everyone's trying to walk this dance. At the same time. Our systems need time to change and evolve, and the technology's moving so quickly that it's hard to imagine our schools and school systems being able to keep up with this pace.

On that note, I also feel like you and I are just trying to keep up with the pace. There's this drumbeat of new AI launches, including Google io. So maybe we can talk a little bit about. What's going on in the AI space as we try to triangulate where that intersects with education? 

[00:15:52] Alex Sarlin: Sure. So I mean, we had the privilege at the end of last year of going to the Google campus and being able to sit down and interview the Google Learning leads, which was truly one of the highlights of my life.

I really mean that. I think it was. Fascinating beyond belief, and I think Google has been thinking about education and EdTech in some really interesting ways. They've developed this learn LM model that's supposed to be pedagogically advanced. They've done the Google Notebook, LM model, their audio overviews, which could turn anything into podcasts.

They've done all sorts of things to try to bake in learning into some of their tools. They have Google Learn about the Google IO conference is obviously their main conference and the things that they're announcing are their main consumer and enterprise products. It's not education specific at all. So I think what we have to do here better or what I'd like to do is take some of the things that they announced and discuss a little bit about what their ramifications and implications might be for the EdTech world.

So ready? Wanna do a little bit of like lightning round on this. Let's do it. So they announced that Google Meet is now going to have instant real time translation between languages, so that if you're talking to somebody and not only translation, translating the tone as well and the voice. So if you're talking to somebody who is speaking Japanese or Swahili, you can hear each other in your native language that feels straight out of Douglas Adams or science fiction.

What do you think that means for Ed tech? What do you think? What's your take? The first thing I thought of was the thing that we've been saying on and off on this podcast for a while, which is that when you break down language barriers, it means that anybody can be a teacher and anybody can be a learner.

And I always immediately go to South Korea. I think of the smartest kids in the World book about how in South Korea there's this enormous. Tutoring infrastructure almost. You know, many, many kids have tutors. There are these superstar tutors make a ton of money. They're, they're famous. And I'm like, well that has never gotten that side of Korea.

'cause all of those people teach in Korea. That doesn't have to be true anymore. You know, the best math tutor or science tutor or the best anything tutor in Korea can now become a global star. That's really interesting to me. Not only through YouTube and translated video. They can be a global star at in real time.

They could be teaching a lesson and everybody listening to it can hear it in their native language. It also, obviously outside of the, the superstars, it just creates the potential for a huge ecosystem of tutors. We just talked to, of course Dojo, CEO, Sam Chowdry last week, and he talked about the Class Dojo's tutoring system that they have.

There's no language barrier that really opens up the opportunities for what online tutoring could look like. What do you think? 

[00:18:30] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, ultimately we're going to be living in a more globalized world and so this. Creates more connectivity, uh, across the world. And while I think there's like a EdTech use case for tutoring, there's really an opportunity for more globalized education writ large.

Yeah, imagine basically any online program. Imagine Coursera, imagine you know, any of our friends at A SU or Southern New Hampshire or Western Governors. In the past, you would spend years and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars translating, and you pretty much would only go with Spanish, Chinese, and English because of the population sizes.

So I think that's a huge opportunity. I think there's a downside in that there's a lot of assumption that translation still leads to localization. And one of the things I've seen a lot in EdTech is like, you pay somebody to translate your thing and it just doesn't, that's land in the other culture. And so I worry that this might come across as this instantaneous shortcut when there's actually quite a bit of room to go.

But I mean, ultimately it's an exciting moment. And you know, Andrew Ang had shared some videos of this early on. Ethan Molik had some videos. The fact that this is basically universally available now is mind blowing. How fast. 

[00:20:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's fair. I think the localization piece is important and there will definitely have to be some thinking there.

It it, it's not that language solves all issues, but there is a sort of Tower of Babel quality to this kind of, or Babelfish, right. Equality to this kind of innovation. Feels like it's gonna have all of these add-on effects that we haven't even really thought of yet. It just opens up a very different, I mean, think of all all the VIP kids and all of the English language tutoring that's happened in China before they shut everything down.

It's like if suddenly you can translate anything in real time as you're talking into any language, whatever language you're speaking, it just changes how language learning works. It changes how online tutoring works. It changes how online conferences work. It might change how hiring works, but you don't have to have a language requirement for hiring.

You can hire developers wherever they are and don't even need any kind of language requirement because you can have every meeting. And everybody can understand each other. It's, it's pretty exciting. So here's a similar one, but with even a more complex feeling, Google announced something called Google Beam, or they, they sort of promoted it.

It's still very expensive. It's still an enterprise product, but it's basically a 3D conferencing suite where you can sit in a booth basically and talk to somebody, and the person on the other side is not actually there, but they look and feel exactly like they're actually there. It's three dimensional, it feels like truly.

It's not just a screen. It's like, it feels like you're actually sitting with them. It almost feels like a confession booth or something. It's like a way to bring people together in a hyper, hyper real way from a distance. What do you make of that? 

[00:21:30] Ben Kornell: I think that what we've seen is a disconnect between in-person and online engagement and interactivity.

One of the things that we've been trying to do is how do we recreate an in-person experience virtually, right? And there are some elements of it that just aren't recruitable, and there's other elements that are actually better virtually than they are in person. And so what I see across this suite of announcements is this idea of like a virtual experience where you're mitigating the in-person deficits and you're maximizing the online enablement.

And I think, you know, part of our dream in ed tech is really the scalability, the infinite scalability of tech. And these kinds of engagement mechanisms radically ratchet up the efficacy potential of online delivery. 

[00:22:24] Alex Sarlin: Yes, I totally agree. It feels like there's increasingly the potential for sort of premium online communications that are more higher fidelity, feel more realistic, have instant translation.

There will probably be, there may be AI co-pilots working on both sides so that you can picture things or know things about the other person. Like, it just feels like we've all gotten very comfortable with Zoom, especially in the pandemic and post pandemic. I feel like Google's trying to enter. The next level of teleconferencing and I think it will have education ramifications, but it may be a while before it's sort of affordable enough to do it anytime.

That said, the Google Meet stuff seems like it actually is, is available now and it can be done anytime. So that that is a big one. How about this, the Project Astra is, has been Google AI agent assistant that they've been working on, and they announced some new capabilities for it this week, including things like the ability to like.

Track prices the same way that Google Flights allow you, you to sort of keep an eye on a flight. You say, I wanna fly to Buenos Aires, keep an eye on this flight, and when it hits a certain price, you know, let me know. It's saying you can now do that for prices of any kind, and it can even buy them for you or work inside your email or connect to your Google docs or, you know, have real agentic capabilities.

It's interesting it, so far, I don't think anything they announced there was partic specifically around the education, unless I, I missed it. It's more about commerce or productivity or ease, but what do you make of the normalization of that this agent and you, you and I have talked forever about how Google's big advantage is that they have the systems that everybody are already working in.

So the idea that Astra could be built, baked right into your email or right into your Google slides or you know, right into your maps, what do you make of it? 

[00:24:08] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, in Silicon Valley, this is all anybody's talking about. Now it's moved from AI to agents and there's a couple different challenges. One is, can the agent move across product surfaces seamlessly to execute things for you?

And Google has a innate advantage in that it's already kind of plugged in. The second big issue is actually authorization or you know, off capabilities. Is this agent really authorized to do these things on your behalf and what. Is great about Google is with Google, single sign-on it is actually already preauthorized to for quite a few things.

So, you know, from an infrastructure standpoint, from a surface standpoint, it is really great. I think that we are still a ways off from a consumer level ag gentech interface where. I am able to coordinate a bunch of agents to do things for me. And so this idea of, it's almost kind of similar to that GPTs concept where you create like a specific task for the ai.

This idea that they have preloaded, Google's been doing this quite a bit. They kind of present a couple preloaded use cases where, okay, I can track flights, I could track another type of price I could track, but I think they're going to still have to have a form factor on top that plays a role of coordinating it for you.

I saw the video where basically he's repairing a bike and then he's using his mobile phone to like get all the instructions to prepare the bike. It looked cool, it looked seamless, but there were little. Giveaways where he had to touch the screen to like move it and he had to like say the question in the right way.

And so I think I was just at Salesforce Tower and I think, you know, mark Benioff is basically looking at Salesforce and if you think about all their workflows, basically turning each of those into an agentic action in B2B, it makes tons of sense because you're doing the exact same workflow over and over and over again.

I think the use cases that Google was featuring, which are consumer, are pretty unlikely to come to market soon, and they're probably more likely to be behind the scenes where you're still interfacing with the front end to coordinate it for you. 

[00:26:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a a really interesting insight. I like the way you're thinking about that.

I agree that there's going to be a learning curve for anything eugenic, but I'm a little more bullish than I think you are about that. I think people are gonna start using this sooner rather than later. The reason I think that is that I think that the problems in this kind of personal use of AI agents, I think are actually pretty well known.

Like you're saying, there's the product surfaces, there's the authorization, and then of course the deep one is just the trust issue, right? It's like do you trust an AI to automatically respond to your emails for you? It's like, huh, do you trust an AI to automatically buy things for you off of Amazon or off of any e-commerce site?

You know, these things give you pause, but so did you know staying at a stranger's house with Airbnb and so did getting in a stranger's car with Uber and so did trying to connect with somebody online to, to date them who, who you only knew from an online profile? I think that this kind of trust issues are known for product people right now, and they're starting to do the kind of thing that you're exactly the kind of thing you're saying.

They, they, they create known use cases. They are, they'll create authorization structures. I mean, even something as simple as if you could enable an agent to inform you when the new X, y, Z comes out, the new video game comes out and automatically buy it, but not actually automatically just ping you on your phone and say, Hey, call of duty modern Warfare 12 is out right now.

Want it? Click here, and as soon as people start doing that a few times and they say, oh, this is actually really easy and really cool. Things just show up for me. Things just happen for me. My calendar is getting organized. I think there's gonna be a little bit of a, a technological sort of flywheel effect there.

So I'm more bullish that this agent stuff is not just gonna sort of fall apart in the, in the face of. Behavioral change. And then in terms of education, I think we have to think about what those use cases are for education, right? What does it mean to have an agentic workflow that does something for you for education?

Does it mean that every college student has an agent that informs them when there's space available in the classes they wanna take? Or when the requirements change, or when enrollment opens, or when their homework is due, or when something has changed or buy their books for them, or anything like that?

Like there's lots of use cases. We just have to figure out what they are and sort of build on when this agentic trust does sort of come into play, at least for some enough people. What do we want to happen as educators and as tech people? 

[00:29:05] Ben Kornell: Yeah. There's no doubt that kids are gonna be the first ones to figure this one out.

I do. And you know, you highlighted a lot of the pro pieces. You could imagine some agentic cons. Sure. And. My view of how a GI might evolve. There's one view where there's some larger sentient entity. I think it's much more likely to be the kind of intelligence that an ant colony has where you actually have hundreds of thousands, if not billions of agents that are able to act independently and in coordination to achieve like pretty massive outcomes.

And so for us as single sentient beings to recognize the a GI happening is hard. You can't look at an ant colony and say, wow, that's a super intelligent being. But when you look at what they're able to achieve collectively, it is mind blowing. And they're essentially programmed to achieve what they achieve.

And so I really do think that while I'm short on the. ENT for consumer near term, I am long on ent ai actually being a, the form factor of a GI as opposed to a singular sentient being, which also, by the way, once the genie's outta the bottle on a GI just like in, you know, if ants are in your house, it will be impossible to get rid of.

You know, hot take here. And I do think that, you know, if you look at positive use cases, the AgTech story is really, really promising, but it's also deathly scary. If you look at the AgTech downside scenarios, 

[00:30:51] Alex Sarlin: you can see a little bit of it in the automatic investing space when you have all of these auto investment hyper fast algorithms that trade based on each other, and they can just crash the market and send it flying.

And I feel like it's a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for that kind of swarm intelligence. Everybody's agents working in response to each other's. That is a really interesting metaphor. I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about that one. Uh, the, the end colony metaphor of AI agents. I love it. I think that's a great note to end on.

I. There were a few other interesting things happening at EdTech this week. There were a couple of of acquisitions that I think are worth noting. We saw Carnegie acquire a company called Credo for higher education consulting. We saw Meadow raise $14 million Meadow. We've had Amy Jenkins from Meadow on the platform, a Z space, which is really interesting.

3D tech company in in California acquired a company called Blocks CAD for 3D Design. So there, there's some interesting stuff happening, but hard not to feel like this. AI and tech news is now starting to merge into the ed tech news. They're starting to be really in the same breath and we find ourselves more and more talking about what some of the big tech companies are doing and and some of the AI pieces.

It's an exciting time. Yeah, 

[00:32:01] Ben Kornell: it is. And it's also a time where I think we're seeing kind of the third wave of EdTech companies that have come out of post pandemic. This is actually a really interesting time for investors. You know, meadow I think is a great example of a like post COVID, but version three company in that they're building with a much more small, nimble team, but tackling some pretty huge opportunities in the space where the scalability is like quite good with AI enablement and so on.

So very, very exciting times. We have some guests coming up. So with that, we're gonna switch it over. But thank you everyone for listening this week in EdTech. If it happens in EdTech, you'll hear it here on EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much. 

[00:32:53] Alex Sarlin: Sonja was the CEO and co-founder of Collegio, where he leads a global team of engineers, researchers, and educators, building an AI powered platform for personalized and adaptive learning.

In under a year, Collegio has grown to serve nearly a hundred thousand students worldwide on the platform. He's a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in economics and international relations, and has experience from the World Bank and the Lisbon Council, along with leadership roles at Stanford's Bases and open Silicon Valley.

Issan is also a member of StartX Stanford's Accelerator for top entrepreneurs. He's passionate about using technology to expand access to education, and to create lasting global impact. Sinan Quaia, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank you so 

[00:33:39] Senan Khawaja: much for having me, Alex. 

[00:33:40] Alex Sarlin: I'm really excited to talk to you. I have heard nothing but really positive, exciting things about Collegio and you just announced a funding round.

Tell us about what collegio is and what led you to 

[00:33:51] Senan Khawaja: start it. Of course. Yeah, super excited by our recent funding round Reach Capital. Led the round with participation from Jobs for the Future ECMC, Tuesday Capital, and it really puts us in a strong position to execute against our lofty ambition of reinventing higher education access.

And a little bit about how we got started. So I worked as an independent college counselor while I was at Stanford, so I actually, I came from Pakistan originally and in my freshman year I started tutoring some friends and family helping them get into college. And by my junior year it had grown into a nice small business.

We were. Working with several hundred students and actually taking away a nice tady bit of revenue as well. But when the AI boom hit, I thought, okay, is it possible to, instead of helping a couple hundred students to help a couple of million? And that was really where the vision started a few years back, and really grateful to see so much tremendous progress.

As you mentioned, Alex, we have nearly a hundred thousand students on the platform today. We help them with everything from college program discovery to scholarship financial aid through brainstorming, reviewing essays, all completely for free, all using 100% AI tools. And on the other side, what we've recently started doing is helping colleges offer admissions to these students and be able to directly recruit these students on the platform.

So that kind of ties into our vision of reinventing higher education access. 

[00:35:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so you launched Collegial while still connected to the academic world. You had this amazing, relevant history of being a college counselor. What was the connection that you made when you said, Hey, when AI came around, you realized AI could support all of these tasks at scale.

What was the sort of aha moment where you said, oh, this college admissions process complex? Lots of pieces, but a lot of it could be automated. 

[00:35:42] Senan Khawaja: Yeah, I think more than a AI related aha, like as you mentioned, my background is more on from the impact world education world from at the World Bank, at the Lisbon Council.

In my own business, what I was running as a student and the thought was, I know what a tremendous advantage a good counselor can provide to a student. And I was helping a segment of the wealthiest folks get into top schools, which pays the bills, but it doesn't exactly get me out of bed every morning and, and feel super excited about the work.

A lot of great kids I worked with, but the thought was, I. Okay. Is there a way, like It was more of a curiosity that I was really possessed with, which would be, okay, can we provide that level of personalized guidance to every student everywhere, regardless of whether they're from rural America, a village in West Africa, the inner cities of South Asia, regardless of who their parents are, if they have parents.

And really that impact first mindset. And then as we were building it, I teamed up with my co-founder, say who he went to uc, Berkeley worked at many AI startups. We saw it become a reality and we saw as AI gets better and better as we've been building the company over the past two years. The ability for us to really service and work closely with these students, 100% through software and AI services.

So there's no human in in the loop, but we're still able to give that level of personalized touch, perhaps even better than a human right, because the AI is not gonna forget. The AI is able to process large amounts of data and then tailor it exactly to you. And of course there are areas where the human can do better, like the empathy aspect, for example.

But for a student who doesn't have an alternative, who goes to a high school, where there's one counselor for 800 students, if they have a counselor at all, right? For that student, it's a game changer, and we're really grateful to be able to provide that service. 

[00:37:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so it's so interesting to hear you talk about it because one of the things that AI does, and you just mentioned it exactly, is it democratizes access to the type of person or expertise we could say that was previously reserved only for the elite or the very wealthy.

And I think college counseling and this type of reading, your essay, giving you feedback on every piece of your college admissions process is like the perfect example. We all remember the sort of varsity blues scandal where it's like certain people get access to this. I was an SAT tutor when I was younger as well.

I know exactly what that is like. So the idea of being able to take this certain type of expertise that was previously only available to certain types of elites and democratize it to everyone is one of the big promises of EdTech. One of the big questions about it, especially in this AI era, is. You already talked about this a little bit, is how do we get comfortable?

Do we need a human in the loop? How do we get comfortable without having that human in the loop? What does personalization look like when you are working, as you say, only through an ai, you're building a model. You're fine tuning a model, you're learning from all the data, from the students', data, from your historic data.

But I'd love to hear you talk through some of that, because I think a lot of AI founders right now in education, they know that as soon as you take the human out of the loop, the scaling is infinite, but people sometimes get nervous taking the human out of the loop. How do you square those two things?

[00:38:48] Senan Khawaja: Yeah. So in terms of comfort, I definitely think it's tricky, right? Like there are people all over on the spectrum. So my friend Emily Pacheco, who is the head of the AI Special Interest Group at the National College Association Conference. So she has the scale where the people are zero to five. Some people are very anti ai.

But some people are full. Even I mispronouncing the word, but they love AI very much. Yeah. And they love to proliferate use of ai. So people are on the spectrum and I think that's definitely okay. But there are some facts, right? AI is in the world, it's here to stay. The majority of students report using AI at least once a week, majority of students in the United States.

So these are all facts that we have to deal with. And then the next question is, okay, yes, chat, GPT exists, and it can write an essay in minutes even. But are we able to provide ethical alternatives to students that say, Hey, don't do this. Do X. Right? So at GIO, we never write an essay for you, or we never do any work for you directly, but we emulate that counselor sitting right next to you, giving you that one-on-one feedback.

And I think in terms of keeping the human out of the loop, very much so. If a student doesn't have access to a human right, if they're first generation English as a second language, low income, a lot of these people don't have access to. I. People in their family or friends who have gone to college or their school counselor is very overworked most of the time, if they have one at all.

So that's where I think the standalone AI does great, but as a company and generally from a vision perspective, where there is a school counselor, we're always looking to augment, right? 

[00:40:16] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. So if we have 

[00:40:16] Senan Khawaja: tools for school counselors, we're looking to support them. We also have the statement out that we wanna provide a personalized AI assistant to every educator.

So that's another thing that we're working on because these people are superheroes, right? And they're just so bogged on with so much to do. The question is how can we support them? So where there are humans in the loop, we're never looking to replace them, we're looking to support them. And in spaces where they're already no human, that's when the AI honest in a standalone format does pretty well.

And in terms of personalization, I don't know if we have time to go into a demo, but it's all about how the AI learns about you much like a human right. So if, let's say, Alex, if you're my tutor, you have many conversations with me, then you can are better poised to write me a recommendation letter, better poised to help me tease out an essay topic, for example, or figure out what a right program is for me, or what I might wanna do after college and where I might wanna study.

Things like that. And the AI is very similar. The more it gets to know you, the more it can personalize to you on top of an existing knowledge base, right? So we can now, with AI technology, we're able to, it functions a lot like a human where it has an existing knowledge base. And our own AI at K Collegio is trained off tens of thousands of essays, hundreds of documents we've created or personally vetted.

And that's like the base layer. And then on top of that is the personalization that you give it as a student that's interacting with it, so it can cater to your needs specifically. 

[00:41:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, 

[00:41:36] Senan Khawaja: I feel like I've been mispronouncing it kleo. So most people say Kleo. I say Kleo. I'm probably one of the few people that that says Kleo.

Oh, 

[00:41:44] Alex Sarlin: KLEO. Okay, I'll do it your way. You're the CEO. So let me ask you this about Kleo. It is focusing on this incredibly important sort of transition, very confusing, very fraught, high stakes transitional period in people's lives. And I take your point very well that you augment counselors if they're there, but for so many students who don't have access to them at all, you're giving them a level of expertise.

They have no way to access it. Makes a lot of sense. Do you see in the future that type of personalized attention and support that Kleo is giving your students expanding in either direction? Do you see it expanding into freshman year or later into college so that when people actually show up at that school that Collegio helped them find and get into, they can figure out how to navigate it?

Or do you see it extending backwards into high school? I, I know that this sort of idea of a persistent learning companion is a big dream in AI and ed tech right now and. I could see you expanding out from 

[00:42:35] Senan Khawaja: this important moment. Yeah, definitely. Great question. So most of our users today are juniors or seniors, and we do have some freshmen and sophomores as well from high school.

So the most success we've seen is with students who are able to sign up early on, and they're the same students who really have that expanded scope, right, in terms of what all is possible for them, especially if they come from, and the majority of students on K collegio actually do come from first generation English as a second language or PE eligible.

Also a low income backgrounds essentially. So that's the majority of students. And then when they sign up early on, those students realize what all is possible for them and also get a clear, actionable idea of what are the different steps that they need to take to actually execute on a plan for them to go to a four year college, if that's the right best step for them.

But we're not necessarily, I. Saying that, oh, you must go to a four year college. It can be a trade school, a coding bootcamp directly into workforce, whatever's best for you. And it's different for different people. Right? Yep. And then in terms of expansion, definitely. Like right now we're owning high school to higher ed, but definitely high school to trade school, high school to workforce, then workforce to school.

These are all the transition periods where we'd be interested in potentially helping students with. And then actually, as students go to college, if we're already their trusted partner for four years, we would definitely love to help them with their resume, with their first internship, with their first job.

So I think it's, for us, it's always about how can we best empower the student? How can we best help the student? And if we have that relationship, it's a no brainer for us that we'd love to continue in college as well and, and beyond. 

[00:44:10] Ben Kornell: Yeah, 

[00:44:11] Alex Sarlin: it 

[00:44:11] Senan Khawaja: makes a lot of sense. 

[00:44:12] Alex Sarlin: They help choose courses or choose majors or you know, navigate all sorts of things in what clubs to join.

There's something very natural about extending. If you've already been writing essays and you know, expressing vulnerability and thinking through all of these complexities of the process within ai, I think he could really understand you in both directions. That's really exciting to hear. This is a little bit of a wacky question, but I'm just curious about your answer to it.

You know, when I used to tutor kids and teach and people would start thinking about this incredibly. Complex question of, you know, should I go to college? Where should I go to college? What might that look like? One of the things that I would say I, I'll I'll ask you next about the ROI and the what you just said about straight to workforce.

That stuff is, is huge. But one of the things that always came up for me that I had learned from being in college was look at the actual professors. Like, look at the actual people who you would be teaching or you'd be working with in a school. And I think a lot of high school students don't think like that at all.

They think, you know, where is the school or how big is the school? Or what does it specialize in? They don't think of it as sort of a group of human beings that they're going to be in contact with. I'm curious if Kleo includes any of that thinking in its recommendations. If, if somebody says, I wanna do climate studies about, you know, the ocean, and it says, Hey, here's some of the best experts.

These three professors at this school all teach and they all teach about this and you'd love working with them. Is that part of your sort of model? So the way that 

[00:45:36] Senan Khawaja: we're thinking about it right now is if someone's, let's say that passionate about a research project, what we'd love to build and are currently building is an extracurricular database, right?

Where that student can then go while they're in high school or in the application process to actually go and perform some of those activities. 

[00:45:53] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So 

[00:45:53] Senan Khawaja: we don't have it as specific as those like specific professors, but we definitely have the program rankings and things like that. Right. But as our, as our data gets better and better, I definitely think something that we can.

Integrate into the system and would do really well is hey, check out these professors. Maybe even reach out to them, show your interest and, and things of that nature. 

[00:46:12] Alex Sarlin: That was sort of a random question, but it was just something that came up a lot in my personal experience. Let's talk about the actual bigger piece of, I think what, what you said.

This is incredibly important. You know, we're at this really strange moment in the history of higher ed. The numbers of higher education students had been rising for many, many years. The percentages had been rising, it sort of plateaued, and now there's a lot of. Change in how people see higher ed. There's been a lot of political pushback.

There's been questions about the ROI of certain types of degrees because of the tuition has gone up, you know all about this stuff. There's this feeling among some that the college for all movement is starting to really disappear and there's starting to be many more options for students, but some totally disagree with that.

And they say that it's really not a great idea to, you know, steer somebody away from college given that there is a wage premium still for it. You are right at the center of this and when you mentioned, hey, you know, we can advise people towards college or towards the straight into the workforce or towards a bootcamp, how do you think about this?

I'm sure this is a very complex piece of the puzzle here. 

[00:47:11] Senan Khawaja: So colleges have an inherent discount rate, actually. So this is something, especially like many students who don't have come from traditionally college going families, they don't know. So the prices of colleges have gone up, but the average discount rate has, has more or less matched it.

So the amount colleges are taking home is actually pretty stable. Great point. But I think the onus is really on the colleges to make themselves a more efficient organization. And I think that's where AI can play a huge, huge role. And then two, also make that value prop clear to students and communicate that value prop to students.

So I think that's something that Keeo is helping college partners with today. And we're working with numerous colleges on how they can improve their messaging or what students actually care about and things like that because it needs to make sense for the student. Yeah. Right. And then it also needs to make sense for the college, and there needs to be a, a clear ROI.

And I think in that kind of growth phase where more and more people were going to college, there was less focus on that. And now we're seeing the sharp contraction. And you might have read the Washington Journal article. There's a lot of needs, news and media and a lot of colleges are rolling up and shutting down.

And the way that we see the space is that students should know about all the options available to them. And colleges should also know about what they, where they should stand, and also if they wanna survive, be. Thoughtful enough to make the decisions, the tough decisions, oftentimes that need to be taken to change their value proposition, change their organizational structure in a way that they perhaps are operating more leanly, but also that they're providing something that's really, really valuable to the students.

So it's all three are really connected, right? Like the way students perceive higher education, the way higher education operates, and then communicates both to workforce up and then students below, and then to be that tether. So I think, I think it's definitely an interesting time in higher education, and I think the institutions that come out will come out much stronger than the ones that don't survive, unfortunately.

[00:49:06] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Can students use K Collegio to help navigate that discount rate conversation? Can they do things like say, you know, our family income is this and this and that, and because of that, can the system help inform them about the true cost of college rather than the sticker price? 

[00:49:22] Senan Khawaja: Yeah, so Weu has a whole bunch of tools for real cost of attendance, a massive scholarship database, but I'll actually, I'll announce it right now.

So we're working on a financial ai, which is really one of a kind, and it's something that takes that personalization to the next level where it's like, okay, here's Alex. This is his situation, this is his aspiration. How can we guide you, not just in terms of making the college path feasible, but also make it make sense financially, and then work as like a personalized financial aid advisor for the student in a way that is engaging for them in a way that is impactful for them and intuitive for them.

So we're really excited to roll that out in the coming months, and we think it can have a national and global impact. 

[00:50:07] Alex Sarlin: I definitely agree. I mean, that is such a big factor in so many people's decisions about college, especially right now, is what is the real cost and again, what is the return on that cost?

So it makes a lot of sense that navigating the financial aid piece of the system would be extremely powerful and hopefully in helping people find the right match and you know, not have student debt. And there's a lot of positives that could come from that kind of tool. 

[00:50:29] Senan Khawaja: For sure. Super excited for it. 

[00:50:31] Alex Sarlin: If people wanna learn more about the funding round, about the growth, about the a hundred thousand students already, where should they go online to find out more?

Yeah. 

[00:50:39] Senan Khawaja: kleo.ai. K-O-L-L-E-G i.ai. That's our website. And if you wanna read more about us. You can just type that into Google type, collect you into Google, and hopefully you'll see many, many articles about us. 

[00:50:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's really exciting. You're definitely getting a lot of buzz in the ed tech world and I, I imagine in the higher ed world as well.

They're excited to be seeing this kind of AI tool in use and growing. 

[00:51:04] Senan Khawaja: And I just wanna say also, if people are interested in joining the mission, so if you're a student, definitely sign up if you're a college and you can book a demo with us. If you're a high school, feel free to as well. We'd love to speak to people in the education space, mission aligned folks, forward thinking folks, so we'd love to be connected and definitely do reach out.

[00:51:21] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. Yeah, take 'em up on that. It might be hard in the future as they grow, but they're growing right now. It's a great time for partnerships and working with them. This is Sunan Kja. He is the CEO and co-founder of K Collegio AI powered platform for personalized and adaptive learning, especially in the college admissions process.

Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thank you so much, Alex. Take care. We are here with Rebecca Tabor Stalin and Connor Deman Yeoman. They're the co-founders and co-CEOs of Merit America, a national nonprofit creating fast, flexible pathways to family sustaining careers for Americans stuck in low wage jobs.

Under their leadership merit. America has served over 15,000 learners, driven an estimated $1 billion in wage gains, and is the anchor partner in Google's a hundred million dollars career training fund. Previously, they helped conceptualize and scale COURSERA'S Enterprise business, now reaching millions and generating over $180 million in a RR.

The New York Times has named Merit America, the Future of Training Programs for the Disadvantaged. Rebecca and Connor, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks for having us. It's so great to see you guys. You have done incredible work with Merit America. Connor, let's start with you. For those who aren't familiar with Merit America, it does amazing work.

Tell us what Merit America is and what kind of outcomes you see. 

[00:52:41] Connor Diemand-Yauman: Wonderful. Well, thanks again, Alex for having us and so great to see you For all the listeners out there, we all cut our teeth at Coursera in the early days and I'm loving this sitcom reunion. It's really fun and maybe we can actually start there.

And the early days of my partnership with Rebecca and also the early genesis of Merit America, which started at Coursera. So both Rebecca and I and Alex, I know you as well, we were all enamored with the vision of universal access to the world's best education at Coursera. I mean, what an audacious, exciting vision.

And when Rebecca and I met and we decided to become work husband and work wife and partner up on building the B2B business at Coursera, we were really drinking the Kool-Aid. And there was this one evening we were, we were on a work trip and we were in the back of an Uber. We were talking shop about how excited we were about Coursera and what we were building, and at the end of the trip.

The Uber driver turns around and he said, Hey, I'm sorry to butt in, but I know Coursera and I actually finished a class and Rebecca and I, we were so excited because no one finished classes. Right? You're the one you did it. Yeah, exactly. You're the one. You're the one who finished, what's your name? And he said, yeah, I finished, but nothing happened.

12 months later, I'm still driving for Uber. And that was this moment for us where we realized, holy cow, universal access, even to the world's best education, does not equal opportunity. And in particular, it doesn't equal opportunity for the 53 million low wage workers in this country who don't have a college degree.

And that's what Merit America is about. How can we create a new mainstream pathway for the folks who are currently left behind? How can we create economic opportunity and wage gains that drive impact and support for our learners and their communities and their families? 

[00:54:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's an incredible vision, and I think you've combined online resources and wraparound services and coaching into a sort of package that really helps people get major life changes through education, whether or not they have a college degree, and your new report really puts some qualitative and quantitative marks on that, especially around the numbers.

Rebecca, tell us about some of the findings in this report and how you're actually measuring the outcomes of. 

[00:55:10] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: It's a great question, and soon after that decision to team up to build this new pathway at scale for talented Americans. Second low wage work, we talked about what's the real goal here? How will we know we've been successful?

And from the earliest days, our North Star for our first chapter was driving a billion dollars in wage gains. We said, becoming the first nonprofit unicorn. So instead of a billion dollar valuation, let's put a billion dollars in wage gains. I love that. Pockets of these talented Americans. And what's really exciting is 2025, we started officially as a nonprofit in 2020, our own nonprofit.

So five years later we hit that goal, and from our earliest days we saw that learners going through our program who were getting this combination of online learning, coupled with best in class coaching and support, were having a really transformative outcome and going on average from making about $27,000 per year before Merit America.

To over $50,000 three or more months later. And as much as we are so proud about that impact, we're equally proud that we've been able to sustain it as we've scaled from our first 15 person cohort, our tiny little pilot in Washington, DC to over 15,000 learners. And so the report that we just released on our wage gains says that we've now, again, had over 10,000 people completing the program, and the vast majority of them are seeing this transformative outcome from, again, making around $27,000 a year, having a $20,000 plus wage gain.

As much as that is our North Star, and we're so proud of that. I think it's important to share that that's not the only thing that we're seeing in our alumni. One story that really comes to mind is a amazing alumni named Nick. Who said the biggest myth about Merit America and the transformation I had is that the wage gain was what mattered most, and he said for him, it was going from a job that was physically demanding and backbreaking, and most importantly boring, where he felt like he wasn't reaching his potential, using his brain power every day into a career that he finds stimulating, engaging, and loves to go to work with every Monday morning with a salary that enables him to change the trajectory for his young child and generations to come.

[00:57:22] Alex Sarlin: That is a huge difference. You're talking about three months after the program, you have a $21,000 wage gain, and then there's also information a little later in the trajectory. Right? You've also surveyed.

[00:57:39] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: That's exactly right. So it's three or more months. That includes everyone who's at least three months out. But when we look to our earliest alums who are now three years out, we see they have over $30,000 wage gain. So it, if you plot those wage gains, and trust me we do, you just see it's a hockey stick and folks have this one time transformation and then keep growing in their careers, 

[00:57:59] Alex Sarlin: it's really amazing.

And just to build on your point about the wage gains are spectacular and meaningful, but they also are only part of the puzzle. And that idea of having pride in your work, fulfilling work, work that's meaningful, that sort of gets you out of bed, that's what we all want at the end of the day. So it must be incredibly gratifying.

Let me ask both of you, but lemme start with you, Rebecca. In putting together the different pieces of this program, the online learning components with coaching services, support services, I'm sure there's some job coaching and various things. What have sort of been your biggest learnings about how to make this kind of difference for historically underserved 

[00:58:32] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: communities?

It's funny. I'll say that one's a softball because we say it all of the time. Our absolute secret sauce at Merit America, which isn't so secret, we'll shout it from the rooftops, is the coaching. It is having an incredibly talented, professional compensated coach who is working with a very small number of learners to really help them complete a technical industry recognized certificate.

To develop the professional skills, including resume cover, letter interviewing, et cetera, and to have the mindset shift that has been so key to what we've seen with our alumni, which is, yes, just because you've worked for 15 years in a fulfillment center, making minimum wage doesn't mean that you're not ready to have a transformative career outcome and to land in a great new environment with a family sustaining wage and the ability to keep working over time.

So our coaches are incredible. Lots of programs say they offer coaching, but when you look under the hood, it's a call center with one person per every thousand individuals type experience. Our coaches are working with about 40 people at a time, you know, a little over 120 or so per year, who they are really in the trenches with understanding what are your goals, what's keeping you back, what's moving you forward, and how can I be a cheerleader as you run this marathon?

[00:59:50] Connor Diemand-Yauman: And I think what's so interesting about this space and our work at Merit is that on the one hand, what we're doing feels innovative, exciting, and groundbreaking. And on the other it is, it's common sense and also something that's been validated in the research time and time again. And Alex, you know this better than I.

Anyone, you look back for decades of educational research and learning science, the most predictive variable for learner outcomes is what? It's the quality of the teacher. Right? 

[01:00:20] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: I I'm assuming you were gonna quiz him then. I think he would've gotten it. I hope 

[01:00:24] Connor Diemand-Yauman: so. I was going to, but Alex knows so much about this field.

I worry he would pick some like esoteric thing that is also true and not where I wanted to take it. But you add 

[01:00:31] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: together the last two numbers of the zip code. 

[01:00:34] Connor Diemand-Yauman: Yeah, exactly. Well, based on the longitudinal studies in the 1912, I'm like, no, Alex, that's not where I wanna take this interview. But yeah, it's the quality of the teacher.

It's the quality of the instructor. It's the ratio between learners and the instructor. It's how well you compensate the instructor and. We know this, we try to implement it in K through 12, but things just like the wheels kind of fall off the car. When we think about workforce development, when we think of higher education, it's for some reason it feels like we're playing a different game and drifting away from what we know works and also what we know the end user wants and needs.

And it's pretty amazing what colleges and universities and a lot of workforce programs can get away with in terms of creating programs that don't actually meet learners where they're at, that aren't designed for working adults for folks with real families and real jobs and real commitments, but also not delivering the value that brought learners to the programs in the first place.

And by that, what I mean is, look, there's a place for colleges and universities and education programs that provide exploration and self-discovery, right? And these incredible idyllic. Experiences where you're on the grassy knoll with your friends and talking about Play-Doh. And a lot of folks just want better lives, better jobs, they want more stability, they want to be less bored, and we need more alternative providers driving that kind of value in a way that actually scales.

And that's what Merit America's about. 

[01:02:04] Alex Sarlin: I think one of the things that makes Merit really special, and it's very brilliant how you guys have set this up, is that you are doing a version of blended learning, basically, that combines content and teaching from some of the most experienced and elite universities and companies in the world.

A lot of Google certificates from amazing universities with really deep relationship building, hands-on coaching. When you say the coaches are in the trenches, they're aligned, they incentive aligned with the end users, with your learners, and people have been trying to find the right mix that actually works, and I think you've.

Really found it. And obviously, you know, we're in this time where scalability versus that human touch is everything right now. Every EdTech company is thinking about it. So I'd love to ask both of you, I know this is a tricky question, but how can we as a field, make sure that we don't over index on either side of the equation, that we actually can put together technology enhanced learning and human relationships to actually get the outcomes that learners want in any context?

Connor, please, lemme start with you and Rebecca, I'd love to hear your take on this as well. 

[01:03:11] Connor Diemand-Yauman: It's just remarkable how binary it always feels. You go and you chat with Ed tech VCs or listen to some of these pitches and the latest app that's gonna train 20,000 truck drivers to become data scientists in three weeks.

Or you go into these very, somewhat tired training programs where you're literally going to the community college or to, you know, you're meeting in a, in a library for. Five days a week. And, and I think to your point Alex, we need to recognize that it's, it's a both and, and that there's a real opportunity to scale what works.

Sometimes when we talk with folks, especially, you know, investors or, or, or folks who have a background in, in technology, they say, well, you know, humans don't scale. You say that coaches are your bread and butter. They say that you're, they're your secret sauce. But they don't scale. They don't scale, and we just fundamentally disagree.

And we can show the models, right? Our coaches work with about a hundred learners per year in with, in about 30 person cohorts, a hundred learners per coach, per year. If we have a thousand coaches, which is not an absurd number of coaches, that's a hundred thousand learners that we are serving every year, that's a meaningful dent.

And then if you have the orientation that look. How can we continue to offer this bespoke, intrusive coaching that is ultimately very human centered, but how can we continue to unlock our coaches with the latest technology? How can we provide them the data and the insights, the just in time learning that rides the channel of that human connection in a way that I, we genuinely believe only a human can, but is supercharging it with some of this technology and with that data, that's where we see the real opportunity.

And look, we might have our foot in our mouths in a few years when we are living in a tech dystopia or Utopia U pick, but we're gonna continue to bet that the most meaningful transformation in education, in personal development. Will ultimately be driven through those intimate human connections that we have been evolving to draw energy from and to connect with for millions of years.

The trick is those interactions can be mediated and enhanced. I. Through technology, but we really do believe in a human coaching model. 

[01:05:39] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: Connor, I'm surprised you didn't share a mantra we've always used, which is technology for everything it does well and humans where it falls short. Mm-hmm. And so we just believe that deeply and that requires us to constantly be looking at, well, what can technology do today that it can do six months ago?

So we used to have our coaches do these targeted nudges to learners. Hmm. We don't need to do that anymore. With predictive ai, you know, who's falling behind with generative ai? You can, you know, draft and send these nudges. But this idea that trust and care are still fundamentally human qualities. And when you are working at a grocery store by day, driving Uber at night, balancing multiple children and trying to get a better career, the thing that's going to lead you to open your laptop and do the work you have to do is because you don't wanna let a person down because there's a person who's rooting for you.

Not 'cause there's a bot. 

[01:06:28] Alex Sarlin: And we've seen that over and over in places like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors and some of these mega universities that have found ways to really support underserved students. They always have somebody who cares about you, and this is this, this coaching model.

But to your point, technology plays an important role and increasingly can at least support the humans and amplify their impact. It's a really interesting time. I mean, we, we just talked toan.

They say we don't have any humans in our loop. That's how we scale the a hundred thousand learners because there's no humans in our loop. And that's how it works. And it's like, okay, right. But then what about all the relationships and the trust and care? And I, I just think the whole, all wrestling with it right now and it's really interesting to hear these incredible outcome, you know, these actual metrics that you're able to change wages, change, growth trajectory for jobs for underserved learners in this incredible way.

I, I think it's a really good flag for, we should really not over index on the technology. But man, this is tricky, don't you think? 

[01:07:29] Connor Diemand-Yauman: We think it's a very difficult needle to thread. And at the end of the day, Rebecca and I are in this work because we are so excited about the opportunity to drive economic mobility and opportunity and create jobs.

And candidly, we're just not super interested about being in a business that is focused entirely on let's cut as many jobs as we can. You know, how do we figure out to replace every single one of our coaches with ai? Not only because we don't believe it's actually what's best for learners, but also if we all have that orientation and if we're not focused on the impact that we have for our end user, but also thinking of our employees as end users.

Who are we providing value to who we are? Helping with their own livelihoods. That leads to a pretty dark place pretty quickly. That's a whole nother topic, but thankfully for right now, we can have our cake and eat it too, because we actually do think it's what's best for our buyers. 

[01:08:25] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, you've seen some fantastic results so far, but with anything that changes this fast and where you're trying to do something this meaningful, but it's a big chore.

There's always, you know, more to do. I'm curious about what's next for Merit America. What are planning for the future to either scale up or change, increase the outcomes even more? What's next for you, Rebecca? 

[01:08:44] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: We hit that first billion dollar wage gain North Star. But our next five years is about continuing to hit the gas on reaching more learners, delivering transformative impact, having a model that is increasingly sustainable and less reliant on philanthropy and building a great team.

And all that said, what feels really important to us right now, what we're spending a lot of time on is how do we help the now hundreds of thousands of people who have started the process of applying to. Actually make it through and find a program that is a great fit for them. So we're thrilled that we've reached 15,000 learners and we are talking about a 53 million person problem.

And we know that there's a real opportunity to say whatever amount of time you spend with Merit America, whether it's just a few minutes as you're exploring a few days, as you're considering a few weeks, and then you decide the full program isn't right for you. How do we make sure that you're getting something that is gonna ha help you have a transformative outcome?

And how do we make sure that we are meeting folks where they are? So we, we started out with this really flexible program and we even saw that we could push it further. How do we go from having a, you know, 15 to 20 hour week program to, you can go five hours, you can go 10 hours, you can put it on pause when life gets in the way.

Where we will win is if we keep our user, our learners, front and center, and really design everything from the ground up for how to help someone who is facing so many competing pressures from work, from family, get the coaching and support they need to make a really big change in their life. 

[01:10:16] Alex Sarlin: That's very noble take place.

You know, both your employees, to your point, Connor and the, your applicants who aren't even in the program yet as stakeholders, as important stakeholders as part of who you're serving is very, very noble. It's really amazing. I think it speaks to why the two of you have done such incredible work with Merit America.

I think you think very differently. You could just make an impact in ways that a lot of people don't do. They can't make it work. And I, I think you've done incredible work here. So one of the things that I think is also fantastic about your approach and fantastic about this type of blended approach in general is by separating out the coaching aspect.

With the content, it allows you to stay very nimble in terms of what you actually teach. Currently you have an IT support, data analytics, UX design, cybersecurity project management, and human resources career tracks. That's incredible. Where do you see the job market going? What do you think is going to happen as AI changes the world, as the politics change, all the things that are coming down the pipe, what types of programs do you expect to add to Merit America and how smooth will it be to add even more, continue to be cutting edge as the world changes?

[01:11:24] Connor Diemand-Yauman: Our goal is to develop programs that are as dynamic as the labor market that our learners are entering. And that means that we need to create a program that, as you said, Alex is incredibly nimble. You know, people sometimes ask, oh, are you a tech training organization? Or, you know, what's your vertical?

Rebecca? And I candidly don't really care what we're training in, what we care about. Is that these tracks lead to upwardly mobile opportunities. We care that we are training folks for jobs that are accessible without a bachelor's degree, that are relatively recession resilient, that can branch out into other tracks.

And when we find new, high potential opportunities, many of which we've found with Google, who just has an incredible team looking at this work and trying to constantly go where the puck is headed. Once we find those, we can quickly, within months, develop new programs and tracks. And that's gonna become even more important as we look at the level and pace of disruption that's on the horizon.

You hear all these reports, people saying, well, this is the number of jobs they're gonna be created by ai, and this is the number of jobs that'll be disrupted, and here are the skills that are going away. I actually don't think anyone knows. I really don't think anyone knows. And I think most people, and when I say most people, I, I mean mainly a bunch of very high priced consultants who go through a lot of data are speaking with a lot of false precision and rigor.

And not to say that the data isn't rigorous or legitimate, it's just that I, I genuinely don't think we can comprehend the level of disruption that will be coming from AI or the pace of that disruption when it hits, because the pace will be exponential. And if there's one thing that the human mind is not good at understanding, it is true exponential growth and it's going to hit so quickly, it's going to be incredibly disorienting.

And so, given that that pace of disruption is the only true constant that we are willing to bet on, the best thing that we can do for our learners and for our organization is lean into the pace of our content development and delivery. 

[01:13:39] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: Just to add to that, I think our containers that we're looking to fill are how do we give you the technical skills and professional skills you need to get a job tomorrow and the technical and professional skills you need to build a career over decades to come.

And as long as, again, that is a version of our North Star and we are filling what goes in those buckets with whatever we is the latest and greatest in demand in the economy, we'll be able to stay on the cutting edge. 

[01:14:03] Alex Sarlin: Incredible. Well, I've taken up more of your time. You're the co-CEOs. I'm sure everybody is waiting for your direction.

[01:14:10] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: Turns out that's not how it works. I think they're hoping we'll stay on this for a little bit longer. 

[01:14:14] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, please, Alex, keep them away from us. We'll put links to your report that you put out about Merit America's Impact, and people should definitely look into some of the work you're doing. It's really quite astounding.

Uh, it's really, really amazing to see both of you. Again, just personally, this is Rebecca Taber Stalin and Connor Die Yeoman, the co-CEOs and co-founders of Merit America. Thanks for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[01:14:39] Rebecca Taber Staehelin: Thanks, Alex. 

[01:14:40] Alex Sarlin: Thanks, Alex. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.

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