Guild Wants to Fix Higher Ed in the U.S. | Business Casual
There are a hundred million Americans, which is two thirds of the workforce, by the way, who need education and skilling to have a chance at the middle class before they retire. It's really quite dire. The American dream has become the exception, not the rule.
That's what I think a theme in a lot of our conversations is that the system is broken. The system the system and this time it's the educational system. Yes, but it's not every episode where I get prompted in my brain to sing. We represent the lollipop guild, that lollipop guild. And I say that because we're talking to Rachel Clark, Company, founder of Guild Yes. Yes. I was looking to disrupt the system. Yes.
She's trying to fix it. But I think you and I should probably both acknowledge our own privilege, at least from my perspective, my parents were able to pay for my college experience. Graduated without any debt. So I feel so thankful. And we have to remember that that is not the case. No. The majority of Americans.
So getting higher education at your current employer while you're working is that much more important. So that's what Guild is trying to tackle. And I love that. It's it's truly an honorable mission, and I really respect that. Rachel, who also acknowledges her privilege. You know, my father always says and I think it's a Spider-Man thing with great power.
Privilege comes great responsibility. I think Uncle Ben said Uncle Ben Yes. Yes. Like, my dad passed on to me. But that is very true. And and not everyone acknowledges that in places of privilege and power, but Rachel certainly has. And she looked at her own family, which, as she explains, was this great A B testing for the benefits of higher ed and she said, I'm going to use my power and position and privilege to try to fix this for so many others.
So this is like, yeah, really honorable stuff. And the public benefit corporation we learn about, which is something I didn't know about. A lot of information here. We got schooled in this happen. Yeah. Yeah.
So today we are hearing from Rachel Carlson, the co-founder of an ed tech company called Guild, which creates tuition benefit programs that help employees get college degrees funded by their employers. We'll hear from Guild's co-founder Rachel Carlson next after this quick break. This episode of Business Casual is sponsored by Grayscale, the world's largest crypto asset manager and provider of crypto investment funds. So you've probably heard about crypto by now. You're curious, but you don't know where to start. It's true.
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For Morning Brew, this is Business Casual, the podcast that reveals the unexpected business story behind everything. I'm Nora Ali. And I'm Scott Rogalski.
Nora and I are here for your ears, bringing you conversations with creators, thinkers, and innovators who can tell us what it all means and why we should care Now let's get down to business. Rachel, you co-founded Guild Education, Inc six years ago when you were still in your twenties. Just after graduating from Stanford. But obviously, this idea did not happen in a vacuum. I know there was something called Student Blueprint even before Guild I did a little digging there to find that out. But I want to hear more about your background personally and how you became interested in the education space.
Yeah. So I often talk about the My Wife or guild as having two flavors, one personal, one professional. On the personal side, It's easiest to describe my family as in a test on higher education. And my dad is one of seven. My mom is one of nine kids.
And so I have 22 and 23 cousins on each side. Perfect for a Navy test, right? Yeah. Good samples. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what the statisticians. So And on my dad's side of the family, my grandpa and grandma both were depression babies that went to college, which, as we all know, is not that rare, especially for middle class white families at the time, obviously was not uniformly distributed or racially equitable. But for their background, they and they both really loved learning.
My grandfather fell in love with learning. He went back and went to law school and divinity school. My grandmother actually got a Masters which is quite rare for a 93 year old today. And she got an education herself. And so they paid for all seven kids of theirs to go to college.
That was like their life goal. And then they paid for 22 of us grandkids to go to college, which is pretty remarkable. On my mom's side, my mom and only one other went off to college Of the nine. But it sort of didn't matter, right? This was the sixties, seventies, eighties, where you could go get a great unionized job.
You could go enter the middle class, whether or not you went to college. It wasn't this stark contrast, but then turned into Gen three. My cousins on that side and only a handful of us went straight to college, and that became the predictor of who got the launch pad into our twenties of an easier life, the chance to have children when we wanted to, the ability to buy homes at so many things that I think are really unfair in terms of the disparity. And so I just got sort of obsessed with the fact that I had cousins with even higher honestly IQ on my mom's side. Smarter. I said that on the record.
My cousins are OK with me saying that, but those cousins have had much harder lives. But for one reason, which is they didn't have the money to go to school in this these last two decades when it's gotten so, so much harder to do it and when it's become the barrier to the middle class. So that's the that's the personal and I can say more about professional, but yeah, we'll get to the professional. But so interesting that you have this empirical evidence to show the impact of access to education and you decided to do something about it to offer access to those who might not have it. So you decided to approach this issue of educational access from this three sided marketplace, which is a challenge, a two sided marketplace is tough. But there's three entities now you're dealing with universities, corporations, the learners slash employees.
So explain to us in the most basic terms how guild works and how you get all of those entities on board. Yeah, well, safe to say I didn't mean to build a three sided marketplace that wasn't like my my life goal build some super complex business structure. My goal was to solve the problem. So like my cousin, there are a hundred million Americans, which is two thirds of the workforce by the way, who need education and skilling to have a chance at the middle class before they retire. Like it's really quite dire.
The American Dream has become the exception not the rule, and that's really problematic. So that was the problem I was obsessed with. We started looking at all 7000 schools. This all came out of research at Stanford's various graduate schools. The school that in the business school, like Scott mentioned, we looked at the 7000 schools in the US to figure out, OK, if you are one of these 100 million Americans like where should you go get re skill? Turns out not everybody should go to Harvard Business School and they won't let everybody in.
So what should people do? It turned out there were only about 300 schools serving that population well. So much of higher ed in America was designed for like the 18 year old who's upper middle class mom and dad drop off in the minivan and then he lives in a dorm and goes to a frat party in a football game. Like that's fine. But that's a very distinct experience that he's hiring college for like our students for 33 year old mom often woman of color you know often works more than 40 hours a week. So there's only about 300 schools that serve them well. And we tried to figure out why weren't those schools scaling because it turns out in 2014, 15 a lot of them were kind of stuck at the size they were and the reason was they couldn't figure out how to meet 100 million Americans they wanted to serve because the cost of digital advertising had skyrocketed in the eighties nineties early 2000.
And like so many things there was sort of a big tech monopoly duopoly call whatever you want that made it really really hard and cost upwards of five $10,000 to meet a single student on the Internet to convince them to go back to school. So all these great public and nonprofit institutions said to us, if you can help us meet the 100 million workers who are already in the workforce who we know we need to reskill Good Lord, we could fund all the things that, you know, we need to do. And I had been a community college advisor that was my professional inspiration for the work.
And so that's how we got to the third side of the marketplace was we realized, Oh my gosh, do you know who knows these hundred million workers, the Fortune, 1000 companies. Mm hmm. So you saw this this void, this problem of people who potentially want to go to college, get that higher education, get that skill training, didn't have the means or didn't have the access, didn't know where to start. And on the other side, colleges looking for more students and in companies looking for higher skilled workers. So all these people are looking, looking, looking, but there's no central location to meet up and match.
Right. So is that that that's in nutshell what guild is offering here? Yeah. So what we realized was if we helped you and, you know, we say college, but it's really that's less than half of what we do. It's credentials, certificates, it's high school completion. It's English as a second language.
But think of it as post-secondary learning or adult learning of all sorts if we matched the best the 300 best nonprofit and public institutions as well as certificate providers, et cetera, if we can introduce them to the hundred million workers they wanted to serve, that would free up a lot of funding, that would lower cost, that would cut digital marketing out of the equation. Who owned about a third of the cost in this whole equation and free up total money. And then our that was our first aha our second aha. And these were not like overnight. These are two years of research.
Our second learning was that employers would not only introduce their employees to these great programs, they would actually fund them. And it started off with them funding the majority of the tuition and then as we proved out more and more of the our like almost all of our employers today fund 100% of their employees education because the return on investment is so fantastic and because the costs are quite low. So what then is the learner experience because it's clear that there's incentives for employers to offer these reskilling and upskilling courses and opportunities to their employees.
But let's say you're an employee at Chipotle. It's something that typically offers how do you decide as a learner what courses you want to take, what the nature of work changing so rapidly? How does that whole process work for someone who wants to get involved? Yeah, it's a great question. So if you go back to school, the question is what do you want to learn? Not what do you want to do? And that's been kind of the liberal arts tradition, and there's nothing wrong with that. I, as a privileged 18 year old, benefited from that.
That is not what the workers don't want. They want to start the conversation about career. So you have to actually flip the whole thing and so our students talked to a career coach at the beginning of their experience. They use our product exploring their career before they ever step foot in the class.
It's this idea that like career services should be the last mile. It should actually be the first mile. Right. And so, you know, let's pick Irish. One of our students, actually, who comes to mind. And when we first met her, she knew she loved people.
She was working in the restaurant. She had moved up pretty quickly and was making more and more money. She wasn't yet a general manager, but she ultimately ran the whole store, which she knew people were her passion. So she wanted to get into h.R.
And recruiting. So with a coach and with, you know, a lot of product discovery, finding out her strengths and, you know, figuring out what classes had already taken, she had tried some dabbled in some, as have, you know, how close to half of americans have taken some college classes. They just don't have a certificate or a degree. And she decided a bachelor's with a focus in human resources was the right fit for her. So it's an exploratory process. It tends to take a couple of months.
It's not you know, we're not a product. We're an experience which is the word you used which I love. Are you personally, Rachel getting to know all these people? Are there just too many to get everyone's story? But it seems like you're tapped in. Yet today we represent and are able to serve over 5 million Americans who have access to our platform. And our coaching doesn't mean they're all classes at any one time.
That would be wild. But so I don't know all 5 million. But I was at community I was a community college advisor and fell in love with this work, but also fell in love with the idea of productize it because I answered a lot of the same questions all day. And the most invigorating conversations I had was were the deeply cognitive ones, the emotional ones, the ones where somebody really is like, Oh God, I have some shame about my learner. Journey, and I had to get over that D I got or that high school counselor who told me I wouldn't amount to anything or that person in my community who said, You you're you're not a white collar, like you're never going to work in an office. You're going to do this path.
And there's no dignity in that, but you don't really deserve dignity. Like everyone has stories, because we in America, we declare people drop out, right? We don't say, Oh, that's a dropout factory, which unfortunately is the case for close to 50% of American schools. 3500 of our schools you shouldn't step foot in.
They have negative outcomes on day one. You've wasted your time if you spent an hour there. But we call everyone dropouts, even though you know, 90% of our community college students don't earn a certificate or degree, we blame them. And so what I'm really passionate about and why I try and listen to you know, and learn about five to ten of our students every week is because you have to ground it in the lived reality to actually understand what a seismic and cultural and systemic issue we're trying to attack.
Rachel, I love this conversation we're having around being really intentional about your career journey and not just thinking about what are the courses you want to take, what specifically it is you want to learn, but looking a little bit more into the future of work with more automation, especially how much do you think reskilling and upskilling is going to be focused or is focused on management and people skills versus technical skills? And how does that sort of fit into the portfolio of offerings with guilt is a great question, and for some reason we've saved most of what you just mentioned. Management people, leadership for graduate school. You know, I went to business school. I know a bunch of people who did, and then a bunch of them became hedge fund managers, and they don't manage anybody. They manage portfolios the person most likely to manage is the 21 year old who just got a promotion from, you know, individual contributor to supervisor at a retailer or person who just got promoted to kitchen manager of a restaurant.
Those folks tend to be in their early twenties and suddenly they're managing a team of eight for a shift for the first time. And so we flip that on its head. We believe you should be able to learn management skills at the very beginning of your higher ed journey.
And actually one of our most popular programs is a frontline management certificate. So think coding boot camp. But for management and why that is so important is that becoming a people manager is often the fastest path to the middle class across a variety of verticals in the US. But nobody tells young people that. Hmm, interesting.
And, and you mentioned the frontline workers as being a segment that you aim to serve specifically. This is a phrase that we've only recently started hearing about in the wake of the pandemic, but of course there's always been frontline workers. We just never label them that. Who are those workers? How do you define that category and why do you have to focus on them? Yeah, it's funny, we've we've been saying that phrase for ten years in the research, and it's like COVID.
Suddenly we were like, Oh, everybody knows what we're talking about now. You know, it does look different by vertical, so you can't slice it just by salary or by education level, but it tends to be the entry level role or what we call the launchpad role in any vertical. So in a hospital, it's your medicine.
They are often at the technician level. They are often that front line person, but they have they it is not a no a job that requires no training. It often requires a certificate or an associate's degree. In retail, it's your cashier and restaurant it's your cashier and your cook. In manufacturing, they work in the factory not above in the on the second ring managing.
So it's it takes on a different flavor, but it's the entry level role in any vertical and it's often the group of folks who have been most left behind and that's why we why I care. Like when we were doing the work on Guild and I was in as a research concept, I was obsessed with, you know, education as a tool for distributing opportunity. And I talked to a lot of people who were starting coding bootcamps at the time.
This was 20, 14. Those were very in vogue. And a bunch of them said like, I got into this work because I was really passionate and now I help graduates of liberal art schools get a second degree because they couldn't figure out what to do when they moved to New York at 23 and not fine, like I'm building a business, but like it just gave me a sense of if I'm going to fall in love, if I'm going to get to do this work the way I want to do it, I want to do it for the most needing and the most deserving population that isn't being served by other products and technology or experiences. Mm. Rachel you've brought up some really good points about maybe the systemic issues in our broader educational system. So I imagine you're very intentional about the universities that you would get on board to participate with Guild.
So I was listening to another interview of yours where you said it was difficult to, you know, be respected as a young person who didn't have a ton of experience as you were initially reaching out to universities, as you were building the company. So you hired your dad to sort of be that face that trusted gray haired face that people might pay more attention to. I'm curious, what lessons did you learn in terms of knowing your own strengths, your own weaknesses, and maybe adjusting to how people perceive you? Speaking of people skills, that's a great people skill to have. Yeah, it was so interesting and actually covered and the Zoom life has been really interesting on that dimension as well. You know, I learned to I learned to play the game early on because when you're early in in any industry, you don't get to say, hey, I want to change the game. You have to just hack the game.
So I dressed older and I wear my hair differently and I wore glasses even though my eyesight pretty good. I, you know, I played the game and that we can all laugh about it. And I remember laughing with the minority of women who were also at business school with me at the time about the game. Now I feel empowered because Guild has a little more leverage in the university space.
I'm like, I don't play in the game anymore. I'm changing the game. And so being blunt about it, talking about it, having those conversations, I didn't tell people he was my dad for a really long time.
I stopped using my maiden name and exclusively used my married name for that reason. Now I'm like, Screw that. Like I'm going to talk about it. And I don't really, you know, I think we have to some it's not always fair to ask a minority group to change the game. And I think we do that a lot in America, like, why don't you just shut the door? And the reality is when you're in an unempowered position, you can't always but once you get to a position of power, it's pretty fun to say, oh, I'm not playing by your rules anymore. Yes.
You had some not some fighting words for some of the institutions of higher learning earlier in this conversation. Was it 3500 of them or are just dropout factories? You're wasting your time is that an issue you see with the institutions themselves or with the cost of these institutions? And when you look at the marketplace of potential learning centers for your for your guild clients, how do you choose which institutions to partner with so that, you know, you're not you're not set into one of these quote dropout factories? Yeah. It's a highly systemic issue. It's not the faculty. So it's not the administration's fault. It's definitely not the students fault.
So couple issues. One, we don't let schools die. I believe deeply in creative innovation and creative destruction. Like those are some of the portended tenets of a healthy evolution of any system in design, whether that's capitalism, democracy, civilization, families. We don't look for a bunch of cultural reasons.
We don't let institutions die, but we create new ones all the time. There's no reason America needs 7000 universities. You could have argued that you needed that before the Internet. You needed one within driving distance of every human that's how many Walmart we have in America right there. I think there are about 6000 Wal-Mart. So sure.
But now with the ability to, you know, be a learner online and the fact that most adults would rather learn online that the community and community college is sometimes a bit of a misnomer because they're commuter campuses. And so when you talk to an adult learner, they do they if they own a car, they try and work out their shift schedule. They drive to the community college, they park, they go and they take a class and they leave like nothing about that community to me. And when they don't have a car, it's even worse with bus schedules and transport and child care.
The average person we serve, she I told you, she's a single mom. She wants to take classes after she puts her kid to bed. And so I think it's time that we allow for some creative disruption in the higher ed sector.
And I think it's a funding problem. We need to let the schools with low performing outcomes and the programs with low performing outcomes. We need to let them go to bed and retire. Mm mm. And to tackle this creative disruption of the educational system that you mentioned, it involves a creative business model, too. We've been talking about nonprofits for profits.
So let's get into what Guild's business model is. It is a public benefit corporation, so that means it's for profit, but created to generate social and public good. What exactly does that mean and why was that the model you chose for guild? Yeah, great question. So the crux of how we get paid is when we went to those schools I told you about those great nonprofits in publics that were outperforming with really great outcomes like 80% graduation rate for Latinas like data.
That was just so exciting. We said to them, Hey, we want to provide you coaching, advising all these career services, all the things we knew worked in the community colleges where we'd been piloting, what could allow us to do that. And they said, Well, if you can cut our marketing cost, the Google Facebook spend out of the equation, we can do it. We could also give a discount to the learner or the employer who ultimately now pays. So that's what we did. We effectively displaced the marketing and acquisition cost from the equation, and that allows the schools to pay for all of our career services, the product and technology that fuel that.
And then most importantly, the coaches who are the backbone of that experience. And that mattered to me because I had become so passionate about coaching and just career discovery and career services. But the community colleges I had been doing that work with really were struggling to pay out of pocket for it. I didn't even know about this public benefit corporation entity. Well, what are some other examples of these? Do you have any do you know who's operating in this space? And when you started out, was this something you were aware of or Oh, you've learned about Public Benefit Corporation.
This could be a good way to go. Yeah, good question. So you may have heard of a B Corp if you walked in Wholefoods, you have because it's a certification you can earn as a sustainable, thoughtful, ethical business model. I think the easiest way to describe any B Corp is a a company that's agreed to a constrained version of capitalism.
I think the issue that we struggle with in today's era is that capitalism is like run amuck. It's the short term earnings gone crazy. It's the idea that profit at all costs. It's the idea that like kind of I'm loving David Gallo's this book right now about Jack Welch. It's that idea that he really created around. Like all that matters is the shareholder and the profit.
Anybody signing up to be a B Corp and then Public Benefit Corporation is the grown up B Corp. You actually reincorporate you are no longer an S Corp or C Corp. And your designation, most of us are incorporated in Delaware for funny business reasons, but you're no longer an asterisk corp. Like most businesses, you become a public benefit corporation. You have to have the B Corp certification to do that.
And it's as you grow up and it's companies like Warby Parker, All Birds, Patagonia, some of the cooperatives like RCI, a lot of us have signed on to these what I think of as constraints and guardrails that we believe ask us to hold ourselves to a higher bar, then capitalism would on its own. We all believe in capitalism. We just all believe in some constraints on today's version of capitalism. That's how I think about that's a great explanation. And Rachel, can you walk through sort of the flow of revenue and where the incentives are for guild because it doesn't feel like it's a volume game.
You are incentivized to have the learners, you know, complete their courses actually gain something from their educational path. So so what does that revenue stream and process look like? Yeah, you're hitting on two parts of our B Corp application. The first was we said, hey, we want to be paid out of displacing this thing that we think adds no value. That digital marketing check that worked and then two, we want to be paid in a way that aligns us with the learners outcomes. So there were schools willing to just pay us upfront because they you know, right now they pay Google and whomever upfront or they pay any career services they might pay for upfront. But we said thank you.
That would be good from a short term cash flow perspective. But I always say if we were robots, right, if we really did people work was like really phenomenal people. 50 my I love our employees but let's pretend we were all robots.
If you paid us upfront, what would we be incentivized to do? We wouldn't be incentivized to coach you all the way to graduation. We wouldn't be incentivized to ensure that you got the best job. Instead we said, hey, pay us term over term as the learner proceeds if they take a break, we're not paid if they drop out, we're not paid until an end. And then our job to help them get back on their feet at the right time. And so it's not perfect, but it aligned us far better than any other model with ensuring that we were serving the learner. And this comes up to you because people say, Oh, employers want to do this just to attract the talent, just to get people in the door with their companies.
It's like, well, sure, but they're agreeing to let us ensure that that talent then goes all the way through school. So it aligns the incentives of the employer, the university or learning provider. And then at Guild. Rachel, this is. Yeah, this is I mean, just thinking about this whole model thing that this whole segment of the population that that hasn't been served in the right way is truly kind of you know, mind blowing for me. I mean, I come from a background where I was fortunate enough to have my education paid for, but certainly the things I studied aren't applying the way I'm doing now.
There is some argument maybe that, you know, people don't need college. You don't need to have that expense. And it the whole thing's a racket.
Yeah. You hear you hear that a lot from a people. And I guess you maybe share some of those things when you talk about these these expensive, not good schools and some of these options. But is it still a challenge to convince some people to get into the higher ed you know, Flywheel College means two things in America, and it's really important to separate them. Skill and signal skill is the component parts of whatever you got. And you can put those component parts in any bundle.
You can call it a credential, you can call it a certificate, you can call it a degree. And there's lots of people who get some of those skills and then don't get the degree right with that dropout. And then there's signal, which is like, well, I went to college, so therefore I'm capable of something. I'd argue that for 22 year olds we mostly use signal like to hire you go ask Name your favorite investment bank or consulting firm were they hiring from the top ten ranked schools in the US because they knew which classes they took or how rigorous those classes were? Like speaking as a Stanford undergrad, we know that's not true.
It was that Stanford admissions had already vetted. So there was a signal attached to you and there were alumni and powers that be didn't mean you were going to be bad at the job, but it wasn't the skills based process. What the low income American knows is that they need skills and we deliver that to them. Now, today, what the data still says is that if you are low income and you want to move into the middle class, a degree is the most powerful way to get there. So long as that degree is made up of skills based component parts, probably shouldn't be all electives, probably shouldn't be a unguided journey.
It should be a structure of skilled courses. But that might change in the next ten years, in which case you'll see Guild offering a lot more certificates and credentials. But we don't really care what the container is. We care about the rigor of the skills within the container, because that's how you help people move up mm hmm. Yeah.
Rachel, lastly, let's do a little bit of a vibe check on the company itself. So we saw congratulations that you raised your series F funding round at $175 million. Are you able to talk about your path to profitability? Are you profitable yet? Is that on the horizon? What's the saddest right now? You know, we're not profitable yet, mainly because, as I'm sure you all know, the trade offs are always growth versus profitability.
And the way most investors think about that growth path is how big is your total addressable market and how far along are you in serving that. And you should be investing up until you start to run out of market opportunity. I mean, we want even 100 million Americans we need to serve and we've got 5 million with access to gold. We don't even serve them. We implement them all yet to go to get whatever training they need so we have a lot of work to do and so we're still in growth mode. That said, the economy has obviously shifted, and so we're being pretty thoughtful about improving towards profitability every quarter.
It doesn't mean that profitability is a milestone the same way. I don't think an IPO is a milestone, but progress against getting better and closer to profitability or having sustainable funding and getting more independent are my are the journeys that I ask the company to focus on with me. And we've accelerated that journey a bit, given the macroeconomic climate. Yeah, it's a big problem to solve. Yeah.
And a very archaic system so we understand, you know, it takes time to get to that total addressable market and now it's time for business casual. The Business Casual Quiz with Rachel Carlson. Don't be nervous is fine. There's nothing at stake. That's what it's multiple choice.
All the questions are going to be about higher education and the like. Oh, you probably already answered a few of them in the course of our conversation. So you also have Nora here to help you out, right? She's going to be great. You're you're you're you're you're co student here. I'm trying to come up with a co learner. Co learner. Coleman, right?
Yeah. All right. Here we are. Numero numero uno, which institution claims to be the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Is it, A, Princeton, B, University of Pennsylvania, C, Harvard or D, Rutgers? My gut is Princeton, but I'm not sure nor.
What do you think? It's. It's Harvard. 1636. Yes, oh, well, could you you could tell Gilger.
I mean, all of you are. It helps when you when you go there. Right? So I also I think I also give tours, like I was going around campus saying six, six. I was I was a series of tour guides. So we both claim that like slightly embarrassing elitist.
Totally. Totally. Are you going to walking backwards, Rachel? Because I was good. Yeah. Yeah, I was. That's important that we mostly make jokes about Harvard in our tours. So come on, I give that, you know, that's fine.
I'm sensing some Ivy envy here, but we're going to go on to Q two. What is the most popular college major in the U.S.? Communications business, English or history? I think it's business, but it depends if it's bachelor's degree or associates degree is included in your data. Do we know go is go with your gut here on this? OK, this this is when Scott hints to us Bachelor bachelors let's go that. Yeah.
All right. I think it's business. Business good at business.
Yeah. According to data from the National Center of Education Statistics, U.S. colleges universities are awarded 2 million bachelor degrees in 20, 18 and 19. More than half of those concentrated in just six fields of study. And of those business the number one about 390,000 bachelors awarded in 2018 to 19 for business so you're good on that one too. We're two for two here down in the homestretch what is the most expensive college in the U.S..
According to 2020 122 tuition data. Columbia University. Brown University, Cornell University or Tufts University. Oh my I talked a couple of years ago is University of Chicago. So I said I thought NYU I thought NYU would be on the list but I would bet Columbia.
It's not I don't think it's Cornell it could be tough but I would bet Columbia. What do you think? Oh, it's Columbia. Yeah, it's New York City. It's expensive.
Yeah. Let's go with it. That's it. Real estate, real estate. Location, location.
Columbia. $63,530 annual tuition. Most expensive, according to U.S. News and World Report. OK, is it worth one? I have to I have to tell your listeners what everybody needs to know more about is the average cost, because the problem is low income Americans hear that and they think like no one in my family's even ever made that in a year pretax.
But the average school is less than $6,000 a year. And so I wanted to I love you ask the question. And the main thing we need to do from a media perspective is change the conversation so that low income Americans know there are feasible paths to get a credential or a certificate or a degree that don't require putting out a second mortgage if you even happen to own a home, let alone going into hundreds of thousands in debt or with guild or it's mostly paid for or go work at one of our company there. But I was going to I thought I wouldn't stand on my soapbox since I was already being kind of preachy. But there you go. Great information.
Thank you for pointing that out, Rachel. Yeah. And thank you for being a guest on the show and for going three for three here on quizzes, casual phenomena work.
Oh, thank you, Nora. No, it was it was teamwork. Yes. Thanks for joining us on the pod, Rachel. We appreciate it. Thank you. This is awesome. We love hearing from you, our listener, our beloved business, casual family.
What did you think of this episode, huh? Pretty impressive, right? Is Rachel going to be president one day or at least Governor Maybe. Let us know. What do you think? Send us an email at Business Casual at morning, Broadcom or DM us on Twitter at Biz Casual Pod. That's busy, casual pod with your thoughts. You can also leave us a voice memo on our Web site, business casual dot F.M. or give us a ring and leave us a voicemail.
Our number is 8622951135. And as business casual grows, we are excited to get to know our listeners old and new. Drop us a line and don't forget to leave your name and where your calling or writing from so we can hear from you in a future episode. Business Casual is proctored by Katherine Milsap and Bella Hutchins. Additional production Sound Design and Mixing by Daniel Marcus Sarah Singers, our VP of Multimedia. Kate Brandt is our fact checker music in this episode from Daniel Marcus in the Mysterious Break Master Cylinder If you like what you heard, please follow business casual on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get nasty for that podcast and we'd love it if you'd give us a great rating and a review.
Thanks for listening to Business Casual. I'm Nora Ali, and I'm Scott Gregorsky. Keep it business and keep it casual. If you like what you saw and you like what you heard, you can listen to the entire episode of this podcast. Business Casual anywhere you get your podcasts. And please go ahead and subscribe to the Morning Brew YouTube channel and go ahead and click on that alarm bell, that thing right there so you can be alerted any time there's a new video.
2022-06-26 23:00
