Affordability: Guild Education

Guild Education (hereafter Guild), based in Denver, Colorado, has established itself as one of the most innovative leaders in the education and employment space. With a mission to “unlock opportunity for America’s workforce through education,” Guild is largely responsible for turning “education as a benefit” into a meaningful phrase and since 2015 has been working with some of the nation’s largest and most iconic companies, along with a carefully selected group of nonprofit educational providers, to connect working adults with opportunities to earn degrees and credentials that are affordable and largely funded by their employers.¹³ As of 2021, Guild, led by cofounder and CEO Rachel Carlson, has raised more than $378 million in funding from social impact investors with a market valuation exceeding $3.75 billion, a rarity in the education technology space.¹⁴

Guild works with Fortune 1000 companies to help them develop and implement an education benefits program to connect their employees to a selected network of high-quality (mostly online) higher education providers, as well as to Guild’s student success coaches, who understand and can help employees find programs that are right for them and their education objectives, move through the application and enrollment process, and advise them regularly as they balance the demands of work and family. Guild’s network of academic partners includes institutions experienced in serving working adults, such as Nebraska’s Bellevue University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Indiana’s Purdue Global University. For these academic partners, Guild reduces the cost of acquiring students by more efficiently matching prospective students to their degree programs; negotiating tuition discounts on their behalf, which in turn help to make the programs more affordable; and supporting those students throughout their educational journey, which exceeds the more minimal support that most online degree programs provide.

Since 2015, Guild has worked with companies with large numbers of frontline employees, including Walmart, Disney, Taco Bell, Lowe’s, Discover Financial, and Chipotle. Guild’s goal is to take a little-used benefit program and transform it into a powerful strategic tool that companies can use to further their business goals while at the same time providing education to millions of working adults, giving them a chance to learn valuable skills and credentials that will serve them long after their current job. Guild’s value proposition to companies is that a strong education benefits program increases recruitment, retention, brand value, and financial return. As of 2021, more than three million students are eligible to participate in education benefits through their employer’s Guild-managed program.¹⁵

Rachel Carlson and Brittany Stich, undergraduate classmates in college and future Stanford Graduate School of Business students, had been working at American Honors in Washington, DC, a company founded by Carlson’s father, which developed and ran honors programs for community colleges and helped build strong transfer pipelines to four-year institutions for students. Frustrated by the lack of traction they saw there, both Carlson and Stich began thinking about how to create better solutions for this population of students, especially tackling college affordability, support to help them succeed, and degrees that could lead to good jobs. Affordability was a big insight and motivator. As Stich explained, “[T]he incentives weren’t aligned. We knew many students couldn’t pay for all of college on their own, and there had to be another payer as an alternative to debt.”¹⁶

During business school, Carlson and Stich began working on potential solutions, first thinking about fixing the gap between education and employment. How could more Americans affordably earn the degrees and credentials that would lead to meaningful job opportunities while also aligning that education with the needs and incentives of employers? Their first effort, Student Blueprint, was launched in 2014 and sought to use technology to match community college students with jobs. While Carlson and Stich learned a lot, they ended up selling the software to another San Francisco educational technology firm. As they continued their research, however, they homed in on an IRS tax provision allowing employers to offer educational assistance to employees of up to $5,250 per year to participate in a “qualified educational program,” initially college degrees but expanded since the 1980s to include both degree and nondegree programs, both undergraduate and graduate. The benefit to the employee is that the contribution from the employer is not considered taxable income.¹⁷

In their research, Carson and Stich discovered a few things that led to what would become Guild. First, while many large companies offered these benefits, mostly in the form of tuition reimbursement, relatively few employees exercised them (3–5 percent). Second, the programs themselves were complex and burdensome to administer for employers and were filled with friction for employees. Employers, lacking the expertise in evaluating and identifying the right academic programs for their employees, provided little guidance and support and were juggling numerous reimbursement requests from employees. Similarly, employees lacked guidance on finding, selecting, and applying to programs, and in many cases had to fund the tuition costs on their own and then go through a lengthy and often complex reimbursement process. For frontline workers, these were significant obstacles. Carlson and Stich also knew that for many schools, especially less selective schools with robust online programs, student acquisition costs were high—averaging more than $3,000 per student. If there were better ways to connect students with accredited high-quality online schools at a lower cost, they thought, an interesting marketplace could be created. So while affordability for students was a driver, one lever they could pull to enable that was to reduce the cost of acquisition for schools.

As Carlson and Stich began this work, they also began thinking about how employers could use educational benefits more strategically, particularly as a way to attract and retain employees, and how individuals could see a job as a pathway to further education instead of the conventional ways we think about education as a pathway to a job. Most importantly, they thought about scale. One of the lessons from American Honors and Student Blueprint was how hard it was to scale education to serve more students, so as they built Guild, they focused on large employers (each with more than ten thousand employees in the United States), especially those with large populations of frontline workers who were seeking further education but who lacked both the resources and the guidance and support to do so.

As Guild developed, its founders also considered operating models and funding sources. When it came time to decide, Stich and Carlson had several options. A large philanthropy offered them $10 million in funding to build Guild as a nonprofit organization. They were also offered seed funding from an existing education and training company that would allow them to operate as a subsidiary under that company’s umbrella. Then, one of Carlson’s professors, also an investor, encouraged them to consider a venture capital funding structure, which is what they ultimately chose, raising a $2 million seed round of funding in summer 2015. Although they debated whether to build Guild as a for-profit or nonprofit company, Carlson noted that after thinking through their options and evaluating the trade-offs, they decided “that only a venture-backed business could give [them] the needed resources to meaningfully scale.”¹⁸ Committed to being a double-bottom-line business, however, Guild would later become a certified B corporation to underscore its commitment to serving the social mission of economic opportunity through education.

Guild’s first large customer was Chipotle, a large, fast-casual restaurant. Carlson reached out cold to Chipotle’s human resources manager via LinkedIn, which led to Guild’s first big contract. What they discovered with Chipotle was a strong social mission and a desire to retain a workforce in an industry with significant churn in a competitive labor market. With its first large customer in place, Guild set up a program where eligible Chipotle employees could exercise their $5,250 in annual education benefits and enroll in online degree programs at one of Guild’s academic partners.

Carlson, CEO of Guild, used insights she had gained in the community college space to understand that for working adults to succeed, Guild needed to do more than remove the friction around program selection, application, and payment. Carlson understood that success, especially for nontraditional learners, was often built on support, an insight that has often been hard to scale. Today Guild employs more than three hundred student success coaches, who work with students (who are also employees of Guild’s customers) one-on-one at every step of their educational journey, handling some of the tasks that companies were unable to do well and large schools with high ratios of students to advisers were unable to provide.

When asked to reflect on Guild’s first five years, both Carlson and Stich take pride in Guild’s work in getting people to care about the issue that so many working adults lack the skills and credentials they need to ensure a better future for themselves and their families. Rejecting a winner-takes-all mentality, they are flattered that they have seen new competitors, such as Los Angeles’s InStride, enter the space and that in this trillion-dollar market there is plenty of room for multiple companies. They are equally proud that people no longer scratch their head at the phrase “education as a benefit” and that Guild has been a category-defining leader in driving that conversation as it helps unlock opportunity for some of those thirty-six million working adults and make education more affordable.

Relevance: Pathstream

One of the early things that Carlson and Stich recognized in building Guild was that there was a gap between the skills employers were looking for in applicants and the coursework that most colleges were providing and that most students were taking. That’s exactly the gap that San Francisco’s Pathstream decided to fill. Led by cofounder and CEO Eleanor Cooper, Pathstream partners with leading technology companies to design and build branded digital skills career programs that are delivered through college and university partnerships, bringing relevant technology-specific skills to more learners. Working with companies such as Facebook, Unity, Tableau, and Salesforce, Pathstream develops competency-based online education curricula that teach the most current content and job-specific tools to students and job seekers across the country.¹⁹ Pathstream’s team of learning designers works closely with tech partners to build university-level coursework, consulting with industry experts and hiring managers to ensure that there is alignment with industry best practices and real labor market needs. Both adult learners and traditional students can access Pathstream courses through a network of college and university partners, including community colleges and four-year institutions, for both credit and noncredit. Upon completion, students receive a dual-branded certificate from both the university partner and the technology company.

While studying for her MBA, Cooper, a former banker, had been working with formerly incarcerated individuals who were trying to enter the workforce. Lacking degrees and social capital but with a strong desire to move ahead, Cooper realized that the challenges of learning relevant digital skills were compounded even more for this population. At the time, many technology-based skills programs were run mostly through expensive boot camps. Community colleges, traditionally one of the most affordable and accessible routes to education and skills, lacked the resources and expertise to offer the kinds of digital skills education that employers were actually looking for in applicants. Other models existed, but many had prerequisites that this population could not meet. Cooper had been trying to help one formerly incarcerated man access those opportunities and saw firsthand how challenging it was for him, even with her help and support. The man did not want to pursue a traditional vocational path but instead wanted to find work in the modern economy—the knowledge economy. But while the economy was digitizing, few pathways existed for him and for other men and women like him who lacked a college degree or a lot of money. Recognizing that affordable education pathways are often disconnected from employment opportunities, Cooper started Pathstream as a way to tackle that problem.

Cooper says three things motivated her thinking. First was the experience working with one individual and seeing the limited options, especially for someone without a college degree. Boot camps averaged more than $12,000 for a multimonth program and often catered to those with significant prior education, including graduate degrees. Second, in doing a labor market analysis that considered macro trends and a better understanding of the skills gaps, Cooper understood that 70 percent of all open positions require digital skills. Third, a landscape analysis that looked at who was currently working in the space, price points, and where the opportunities might be suggested there was room for something different in the ecosystem.

The early steps to what would soon become Pathstream started with a virtual-reality boot camp that Cooper developed as an interim project for a software company, which allowed her to learn more about digital skills. That project led to a conversation with Facebook, which at the time was interested in doing something oriented toward social impact on a bigger scale related to the skills gap. Working with Facebook, Pathstream developed and launched an online digital marketing certificate program to teach students how to use Facebook Ads and Google Analytics, perform A/B testing, and cultivate other skills that were in demand by thousands of companies, large and small. Originally launched and delivered with twenty community college partners, it was part of Facebook’s push to train more than a million people to learn digital marketing skills that could help them secure meaningful employment in the modern economy.²⁰ As Cooper began seeking college and university partners for Pathstream to work with, she was astonished by the response. Not one school said no. Providing turnkey program content with industry relationships proved a boon for community colleges, which love working with industry but often faced challenges in connecting with technology companies, especially if they were located outside major tech hubs.

Cooper started Pathstream in 2018 as a for-profit company, initially raising $1 million in seed capital, followed a year later by a $13 million second round of funding. When asked about building a venture-backed for-profit company, Cooper explained that, “You can get more significant capital from the venture market. Philanthropic dollars are hard to raise, and if you’re serious about scaling, you need capital.”²¹ She also noted that to attract top talent, especially in building a technology company, she needed to be able to offer meaningful pay and equity. At the same time, she acknowledged that building a social impact business as a for-profit company has its challenges, especially in the world of education, where partners can often be skeptical about your intent. Pathstream understands that employers need job-ready candidates with modern technology skills to remain competitive in their industries. They also know that colleges and universities are not teaching these skills, because they lack the expertise and resources to build and maintain new programs that are current and aligned with industry. Technology companies are motivated to educate new users but do not have the capacity to build accredited college courses or offer a college degree.

Cooper finds the real value in Pathstream’s approach as being an intermediary between these communities, who often speak different languages. Pathstream helps students access affordable and meaningful skills and certifications that are hard to access in other ways. Additionally, Pathstream helps educational institutions provide cobranded and relevant certifications that would be hard to develop on their own. Finally, Pathstream enables technology companies to reach students and institutional partners at scale, since developing and maintaining relationships with individual colleges is difficult and inefficient for most large companies. The dual-branded certificate is proving to be a useful innovation in the space, as certificates are emerging as a leading credential for job seekers.²² According to Pathstream’s data, colleges are embracing certificates because of increased financial pressure to attract and retain students, and federal funding will increasingly be tied to completion outcomes.

When asked where she sees Pathstream today, Cooper replied that “the role we are playing right now is about career discovery and navigation. More people can feel included in the knowledge economy, and can build motivation and confidence, along with skills. We’re also teaching digital resilience.” In its first eighteen months, more than four thousand students completed Pathstream certifications. When asked where she sees Pathstream tomorrow, she confidently predicted that “in the future, I hope that anyone with a high school diploma and beyond can access a broad enough range of entry level career paths that can open up a huge number of opportunities for self-determination.”²³

Attainment: Rivet School

In the wake of the 2016 US elections, MBA student Eli Bildner had been thinking broadly about the divergent returns of labor and capital, the enormous aggregation of wealth in major cities, and specifically the narrowing of accessible pathways to education and opportunity for more Americans. Prior to business school, Bildner had helped to found an online coding boot camp and also worked for Coursera in the early days of the massive open online course (MOOC) platform company. While the former excited him with its accessibility and the relative affordability of an online curriculum, the latter helped him understand the immense motivational challenges needed to complete an online course or degree that was largely delivered in an asynchronous format for solo learners. A commonly referenced statistic about MOOCs was that 96 percent of students who began a course never finished. In spite of its founders’ promise to democratize access to education at scale, it hardly seemed that such a model could be a stand-alone solution for economic inequality and opportunity. The student simply needed more to succeed.²⁴

During his last year of business school, Bildner was introduced to someone who had helped start a nonprofit school in Rwanda called Kepler University.²⁵ Kepler’s model combined cohort and place-based in-person academic support and coaching with an accredited competency-based undergraduate curriculum delivered online—specifically an American bachelor’s degree program from Southern New Hampshire University. Bildner was being recruited to join and lead Kepler, which wasn’t the right fit for him or his family, but the model continued to resonate with him. It wasn’t just online, and not just in person, but it blended parts of both to deliver something that was more affordable but also more successful for learner completion. Bildner began to think about how he could replicate that for some of the millions of Americans for whom higher education was both unaffordable and hard to complete.

Bildner started to talk with more people working in the space. He realized early on, as he thought about what a blended or hybrid education program would look like, that there were clear trade-offs between commercial potential and social impact. There were some existing approaches and models, including one that worked with underemployed graduates from lower-selectivity public universities and combined cohort building, social capital building, and skills. But trying to do all this was (and is) hard, and Bildner understood that if he was going to build something successful, he needed to constrain the problem. At about the same time, he connected with a group of current and former board members from KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, who were frustrated with the lack of success they were seeing in KIPP graduates persisting through college.

Bildner’s assessment was that education solutions are easy to talk about at a high level, but education systems are complex, and there are myriad reasons why these problems haven’t been solved. As he spoke with more California community college students, he learned more about the barriers they faced as they tried to complete a degree. They were immense. Bildner noted that solutions may seem easy at first. “You see someone who is homeless on the streets,” he explained, “and we want to believe that they’re one step away from a six-figure salary and a house. And maybe there are people for whom that’s true. That there’s some easy fix. But for most people twenty things need to happen, and you can’t do twenty things at once. What’s the one intervention?”²⁶ Bildner explained that college is often seen as that transformational element in changing lives, but there are many factors that get in the way of someone getting an education. It could be a lack of financial resources. It could be a complicated family situation or home responsibilities. For someone to get through a degree program on top of all those other factors in two to six years, a lot needs to happen.

As Bildner explained:

It’s really hard for most universities to do what we do for a few reasons. When I say, “what we do,” what I mean is combining a competency-based online degree program with comprehensive, place-based support. One reason universities offer competency-based programs is that they’re less expensive for students than traditional in person synchronous courses. But this is a double-edged sword for the university—it still costs just as much to find students, and if you’re charging significantly lower tuition (even if a competency-based model also carries fewer costs), you’re going to make less money. I’m not trying to be cynical here—it’s just really hard for universities to justify investing in these programs if they’re both hard to support on their margins, [and] also might cannibalize students from higher-margin programs. At the same time, most online degree programs just aren’t structured in a way where they form place-based partnerships and provide place-based support. It’s not the way they’re set up, and not in their skill set.²⁷

In starting Rivet School (originally called Concourse Education), Bildner went into that work thinking about career, college, and the support students needed to be successful. With seed funding from philanthropic sources, and with an organization of three people, they had some great insights and ideas, some money to get it off the ground, and some choices. They understood that they couldn’t solve everything, so they knew they needed to be great at one thing. They chose an accelerated bachelor’s degree program, creating shortcuts by partnering with existing low-cost but nonprofit accredited online providers, and bolted onto that the kinds of support they thought could help students be more successful as they managed the rest of their life and school. Bildner and his cofounders realized that the challenges were being able to provide on-demand support, encouragement, and a sense that other students were going through the experience together with them, even if most of their learning was being done online.

Bildner and his small team came to understand that most colleges weren’t designed around the needs of real students. The lack of advisers, or the small number of advisers to serve large numbers of students, made understanding credits and course sequences and managing academic life difficult, especially for the demographic that increasing numbers of underserved students looked like: working adults, students who were parents, and first-generation, low-income students. According to Bildner, in California, where Rivet School began, only 23 percent of public university students, 13 percent of community college students, and 3 percent of for-profit online students graduate on time. Founded in 2018 in Richmond, California, in one of the counties lowest in educational attainment in the Bay Area, Rivet School honors the thousands of shipyard workers in Northern California during World War II, including many women and people of color who had previously been discriminated against for employment but found well-paying middle-class jobs there, often represented in popular culture by the “Rosie the Riveter” icon, which Rivet School adopted as part of its brand identity.

Rivet School sees itself as a modern incarnation of that midcentury vision, but instead of jobs in twentieth-century industrial shipyards, Rivet School has developed a program to help more Americans find pathways to economic opportunity and mobility through education in twenty-first century knowledge economy fields such as technology, health care, education, and business.²⁸ The Rivet School model helps students select and enroll in one of two fully accredited, nonprofit, entirely online bachelor’s degree programs through either Southern New Hampshire University or Brandman University. Realizing that solo learning is hard, Rivet School’s model puts students into cohorts so they have a group of other students with whom they are progressing and requires a six-week orientation or onboarding process where students get to know others in their cohort, Rivet coaches, and advisers, and are introduced to skills that will be useful in helping them be successful. They also get a personal coach and access to resources to help them stay on track, meet their academic objectives, and progress through a degree program as they manage the rest of their life, which usually includes significant work and family responsibilities.

Today, Rivet School serves about two hundred students across Northern California from its Richmond base. The program has started to see its first bachelor’s degree graduates, and the majority of Riveters are on track to earn a bachelor’s degree in three years or less, and for less than $10,000 in out-of-pocket costs, because of its affordable online program and the services that are subsidized by philanthropic support. Their students (and graduates) are almost across the board the first in their families to attend and complete college, are predominately students of color, and, prior to Rivet School, many had unsuccessfully tried to earn a degree.

According to Bildner, “[O]ur goal isn’t to get students degrees; it’s to enable a broader swathe of Americans to access the opportunity that comes from a knowledge-economy job. And while it’s popular to pronounce the death of the degree, Americans without college are increasingly finding themselves shut out of these opportunities.”²⁹

Bildner noted that

[W]hat we’re doing at Rivet School is making college more accessible, more efficient, and more job-focused for traditionally underserved students. This is particularly important as what we’re actually seeing in the market is employers placing more—not less—value on credentials over time. Without a better path to a degree (and other credentials) for “post-traditional” students like working adults and parent learners, for instance, economic mobility will become further and further out of reach.³⁰

Conclusion: Affordability, Relevance, and Attainment

When considering these approaches together, each social entrepreneur has indexed more highly on one of these dimensions—affordability, relevance, or attainment. Guild went after affordability first, notably by shifting the role of payer from the student to the employer, with these working students exercising company-sponsored tuition benefits; getting a job allows them to get an education. Guild’s model, especially focused on frontline workers, has created a more affordable pathway to education. But affordability alone will not solve this problem. Guild has also provided the advice, support, and coaching needed to help drive these working adults toward attainment, which is the hardest part of scaling efficiently. Pathstream started by focusing on relevance, building curricula with industry partners but ensuring that those digitally focused certificates are delivered through accredited partners. But Pathstream also recognized that affordability and attainment (an actual academically backed but industry-relevant credential or certificate) is essential to greater economic mobility. Finally, Rivet School focused from the start on attainment—getting more students to graduate with degrees—but also understands that for students to persist and complete a degree, programs need to be affordable, flexible, and support the specific needs of working adults, and in fields that have a greater chance of leading to meaningful work.

Most importantly, all these ventures have learned that support—the most resource-intensive part of education—is essential to success for the working adult learner, and while Pathstream and Guild, in particular, have the capital to be able to do that, Rivet School will likely be much harder to scale because of its resource limitations but could be a good model for many other Rivet-like schools on a local or regional level, each of which could be supported by both philanthropy and industry.

Making higher education more affordable, improving time to degree and degree completion rates, and providing better connections between the skills and competencies students learn and labor market opportunities will continue to be areas of concern and focus, especially for more-traditional public and private colleges and universities. But addressing the critical needs of those who have been poorly served by those institutions; who have some credits, some debt, and no degree; and those who have been nonconsumers but seek the kinds of education that will lead to meaningful employment to support themselves and their families remains an equally compelling social problem. Guild, Pathstream, and Rivet School have each approached that problem differently, using different tools and approaches, and to some degree have focused on different segments of that large population that needs to be served. None of these social ventures and their approaches will solve this problem on their own, and choosing one thing often means not working on others. But each of these entrepreneurs has understood that social innovation—whether venture backed or supported by philanthropy—provides an opportunity to contribute to the solution.

FOR FURTHER READING

The single best overview on understanding the changing dynamics of traditional higher education is Goldie Blumenstyk’s American Higher Education in Crisis: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2015). From the perspective of an education entrepreneur and investor, Ryan Craig’s two books College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (BenBella, 2018) document ways that traditional higher education is broken and explore models that provide quality alternatives to traditional degrees. Michael W. Kirst and Mitchell L. Stevens’s Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education (Stanford University Press, 2015) is a useful collection of essays that contextualize the changing demographics of higher education seekers and how those changes need to be understood to better serve the educational needs of contemporary higher education consumers, especially in broad-access universities, community colleges, and alternative programs.

Notes

1. 1. Andy Porter, “Rethinking the Achievement Gap,” University of Pennsylvania GSE News, https://www.gse.upenn.edu/news/rethinking-achievement-gap.

2. 2. National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics, 2020), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_303.10.asp.

3. 3. National Center for Educational Statistics, The Condition of Education (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics, 2020), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp#:~:text=In%20school%20year%202017%E2%80%9318,first%20measured%20in%202010%E2%80%9311.

4. 4. Sara Hebel and Jeffrey Selingo, “Obama’s Higher Education Goal Is Ambitious but Achievable, Leaders Say,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2009, https://www-chronicle-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/article/obamas-higher-education-goal-is-ambitious-but-achievable-leaders-say-1551/.

5. 5. National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics.

6. 6. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Some College, No Degree (Herndon, VA: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2019), https://nscresearchcenter.org/some-college-no-degree-2019/.

7. 7. Ibid.

8. 8. Goldie Blumenstyk, American Higher Education in Crisis: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 12–15.

9. 9. Gates Foundation, https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/demographics/.

10. 10. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, The College Payoff (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 2013), 2, https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/the-college-payoff/#resources.

11. 11. The Lumina Foundation, https://www.luminafoundation.org/about/.

12. 12. Ryan Craig, A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (Dallas: BenBella, 2018), 11–15, 149–152.

13. 13. Guild Education, www.guildeducation.com.

14. 14. Crunchbase, Guild Education Funding History, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/guild-education.

15. 15. Betsy Corcoran, “Guild’s Mission to Create Smarter, Better Workforce Is Just the Beginning,” EdSurge, August 26, 2020, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-08-26-guild-s-mission-to-create-a-smarter-better-workforce-is-just-the-beginning.

16. 16. Brittany Stich and Rachel Carlson, cofounders, Guild Education, interview with the author, September 2020.

17. 17. Internal Revenue Service, Tax Benefits for Education (Washington, DC: Internal Revenue Service, 2020), https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p970.pdf.

18. 18. Stich and Carlson, interview with the author, September 2020.

19. 19. Rather than measuring student progress toward completing a course and degree by time, competency-based education approaches focus instead on self-paced mastery of a defined set of competencies that students are able to demonstrate. It has allowed several nonprofit online institutions, such as Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University, to offer affordable, timely degree programs at scale.

20. 20. Facebook, “Training 1 Million People and Small Business Owners across the US by 2020,” press release, June 8, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/06/training-1-million-people-and-small-business-owners-across-the-us-by-2020/.

21. 21. Eleanor Cooper, CEO, Pathstream, interview with the author, October 2020.

22. 22. Paul Fain, “Alternative Credentials on the Rise,” Inside Higher Education, August 27, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/27/interest-spikes-short-term-online-credentials-will-it-be-sustained.

23. 23. Cooper, interview with the author, October 2020.

24. 24. Daphne Koller, “MOOCs Can Be a Significant Factor in Opening Doors to Opportunity,” EdSurge, December 13, 2013, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-12-31-daphne-koller-moocs-can-be-a-significant-factor-in-opening-doors-to-opportunity.

25. 25. Kepler University, www.kepler.org.

26. 26. Eli Bildner, Rivet School.

27. 27. Ibid.

28. 28. Rivet School, www.rivetschool.org.

29. 29. Bildner.

30. 30. Ibid.