November 2, 2025 • 20 mins
Tade Oyerinde is Chancellor at Campus.edu.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, how do you reconsider the role or reimagine
the role of faculty compared to traditional institutions.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, I mean I think, as I said, to start,
faculty have to inspire. So we don't hire you know, boring,
you know, like just like you know, like uninspirational faculty.
We like to get it. To get hired at campus,
yes you have to be it from a top reputable institution,
but we also have to be charismatic, engaging, exciting, used
to be passionate about what you're teaching because students can
(00:31):
you know, they can feed off of that and it
actually ends up inspiring and motivating them and then improving
their outcomes. So to me, that's like certainly one way
in which our faculty are better than the average faculty,
even at elite universities across the country. Thing number two
is our faculty tend to genuinely want to teach. In
a lot of universities, many of the faculty they want
to do research, right, they don't actually want to teach.
(00:55):
They have to teach in some cases maybe they you know,
they're on the path for tenure and so they have
to do whatever is going to help them get you know,
that tenure track job or get tenured, so they were
fired to teach. But we actually only hire faculty who
want to teach. They're not doing research, you know, they're
not trying to get tenure. They're just here because they
love teaching. And so I think those are the probably
(01:16):
two things that our faculty do that distinguish them from
I think facts that even other top universities.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
You know, I think about you know when I see
you know, smart and intelligent, passionate people like you, and
I guess my question is, like you could have done
a lot of things with your skill and ambition. Why
did you choose education to work on?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Naivete accidentally and Brandon washing.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So look, I think you know, when you're a kid,
you don't realize these things, but now looking back, it's
kind of obvious. You know, My my paternal grandfather was
a college dean. My maternal grandfather was a high school principal.
My mother got a PhD in education, homeschooled my siblings
(02:05):
and me, and and then and then became a college dean.
And my older sister, you know, as as a professor.
My father sorted a nursing school. And when we were
when I was twelve, and sort of, you know, my
brother and I used to go around and pass up
flyers to all the churches Sunday morning and get people
to go to the nursing school. So, you know, I
think sort of in hindsight, you know, everything was like
(02:27):
kind of forcing me to think about education my entire life.
And my mother in particular used my brother and I
as and my older sister. But my brother and I
are identical twins, So I think it was an interesting
sort of a b test as sort of guinea pig.
It's for different pedagogical learning modality, is different learning techniques, space,
repetition things kind of things like this, and and so
(02:48):
I guess I've always sort of been brainwashed at a
deep level to think about how then education work, how
can it be better, how can we make it work
for more people? And so I think that's probably deep
in my core. And I think the accidental bit is
just you know, I really, you know, I didn't plan
to be an education entrepreneur work in the space. I
actually went to a university to study aerospace engineering. I
(03:09):
started flying planes. I was going to be a pilot
when I was twelve, So.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
That was my plan.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
And you know, and then yeah, I think, well, what's
the what's the quote everyone's got a plan into their
punch in.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
The face or something like that. Right, Yeah, that's how
these things go.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, you talked about your previous and just now you
talked about your previous track, like where you thought you
were going to be, you know, lending your talents, but
you're now leading a company, no organization, you know, an effort.
How did you learn to lead and particularly lead people
and lead teams? Like, how did you learn to not
(03:46):
you know, theoretically, but to actually bring to people together
for a common purpose with their agent.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I'm not sure that I've I don't I don't think
I've mastered leadership quite frankly, I'm not passionate about, you know,
just leading in an abstract sense. I'm passionate about solving
this problem for our country. I think, you know, a
lot of people think about education and like a oh
education kind of way. I sort of think about it,
(04:16):
if you know what I mean. I think about it
almost as like an existential problem for the country to solve.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
You know. I think.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
America is like we've sold our country rightfully as the
land of opportunity, and it's supposed to be a place
where it doesn't matter how you were born or the
conditions of your birth economically, you know, parentally, if you
work hard, you put in the work, you're going to
be able to.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Build a great life here.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I think over the last thirty forty years, that's
just I think a lot of people feel that's just
not true anymore. And I think a big part of
that is the student loan.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Crisis.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I mean, kids are graduating today, you know, two hundred
K in debt. You're starting life in the red negative
two hundred okay, and then you can just for in
the next decade plus climbing out.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
You can't buy a home. You feel like you can't
afford to take any risks like start a business.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Many people, like a lot of my age man's, are
saying they don't feel like they can have more than one kid,
if any kids at all, because they can afford them.
I think it's an absolute crisis. I think we, you know,
we have to actually solve this. People have to be
able to get a home. You know, by twenty seven,
twenty eight, if you're working hard, like you should to
buy a home, right, you shouldn't have any debt to get.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
A great education to launch your career.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So like, to me, this is what inspires me, and
this is what I get up every single day trying
to solve. This is what I spent my twenties and
I will spend all my thirties tackling at least. And
so I don't think I have formal leadership training in
any traditional sense. I think people I found that. I
think some of the smartest, most hard working people are
(05:48):
trackled to passion, and I think that's why people join campus.
You know, about three hundred people today, and I think
they're tracted with my passion. They know it's genuine, they
know that I'm obsessed with this issue. I think people
people are trapped in the people who are really, really
freaking passionate, and they want to work with people who
are true believers. And so I think that's that's what
enables me a big, good leader. I don't think that
(06:08):
I'm necessarily qualified to, like, you know, lead you know,
a sports team like I don't know that I could be,
you know, the coach of the you know Atlanta Falcons.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Like I used to love football a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
You know, I still like it, you know, but it's
not like I'm not going to come out there every
single day, day in day out like coach Saban would
or something like that, motivating.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
The guiles, because that's not my passion.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But I can lead people to go and solve this
big problem for our country and education and access to
world class education because people can literally see that, you know,
I care about this more than most people care about anything,
So so I think that's.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Yeah, that's how I think about leadership.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean in starting a company, an organization and
institution in this respect, like you know, particularly because you
weren't setting out on a journey to be a founder
or an entrepreneur, at what point did you realize or
at what happened that made you realize like oh crap,
Like I'm the CEO, like I'm the chancellor, Like whether
(07:05):
or not we keep going to stop is on me.
Like what happened when that moment hit you?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, you know, I think that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Like in the very like in the first four years
of the company, it was like kind of just me
and the homies. I was just you know, recruiting, you know,
friends of friends. You know, people are known through the
Internet to work on building software. We started originally just
building online learning software. I think the moment where I realized, no, no,
(07:35):
like on top of actually doing things, there is like
a specific leadership role. I think that moment was when
we bought we acquired this college in Sacramento. It was
called MTI College, and you know, it was the first time,
you know, I'd really sat down with folks who dedicated
thirty years or life to something. There are people who'd
(07:57):
worked at MTI College for more than thirty years, and
to explain them my vision and why I thought, you know,
campus and rebranding the institution is campus, and you know,
we thinking the way we were executing on certain strategies,
you know, keeping the same original mission but executing a
completely completely different strategy was the right thing for the institution.
(08:17):
And that was when I was like, Okay, there's a
real job here to motivate, to inspire my staff and
to lead them and to sort of be the kind
of person that they want to follow. Prior to that,
it was like, yo, guys, we just got to get
this shit out, like let's build.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
No.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
No, no professors are using the software. The complaining is buggy.
You know, we can't have it. You know, it was
just like putting out buyers left and right with the passion.
I think, I think, you know, after we acquire the college,
it was like there's actually like a real responsibility to
be a leader, not just not just a person who's
who's pushing everything with pure passion.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
You know what, I'm curious on what excites you most
about the role AI can play in helping the scale
access to high quality education.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Well, you just said at scale to me is supposed
really cool. I'll give you an example. So, as I
said earlier, for every fifty students been a role, we
hire a success coach. This is somebody who is there
to motivate the student, who's there to be their point
of contact. If the student has any issue, right with
the students feeling depressed or the students dealing with a
life issue, the coach is their first point of contact
(09:25):
to help them navigate whatever they're going through. And so
we have the office in Atlanta. We have over one
hundred people there now there are Student Impact Hub and
their job is to just work students through all these
issues between all these barriers around or over these barriers
between first day of classes and graduation.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
And so.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
When you have a lot of people, you know, interacting
with students, you're responsible as an institution for making sure
those interactions are positive. And now we're not just a
random bank. We call one eight hundred and then we're
going to have a brief survey on your hoighood. Call no, no,
Like we want this to be awesome. So in the
sundary survey, it's like, we actually need to be responsible
for making sure every single person on the phone with students,
(10:08):
the inaccurate students is ready to go. And so you know,
we have a person who just used to listen to
ten percent of all interactions with students and just grade
them and then give feedback or God forbid, something bad happened,
escalate that. But generally it's like, you know, giving feedback
and helping these student impact people be better at their work.
Now AI can do it in a way that's more
privacy preserving and more efficient and cheaper and better. So
(10:31):
it's just like it's like, okay, you can just send
a transcript of a call to an LM. If there
was a flaged issue you know, profanity was used or whatever.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
You know, you have a list of things you check
for then a human actually looks at it. If not,
then no human ever sees it. So you're improving privacy
and then you can scale that up. We're doing it
now for all of our interactions, whereas we could only
do it for five to fifteen percent usually around ten
percent of the interactions before. So I think AI can
make us way more efficient at enhancing the quality of
(11:00):
our services number one. Number two is AI should be
able to do things that computers are good at and
humans hate doing, and let humans do things that humans
are great at doing and computers can't do.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
So.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
For example, again with our faculty, I've said it twice already,
their job is to inspire. Do professors from Princeton love
inspiring students about what they're passionate about, what their area
of expertise is?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah? Do they like grading homework repetitively? No?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
They don't. They don't like grading homework competitively? So okay,
can can a professor set a grading rubric that an
AI executes and automates a lot of the grading?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Right? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
For you can do that a lot of times. And
so there's so many processes. For one example that AI
will be able to do that will free up our
people to spend more time with students, like actually interfacing
with students and not doing back office processes. And then lastly,
you know, I think I think, yeah, the cool thing
(11:57):
about campus. One of the unique things about campus is
it's a live online learning experience. So you know, just
like you and I are meeting face to face, That's
how our students meet the faculty, you know, you know,
for twelve hours a week. It's a lot of it's
in tests. It's awesome now that the annoying thing those
that after class ends. Right now, there's no you know, yeah,
(12:18):
if you get stuck on a problem you know you're
working on in your homework, or you're studying for exam
and you're confused, you know, maybe you have to wait
for the next office hours to show up or schedule
tutoring sessions that could be two days out.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
With AI, I think we're going to be able to
in the.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Next six to twelve months have every single student have
on demand world class tutoring, on demand world class study body,
you know, on demand homework help. And I think that's
going to be a game changer for both our students
and I think broadly for higher education in general.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
You know, about ten years ago or so, there was
this big un college movement where people started to challenge
the value of a number of education. Yeah, and this
was around the time where I don't remember if we
were coming out or if we were going into like
the mooks, like the massive open online college you know
season that we were in. And you know, people have
(13:11):
my points, like people have taken these sorts of challenges
on before, and either there's regulatory or bureaucratic or just
pure like success rate, Like there's there's reasons it hasn't
worked in trying to reimagine college and university experiences like
what do you what do you have you faced as
like the biggest regulatory or bureaucratic reasons that you know
(13:35):
cause challenges to you know, or in stations like yours.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
First, I'm still say it's refreshing to talk to a storyteller.
He's gone that deep on the space.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
It's cool.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, we're not the first, second, or third to try
and tackle, you know, the problem with access to world
class education in the country. I think a lot of
the prior efforts and I studied all of them before
we got started with campus, as any why.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Person will do.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
In stalled largely in part because they didn't have a
thoughtful solution to the money problem. And what that means
is specifically outside of basically India and China, the way
that the higher education is largely paid for is through
state subsidies. The government subsizes or outlet pays for the
vast majority of undergraduate education. But the US and Europe
(14:27):
that's just that's the core model. So if you don't
have a way for students to be able to take
your programs through these you know, state subsidies that they're
entitled to by being Americans, like in our case, it's
the Pelgrant. It's you know, it's eleven thousand dollars a
year for six years. It's a beautiful, amazing asset that
changes millions of lives every year.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
And if you don't know how to access that.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Then your you're on college or disruptive mood, whatever it is.
Is it not going to work. It's not going to
be successful because that's how most students go to college.
And so we were very thoughtful about that from day one.
You know, I you know, our motto is fuc K
student debt, Like we did not want to add one
I don't know if I can curse here. We did
not want to We did not want to add one
(15:13):
dollar to the pile of student loan debt.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
In this country.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And we haven't of our about twenty six hundred students today,
not a single one of them right now, our online
students has taken one dollar a student loan debt. And
that's that's super key for me. You know, So it's
all pelgrant funded or the students you know, pay out
of pocket if they're affluent and they can afford to
do so. And so basically that's the core. I think that,
you know, a lot of the people came before failed
(15:36):
at the second piece that's about at a little.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Bit less core. I think that a lot of folks
failed at is.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
People want college degrees, like they just I think it's
like it's all these like these like Ivy League graduates
in Silicon Valley who don't know, regular people in Atlanta,
in Pittsburgh, you know, in Detroit, you know, in rural America,
like just regular people and they're like nobody wants college.
And it's like proready kidding me, Like there's millions of
(16:04):
kids every year who would be the first in their
family to go to college. And they, you know, they
just want the pride of being able to say, I'm
a college kid, first of all, not even a graduate.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I'm just a college kid.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
You know, there's a million of the kids in middle
income high schools and low income high schools all over
the country who senior year want to wear that hoodie
of a college they got admitted to, even if they're
not even going. They just want to wear that pride.
And these these Silicon Valley elites, you know, they didn't
necessarily understand that. You know, in Silicon Valley, we have
this myth of the you know, the college dropout, of
which I am one.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I did three years in aerospace and dropped out. But
like so I understand that.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
But like they have this myth of the college drop
But it's like Silicon value only invests in college dropouts
who drop out of elite schools, Like nobody's investing in
the community college dropouts in Silicon Valley, like you know,
and so so so, college actually is a really valuable thing,
and both in terms of the confidence that it bestows
upon the people who who complete it, and and then
(16:59):
of course they economic payoff. You know, if you get
a bachelor's degree, you're gonna earn a million dollars more
over the course of your life than someone with just
a high school diploma.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
If you get an.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Associate's degree, you're in a half a million more of
the coasher life. So Americans know this. Most people recognize this,
and so they actually want a degree. So what they
don't want is a debt. What they don't want is
the stupid, you know, nonsense theoretical education as.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Opposed to practical, real world skills.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
What they don't want is a system that treats them
like crap and says, oh, you're one day late to register, Sorry,
wait till next fall to start. Like it's all these
like really city, really silly, you know, sort of idiosyncrasies
in our higher station system that no other service of
this level of importance has, you know, like you're telling
(17:44):
me I can't take the class that I need a
graduate because it's full, so you can make me take
an extra semester just waiting around on camp like ridiculous
stuff that students have to deal with. And I think
that's what folks actually don't want, And so for us,
it was like, how do we solve the debt problem
right so that students don't have take onlines? And that
was by figuring out a business model that worked where
the tuition is priced below the pelgrant Number one, Number two,
(18:06):
how do we make sure the quality is excellent.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
You're not learning nonsense. You know that's not.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Actually going to prepare you to be successful. You're learning
crucial things. For example, if you take our business classes,
you're learning how to negotiate. I've hired a lot of
smart people out of the elite schools in this country.
Many of them are business majors. Many of them don't
not negotiate. There's like a contractor here to fix the window,
and the contractors trying to negotiate and they're being all
friendly with them. I'm like, this is the contractor. He's
(18:32):
going to take you for a ride. You better take
that small after face, and I think you're about to
walk off the room, Like these are things that the
kid in the South Side Chicago knows by age eleven.
They know how to posture, they know how to communicate
with the body language and the tone, the right things
they need to communicate to get what they need to get. Done,
done right, that kids coming from the elite business schools
in this country may not even know. And so campus
(18:53):
graduates are equipped. If you're getting one of my business graduates,
good luck. If you're sitting acrossing them on a negotiation table,
they know how to read your face, your body language,
are going to make you sweat, right, and that's what
you know. That's what high quality education is about. That
students are actually looking for, not just theoretical nonsense, practical skills.
And then lastly, we treat students like customers. They are
paying customers. It's not sink or swim.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
It's all up to you. No, no, no, How can we
help you be successful in life? How can we create
help you create the life that you want for yourself.
That's our entire approach to students.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
So if you need a class to graduate, I don't
care if you're the only kid who needs it, We're
hiring a professor to teach that class.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
If you need a laptop, great, we give free laptops
to seventy eight percent of our students.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Cool, we got it.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
If you need Wi Fi at home, we give free
Wi Fi to almost seventy percent of our students. Free WiFi,
the WiFi, don't go t mobile or Risen. Let's go, like,
what do you need to be successful? As our customer
is our general approach, and that's so. I think when
you solve those three things, you know, when you solve
the debt problem, when you solve the quality problem, and
you solved the like you know, sort of cust fromer
(20:00):
centricness problem or try central to be a problem, then
I think actually everyone wants college.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Who does want to be a college kid? Who who
want to graduate? Let's go
You know, how do you reconsider the role or reimagine
the role of faculty compared to traditional institutions.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, I mean I think, as I said, to start,
faculty have to inspire. So we don't hire you know, boring,
you know, like just like you know, like uninspirational faculty.
We like to get it. To get hired at campus,
yes you have to be it from a top reputable institution,
but we also have to be charismatic, engaging, exciting, used
to be passionate about what you're teaching because students can
(00:31):
you know, they can feed off of that and it
actually ends up inspiring and motivating them and then improving
their outcomes. So to me, that's like certainly one way
in which our faculty are better than the average faculty,
even at elite universities across the country. Thing number two
is our faculty tend to genuinely want to teach. In
a lot of universities, many of the faculty they want
to do research, right, they don't actually want to teach.
(00:55):
They have to teach in some cases maybe they you know,
they're on the path for tenure and so they have
to do whatever is going to help them get you know,
that tenure track job or get tenured, so they were
fired to teach. But we actually only hire faculty who
want to teach. They're not doing research, you know, they're
not trying to get tenure. They're just here because they
love teaching. And so I think those are the probably
(01:16):
two things that our faculty do that distinguish them from
I think facts that even other top universities.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
You know, I think about you know when I see
you know, smart and intelligent, passionate people like you, and
I guess my question is, like you could have done
a lot of things with your skill and ambition. Why
did you choose education to work on?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Naivete accidentally and Brandon washing.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So look, I think you know, when you're a kid,
you don't realize these things, but now looking back, it's
kind of obvious. You know, My my paternal grandfather was
a college dean. My maternal grandfather was a high school principal.
My mother got a PhD in education, homeschooled my siblings
(02:05):
and me, and and then and then became a college dean.
And my older sister, you know, as as a professor.
My father sorted a nursing school. And when we were
when I was twelve, and sort of, you know, my
brother and I used to go around and pass up
flyers to all the churches Sunday morning and get people
to go to the nursing school. So, you know, I
think sort of in hindsight, you know, everything was like
(02:27):
kind of forcing me to think about education my entire life.
And my mother in particular used my brother and I
as and my older sister. But my brother and I
are identical twins, So I think it was an interesting
sort of a b test as sort of guinea pig.
It's for different pedagogical learning modality, is different learning techniques, space,
repetition things kind of things like this, and and so
(02:48):
I guess I've always sort of been brainwashed at a
deep level to think about how then education work, how
can it be better, how can we make it work
for more people? And so I think that's probably deep
in my core. And I think the accidental bit is
just you know, I really, you know, I didn't plan
to be an education entrepreneur work in the space. I
actually went to a university to study aerospace engineering. I
(03:09):
started flying planes. I was going to be a pilot
when I was twelve, So.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
That was my plan.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
And you know, and then yeah, I think, well, what's
the what's the quote everyone's got a plan into their
punch in.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
The face or something like that. Right, Yeah, that's how
these things go.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, you talked about your previous and just now you
talked about your previous track, like where you thought you
were going to be, you know, lending your talents, but
you're now leading a company, no organization, you know, an effort.
How did you learn to lead and particularly lead people
and lead teams? Like, how did you learn to not
(03:46):
you know, theoretically, but to actually bring to people together
for a common purpose with their agent.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I'm not sure that I've I don't I don't think
I've mastered leadership quite frankly, I'm not passionate about, you know,
just leading in an abstract sense. I'm passionate about solving
this problem for our country. I think, you know, a
lot of people think about education and like a oh
education kind of way. I sort of think about it,
(04:16):
if you know what I mean. I think about it
almost as like an existential problem for the country to solve.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
You know. I think.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
America is like we've sold our country rightfully as the
land of opportunity, and it's supposed to be a place
where it doesn't matter how you were born or the
conditions of your birth economically, you know, parentally, if you
work hard, you put in the work, you're going to
be able to.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Build a great life here.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I think over the last thirty forty years, that's
just I think a lot of people feel that's just
not true anymore. And I think a big part of
that is the student loan.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Crisis.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I mean, kids are graduating today, you know, two hundred
K in debt. You're starting life in the red negative
two hundred okay, and then you can just for in
the next decade plus climbing out.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
You can't buy a home. You feel like you can't
afford to take any risks like start a business.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Many people, like a lot of my age man's, are
saying they don't feel like they can have more than one kid,
if any kids at all, because they can afford them.
I think it's an absolute crisis. I think we, you know,
we have to actually solve this. People have to be
able to get a home. You know, by twenty seven,
twenty eight, if you're working hard, like you should to
buy a home, right, you shouldn't have any debt to get.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
A great education to launch your career.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So like, to me, this is what inspires me, and
this is what I get up every single day trying
to solve. This is what I spent my twenties and
I will spend all my thirties tackling at least. And
so I don't think I have formal leadership training in
any traditional sense. I think people I found that. I
think some of the smartest, most hard working people are
(05:48):
trackled to passion, and I think that's why people join campus.
You know, about three hundred people today, and I think
they're tracted with my passion. They know it's genuine, they
know that I'm obsessed with this issue. I think people
people are trapped in the people who are really, really
freaking passionate, and they want to work with people who
are true believers. And so I think that's that's what
enables me a big, good leader. I don't think that
(06:08):
I'm necessarily qualified to, like, you know, lead you know,
a sports team like I don't know that I could be,
you know, the coach of the you know Atlanta Falcons.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Like I used to love football a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
You know, I still like it, you know, but it's
not like I'm not going to come out there every
single day, day in day out like coach Saban would
or something like that, motivating.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
The guiles, because that's not my passion.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But I can lead people to go and solve this
big problem for our country and education and access to
world class education because people can literally see that, you know,
I care about this more than most people care about anything,
So so I think that's.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Yeah, that's how I think about leadership.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean in starting a company, an organization and
institution in this respect, like you know, particularly because you
weren't setting out on a journey to be a founder
or an entrepreneur, at what point did you realize or
at what happened that made you realize like oh crap,
Like I'm the CEO, like I'm the chancellor, Like whether
(07:05):
or not we keep going to stop is on me.
Like what happened when that moment hit you?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, you know, I think that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Like in the very like in the first four years
of the company, it was like kind of just me
and the homies. I was just you know, recruiting, you know,
friends of friends. You know, people are known through the
Internet to work on building software. We started originally just
building online learning software. I think the moment where I realized, no, no,
(07:35):
like on top of actually doing things, there is like
a specific leadership role. I think that moment was when
we bought we acquired this college in Sacramento. It was
called MTI College, and you know, it was the first time,
you know, I'd really sat down with folks who dedicated
thirty years or life to something. There are people who'd
(07:57):
worked at MTI College for more than thirty years, and
to explain them my vision and why I thought, you know,
campus and rebranding the institution is campus, and you know,
we thinking the way we were executing on certain strategies,
you know, keeping the same original mission but executing a
completely completely different strategy was the right thing for the institution.
(08:17):
And that was when I was like, Okay, there's a
real job here to motivate, to inspire my staff and
to lead them and to sort of be the kind
of person that they want to follow. Prior to that,
it was like, yo, guys, we just got to get
this shit out, like let's build.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
No.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
No, no professors are using the software. The complaining is buggy.
You know, we can't have it. You know, it was
just like putting out buyers left and right with the passion.
I think, I think, you know, after we acquire the college,
it was like there's actually like a real responsibility to
be a leader, not just not just a person who's
who's pushing everything with pure passion.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
You know what, I'm curious on what excites you most
about the role AI can play in helping the scale
access to high quality education.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Well, you just said at scale to me is supposed
really cool. I'll give you an example. So, as I
said earlier, for every fifty students been a role, we
hire a success coach. This is somebody who is there
to motivate the student, who's there to be their point
of contact. If the student has any issue, right with
the students feeling depressed or the students dealing with a
life issue, the coach is their first point of contact
(09:25):
to help them navigate whatever they're going through. And so
we have the office in Atlanta. We have over one
hundred people there now there are Student Impact Hub and
their job is to just work students through all these
issues between all these barriers around or over these barriers
between first day of classes and graduation.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
And so.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
When you have a lot of people, you know, interacting
with students, you're responsible as an institution for making sure
those interactions are positive. And now we're not just a
random bank. We call one eight hundred and then we're
going to have a brief survey on your hoighood. Call no, no,
Like we want this to be awesome. So in the
sundary survey, it's like, we actually need to be responsible
for making sure every single person on the phone with students,
(10:08):
the inaccurate students is ready to go. And so you know,
we have a person who just used to listen to
ten percent of all interactions with students and just grade
them and then give feedback or God forbid, something bad happened,
escalate that. But generally it's like, you know, giving feedback
and helping these student impact people be better at their work.
Now AI can do it in a way that's more
privacy preserving and more efficient and cheaper and better. So
(10:31):
it's just like it's like, okay, you can just send
a transcript of a call to an LM. If there
was a flaged issue you know, profanity was used or whatever.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
You know, you have a list of things you check
for then a human actually looks at it. If not,
then no human ever sees it. So you're improving privacy
and then you can scale that up. We're doing it
now for all of our interactions, whereas we could only
do it for five to fifteen percent usually around ten
percent of the interactions before. So I think AI can
make us way more efficient at enhancing the quality of
(11:00):
our services number one. Number two is AI should be
able to do things that computers are good at and
humans hate doing, and let humans do things that humans
are great at doing and computers can't do.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
So.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
For example, again with our faculty, I've said it twice already,
their job is to inspire. Do professors from Princeton love
inspiring students about what they're passionate about, what their area
of expertise is?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah? Do they like grading homework repetitively? No?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
They don't. They don't like grading homework competitively? So okay,
can can a professor set a grading rubric that an
AI executes and automates a lot of the grading?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Right? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
For you can do that a lot of times. And
so there's so many processes. For one example that AI
will be able to do that will free up our
people to spend more time with students, like actually interfacing
with students and not doing back office processes. And then lastly,
you know, I think I think, yeah, the cool thing
(11:57):
about campus. One of the unique things about campus is
it's a live online learning experience. So you know, just
like you and I are meeting face to face, That's
how our students meet the faculty, you know, you know,
for twelve hours a week. It's a lot of it's
in tests. It's awesome now that the annoying thing those
that after class ends. Right now, there's no you know, yeah,
(12:18):
if you get stuck on a problem you know you're
working on in your homework, or you're studying for exam
and you're confused, you know, maybe you have to wait
for the next office hours to show up or schedule
tutoring sessions that could be two days out.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
With AI, I think we're going to be able to
in the.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Next six to twelve months have every single student have
on demand world class tutoring, on demand world class study body,
you know, on demand homework help. And I think that's
going to be a game changer for both our students
and I think broadly for higher education in general.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
You know, about ten years ago or so, there was
this big un college movement where people started to challenge
the value of a number of education. Yeah, and this
was around the time where I don't remember if we
were coming out or if we were going into like
the mooks, like the massive open online college you know
season that we were in. And you know, people have
(13:11):
my points, like people have taken these sorts of challenges
on before, and either there's regulatory or bureaucratic or just
pure like success rate, Like there's there's reasons it hasn't
worked in trying to reimagine college and university experiences like
what do you what do you have you faced as
like the biggest regulatory or bureaucratic reasons that you know
(13:35):
cause challenges to you know, or in stations like yours.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
First, I'm still say it's refreshing to talk to a storyteller.
He's gone that deep on the space.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
It's cool.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, we're not the first, second, or third to try
and tackle, you know, the problem with access to world
class education in the country. I think a lot of
the prior efforts and I studied all of them before
we got started with campus, as any why.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Person will do.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
In stalled largely in part because they didn't have a
thoughtful solution to the money problem. And what that means
is specifically outside of basically India and China, the way
that the higher education is largely paid for is through
state subsidies. The government subsizes or outlet pays for the
vast majority of undergraduate education. But the US and Europe
(14:27):
that's just that's the core model. So if you don't
have a way for students to be able to take
your programs through these you know, state subsidies that they're
entitled to by being Americans, like in our case, it's
the Pelgrant. It's you know, it's eleven thousand dollars a
year for six years. It's a beautiful, amazing asset that
changes millions of lives every year.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
And if you don't know how to access that.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Then your you're on college or disruptive mood, whatever it is.
Is it not going to work. It's not going to
be successful because that's how most students go to college.
And so we were very thoughtful about that from day one.
You know, I you know, our motto is fuc K
student debt, Like we did not want to add one
I don't know if I can curse here. We did
not want to We did not want to add one
(15:13):
dollar to the pile of student loan debt.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
In this country.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And we haven't of our about twenty six hundred students today,
not a single one of them right now, our online
students has taken one dollar a student loan debt. And
that's that's super key for me. You know, So it's
all pelgrant funded or the students you know, pay out
of pocket if they're affluent and they can afford to
do so. And so basically that's the core. I think that,
you know, a lot of the people came before failed
(15:36):
at the second piece that's about at a little.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Bit less core. I think that a lot of folks
failed at is.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
People want college degrees, like they just I think it's
like it's all these like these like Ivy League graduates
in Silicon Valley who don't know, regular people in Atlanta,
in Pittsburgh, you know, in Detroit, you know, in rural America,
like just regular people and they're like nobody wants college.
And it's like proready kidding me, Like there's millions of
(16:04):
kids every year who would be the first in their
family to go to college. And they, you know, they
just want the pride of being able to say, I'm
a college kid, first of all, not even a graduate.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I'm just a college kid.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
You know, there's a million of the kids in middle
income high schools and low income high schools all over
the country who senior year want to wear that hoodie
of a college they got admitted to, even if they're
not even going. They just want to wear that pride.
And these these Silicon Valley elites, you know, they didn't
necessarily understand that. You know, in Silicon Valley, we have
this myth of the you know, the college dropout, of
which I am one.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I did three years in aerospace and dropped out. But
like so I understand that.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
But like they have this myth of the college drop
But it's like Silicon value only invests in college dropouts
who drop out of elite schools, Like nobody's investing in
the community college dropouts in Silicon Valley, like you know,
and so so so, college actually is a really valuable thing,
and both in terms of the confidence that it bestows
upon the people who who complete it, and and then
(16:59):
of course they economic payoff. You know, if you get
a bachelor's degree, you're gonna earn a million dollars more
over the course of your life than someone with just
a high school diploma.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
If you get an.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Associate's degree, you're in a half a million more of
the coasher life. So Americans know this. Most people recognize this,
and so they actually want a degree. So what they
don't want is a debt. What they don't want is
the stupid, you know, nonsense theoretical education as.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Opposed to practical, real world skills.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
What they don't want is a system that treats them
like crap and says, oh, you're one day late to register, Sorry,
wait till next fall to start. Like it's all these
like really city, really silly, you know, sort of idiosyncrasies
in our higher station system that no other service of
this level of importance has, you know, like you're telling
(17:44):
me I can't take the class that I need a
graduate because it's full, so you can make me take
an extra semester just waiting around on camp like ridiculous
stuff that students have to deal with. And I think
that's what folks actually don't want, And so for us,
it was like, how do we solve the debt problem
right so that students don't have take onlines? And that
was by figuring out a business model that worked where
the tuition is priced below the pelgrant Number one, Number two,
(18:06):
how do we make sure the quality is excellent.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
You're not learning nonsense. You know that's not.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Actually going to prepare you to be successful. You're learning
crucial things. For example, if you take our business classes,
you're learning how to negotiate. I've hired a lot of
smart people out of the elite schools in this country.
Many of them are business majors. Many of them don't
not negotiate. There's like a contractor here to fix the window,
and the contractors trying to negotiate and they're being all
friendly with them. I'm like, this is the contractor. He's
(18:32):
going to take you for a ride. You better take
that small after face, and I think you're about to
walk off the room, Like these are things that the
kid in the South Side Chicago knows by age eleven.
They know how to posture, they know how to communicate
with the body language and the tone, the right things
they need to communicate to get what they need to get. Done,
done right, that kids coming from the elite business schools
in this country may not even know. And so campus
(18:53):
graduates are equipped. If you're getting one of my business graduates,
good luck. If you're sitting acrossing them on a negotiation table,
they know how to read your face, your body language,
are going to make you sweat, right, and that's what
you know. That's what high quality education is about. That
students are actually looking for, not just theoretical nonsense, practical skills.
And then lastly, we treat students like customers. They are
paying customers. It's not sink or swim.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
It's all up to you. No, no, no, How can we
help you be successful in life? How can we create
help you create the life that you want for yourself.
That's our entire approach to students.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
So if you need a class to graduate, I don't
care if you're the only kid who needs it, We're
hiring a professor to teach that class.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
If you need a laptop, great, we give free laptops
to seventy eight percent of our students.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Cool, we got it.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
If you need Wi Fi at home, we give free
Wi Fi to almost seventy percent of our students. Free WiFi,
the WiFi, don't go t mobile or Risen. Let's go, like,
what do you need to be successful? As our customer
is our general approach, and that's so. I think when
you solve those three things, you know, when you solve
the debt problem, when you solve the quality problem, and
you solved the like you know, sort of cust fromer
(20:00):
centricness problem or try central to be a problem, then
I think actually everyone wants college.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Who does want to be a college kid? Who who
want to graduate? Let's go
Host
Will Lucas
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