Ep 71: Reinventing Community College with Tade Oyerinde, Chancellor of Campus

0:00Imagine you're a high school senior on Admitted Students Day. Remember Admitted Students Day where everyone wears the hoodie of the school they're going to. Nobody wants to be the kid wearing the local community college hoodie. It's like, oh, you were too dumb to go to a four-year school. That's the way people perceive it. Even though for, I'd say, at least half of students in America today, community college is the clever path. It's a smart path. It's way better, even with the lower graduation rates, than getting into debt to go to a tier three private school.

0:33Tade is the chancellor of campus, a new type of community college. We've heard a lot about the problems with four-year colleges, but community colleges are also in crisis in our nation. Right now, the graduation rate is as low as about 30 % on average. And on average, people are coming out with debt and they're not getting benefit from it. Tade has created a new model where you don't have to get any debt, where he's getting the graduation rates way up, and he's innovating to be able to educate hopefully soon hundreds of thousands of people. Let's hear about the community college world and what's possible with Tade.

1:03I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. Really excited to have Tade Ayurinde with us today. Tade, thanks for being here. Sure. Thanks, Joe, for having me. Call yourself the chancellor of campus these days, right? Well, it's what they call me. The chancellor. I love it. Founder and CEO of a startup that's taken over community college and is taking education to everyone in a better way. I'm excited to talk about campus, but first let's hear a little bit about your background. Your parents are from Nigeria. You grew up in Atlanta. Is that right? Yeah. So my father came here to finish university.

1:31My mother came shortly after. They had me, my twin brother and my older sister in Atlanta. And yeah, I was born and raised there. And my older sister's a genius. And so my parents decided to homeschool us because they thought that my brother and I were going to be gifted as she is. And much their disappointment, we didn't quite have the same gifts, but, but yeah, they decided to homeschool all of us. And so we were homeschooled up until, up until high school and, and then finished high school when I was 16 and then, and then moved. I was actually going to be a pilot and went to flight school in Florida for a year and then decided to study aerospace engineering and went to go do that in the UK.

2:11You went to Leeds in the UK. What about aerospace engineering attracted you? You know, it's kind of lame now to say it, but I watched The Aviator and sort of got super, super deep on Howard Hughes and pretty much decided that I'd always loved aviation, everything aviation. But I realized that I actually wanted to do much more than sort of fly the aircraft. I wanted to design them. I wanted to understand the propulsion systems. I thought there was going to be really interesting advances in how we design these systems, how we stabilize them. I thought computing meant that we can do interesting things with VTOL and gimbal thrusting.

2:48We can. Right. They're really going to be difficult to do in a purely analog world. And yeah, I just decided to study it. I thought it was going to be really fun. Did it for three years. And we were talking earlier, you're an optimist, but you're frustrated that things are broken. So part of your motivation for building campus is you're trying to fix things that are broken. Like what's broken that you're working on? I always think broken is a little bit too vague and abstract to like describe things this complex. But what I'll say about our education system, specifically higher education in America, is that it works exceptionally well for some people.

3:21Like we can all point out like, oh, this kid crushed the SATs. This kid got a full ride to Stanford. Like those stories exist, but it doesn't work at all for a lot, a lot of people. And so it's like, okay, well, how do we make it work for everyone is sort of the way I like to frame it. And that's sort of the question that I always make us ask every day at campus. And so specifically, who isn't it working for today? Our higher education system. It's basically, if you look at cost, if you look at the cost of getting a bachelor's degree, if you sort of map it out relative to the cost of TVs, the cost of even healthcare, the cost of pretty much electronics, goods, every other aspect of the things we spend money on.

4:03It's just massively driven up. In fact, there's like a chart you guys can. Yeah, we put the chart on. It's just gone up way more inflation than almost any other area. Why is this? I mean, people hear about it anymore. Administrators. What's the problem? Administrative bloat is definitely a big part of it. It's certainly multifactorial. I think that like one interesting thought experiment is to like think like what is the other, the one other country on earth that has a higher education system comparable to ours in the States? If you think about like multiple institutions, the top 10 globally, but then also a long tail of dozens of great institutions.

4:32Like what would you say? Does the UK come up? It's the UK. Yeah. And so, okay, well, the UK manages with 200 universities to educate 2 million people a year. In the United States, we have 10 times as many students, about 20 million students, but 20 times as many institutions. We have 4 ,000 colleges and universities and states. So we're half as efficient as the Brits. And these are not like, this is just the Brits. It's not like, oh, this is the Singaporeans or the Chinese who figured out some new, This is like the Brits. They were pretty good 100 years ago. Yeah, 100 years ago, right. We should be at least as efficient as the Brits.

5:15And so the way to think about it is every new institution means that we have a dean of this, a chancellor of that, a provost of that. It's like way too many administrators. So at least two times the number of administrators approximately just based on what the British have been able to do. And so I think administrative bloat is a huge part of it. Some of it is also that sticker costs have gone up, but actual, like what students are actually paying on average is not quite as steep. It's still gone up relative to all those things we talked about. It's not quite as steep because institutions just basically charge the full paying students, the international students, the wealthy students full freight.

5:54And then they give a lot of institutional dollars and scholarships to other students. But the main thing is that whenever you have a market where the U.S. government or any other entity has said, hey, we're going to give away student loans and allow people to pay no matter what you charge. You restore the market in a crazy way. It's a complete distortion. And so institutions keep raising tuition and the government just keeps financing more student loans. And that's why we're at one point about one point eight trillion in student loan debt at this point. So with campus you're building, you're focusing on fixing the community college part of this.

6:28Like we're all familiar with some of the problems in the four-year colleges we've talked about. Obviously, I'm starting a new university to compete with some of the top four-year colleges. What's the state of community college in America other than being too expensive? Like is it doing pretty well? Is it not doing well? What's going on? So yeah, cost isn't really the problem with community college. The major like problem with community college, I sort of describe in two ways. It's like quality and completion, which is kind of a child or derivative of quality. And so only about 30 % of students who go to a community college will ever graduate with an associate's degree or transfer into a four-year school and get a bachelor's degree.

7:04They're all dropping out. Yeah, the vast majority, more than two-thirds are going to drop out. Is it because they're not finding it useful for their lives? Is it because they're too busy with something? What's going on? It's definitely multifactorial. There are some excellent community colleges. If you look at what Miami-Dade is doing, if you look at what the City University of New York is doing, If you look at Dallas College, there are definitely bright spots. But the reality is that most of the community colleges sort of have this traditional notion of sort of sink or swim. It's all up to you.

7:35They don't really treat students like they're customers. And they don't have the resources to basically do what we in Silicon Valley call customer support. So like in Silicon Valley, if you're an enterprise software company and one of your big logo companies says, hey, we're not renewing. It's like, holy. Yeah. And you figure out why. Like you figure out why you do everything you can to stop it. And like, you're going to get sworn. In fact, before the renewal cycle, there's going to be a nurturing campaign to like, you know, make sure that those customers don't churn. Yeah. In most community colleges, if a student just stops showing up to class, nothing happens.

8:11They don't even follow up. Nobody notices. Nothing happens. Maybe you'll get some automated email after a month or two or three of not showing up. But there really isn't this sort of infrastructure in place to make sure that we're sort of monitoring students and helping them get across. And then you combine that with, I think, the general decline in the average American's perception of the value of getting a degree. And what you have is a lot of people are saying, hey, look, I'd rather just go work at Chipotle. I'd rather go deliver Uber Eats or DoorDash or something else. maybe OnlyFans, whatever it is, to get by.

8:55And it's like, if you talk to young people today, that's actually what a lot of them are doing. And so what's needed is, and you can't ignore culture. Culture is an important factor. But what's needed is someone who says, hey, we're actually going to make it possible for you to get a high-quality education with all the supports that you need to get through it, without the debt. And that's largely what's missing. So you guys, you actually acquired a for-profit community college because that allowed you to buy it and do something with it. And you have a campus in Sacramento, but you're doing it both in person and online.

9:33And you're trying to scale this massively to help people. Is that a high level summary? Yeah. And I think the long-term goal would certainly be to scale. I think short-term, we're basically trying to further develop the model of student support that's going to help get those completion rates to above 50%. And so - You use technology to do that? Technology is a big piece. So our sort of zero to one, our very first sort of swing at bat at solving the completion rate problem was to look at what actually the City University of New York has done. They've been able to achieve a 51 % completion rate in their CUNY ASAP program, the Accelerated Study of Associate's Degree programs, where they've basically found if you did four things, you can get students to graduate about 50%.

10:15The first is they gave every student a MetroCard so they can come to campus for free. You don't have to jump the turnstiles or like not be able to afford to get there. You get to go for free. The second is they made sure that tuition, inclusive of books and sort of fees, was lower than the Pell Grant. What's that? It's like six, seven thousand these days? Yeah, seven thousand four hundred and ninety five dollars this year. So you can cover it with the grant and therefore don't have to worry about debt? Zero debt. You don't have to worry about debt at all. And then the third thing is they paired every student with what they call support coaches.

10:47Basically, this is a human being who plays the role that my mother played when I was an undergrad who was like signing in like every day to my, like my academic records and like, why weren't you in class? Checking in on you. Like, why do you have that assignment outstanding? Like get that in. And then - So you actually, everyone has a mom, you're bugging them. Yeah. I mean, and by the way, a lot of these students, you know, have complex lives. They're the first in their family to go to college. Maybe they're first generation Americans. Maybe their parents don't even speak English. Maybe their parents have no idea how to help them navigate the higher education system.

11:17And so this, this person, if they're properly trained, can actually, can actually be a huge, a huge sort of difference maker in these students' lives. And then the last thing that CUNY ASAP found super important was that you kind of had to make the students enroll full time. Really? Yeah. You kind of have to have the students. Because if they have a job, they're just going to drop things. Well, there's still, most of these students still have a job. They still work on average 20 plus hours a week, but they have to be enrolled in at least three, three classes a quarter. So it's basically full-time defined as like, um, you're going to graduate a two-year degree in two years.

11:50You're on track to graduate in two years. If you, if you make, if you do halftime, it's going to take you four years to get the two-year degree. A lot of these students are just going to get fatigued. Um, I probably would have gotten fatigued if it would have taken five seconds. I'm going to do a bachelor's in eight years. Like it's a long time. You'd be too exhausted. You'd be too exhausted. We found it's about having a conversation up front with students and really succeeding at helping them to understand the value of getting an associate's degree. What is the value of an associate's degree?

12:15Like what can you do with that in America? Generally speaking, um, if you get a bachelor's degree, you're going to out earn people with just a high school diploma by about a million dollars over the course of your life. Um, associate's degree gets you about half the value. So about half a million dollars over the course of your life. And so the key really is ROI. So it's like an associate's degree should be a no-brainer if you can get one for free. It is a no-brainer if you can get one for free. Are there certain jobs that someone has an associate's degree that's much easier to get? How does that work?

12:43It's more about getting into management. It's more about scaling up in a role once you're there. Got it. So people will trust you more with leadership and stuff. Absolutely. They'll trust you more with leadership roles and you have a credential that you can transfer around from role to role that gives you more flexibility versus just if you have a sort of a job sort of resume, then it's more difficult to convince people that you can sort of, that you have this general foundation of sort of intelligence that allows you to sort of jump into different roles. And you've built on this model because you obviously you took these four principles from this successful school in New York, but you guys are online and offline as well.

13:24And you actually are using a network of like top adjunct professors which I think is pretty cool. Can you tell us about that a little bit? Yeah, so on day one, we were like, okay, there's no point in trying to build and scale up a community college if we don't have a great model that leads to higher graduation rates. And so we've basically been inspired by the ASAP model and we do those same things. We also give our students free math and writing tutoring. Some of them have deficiencies, like they went to a crappy high school and we have to help fill those gaps. And then the other thing is, is instead of a MetroCard, because most of our students are fully online, we give every student a laptop and we pay about a third of their wifi bills if their, if their wifi is too, too slow or unreliable.

14:05But then we've also noticed like this broader trend of students, young people, even their parents just getting disillusioned with higher ed. And there's a massive problem with the way people perceive the quality of community college education. Generally, if you look at the thought experiment that I always tell people is like, just imagine you're a high school senior on admitted students day, remember admitted students day where everyone wears the hoodie of the school they're going to, nobody wants to be the kid wearing the local community college hoodie. It's like, Oh, you were too dumb to go to a four-year school.

14:37Like, or like, it's like, that's the way people perceive it. Even though for, I'd say at least half of students in America today, community college is the clever path. It's a smart path. It's way better even, even with the lower graduation rates than, than getting, getting into debt to go to a tier three. No, it's true that debt to go to tier three doesn't make any sense. And you know, I actually, my friends and I took math classes at the local community college because we went ahead and they're actually pretty hard math classes and pretty good teachers. I mean, there's actually some legit people there.

15:03Now, when I think about it, I tend to think of like kind of social activists, like social justice nonsense when I think of community colleges, sociology, psychology. So I do kind of maybe my own mind disparage some parts of it, but there's also good things there. Look, it's a mixed bag. There's definitely like, there are absolutely excellent community colleges where I would send my kids if they wanted to go to community college. And then there's a long tail of community colleges that are really struggling. And to be clear, I do think they are largely underfunded. Maybe we don't need so many community colleges, it sounds like is your view.

15:33We have fewer that are better. I think it's actually really interesting. And I'll get to that in a second, the number of community colleges that we need. But I think our goal was, okay, let's take this model that's worked. And let's also solve the perception problem, or at least try to solve it. And a big part of doing that was, was let's hire the same faculty who teach at Princeton and Morehouse and UCLA. I love it. And so this was actually kind of how I got into this, this like what I consider to be like a super, super exciting opportunity with campus. I was actually at UCLA. We originally started off as a software business.

16:13We were basically building Zoom plus Slack, you know, plus maybe Quora. It was like a robust communication platform for college classes. And I used to fly around the country. We didn't try and sell it enterprise to the university because I don't know if you could tell, but I'm not an enterprise sales guy. Like I was like, I'm a consumer guy. And I was just like, okay, let's sell to professors. And then you get to actually build software for the professors, not for like this long. Oh, so you guys know some cool professors. That's cool. Yeah. And so I got to meet thousands of professors. I used to fly around the country to spend time with them, try and get them to bring all of their colleagues into an office, and then I'd pitch them.

16:53I was at UCLA in 2018. I met in this professor's office. I get into the office, and he's got an air mattress off to the side. And he's just like, I'm like, what's going on? He's like, oh, yeah, I'm an adjunct professor. I can't afford to live anywhere near Westwood. I live six hours away, drive up on sort of Monday morning and sleep in my office till Friday night. And I go back out for the weekend. Wow. And I was like completely shocked. And he's like, yeah, I make 37 grand a year. Whoa. And it was like sort of blew my mind. Like my mother, you know, was a college dean. Actually, my, like I come from a long family of education.

17:33My paternal grandfather was a college dean. In Nigeria. In Nigeria. My maternal grandfather was a high school principal. My mother's a college dean. My older sister is a dermatologist, but now she's also on the faculty at Baylor. And so like, I'm like very, I thought I knew a lot about, about education. I thought I knew about higher ed. I thought I understood, oh, faculty. I thought adjuncts were like when James Comey or Michelle Obama wants to give back. So they teach, you know, they teach like for fun at Georgetown. It's like, actually that's like very rare. Most, most adjuncts are like grad students with 250 grand in debt who make less than 50 grand a year.

18:09That's rough. And, um, or recent grad student, recent PhD graduates, um, with, with tons of debt and who make less than 50 K a year. And so that was like the first thing where I was like, Holy crap. Like there's this like massive, massive talent supply that's being undervalued. And like, what if we could like, what if we could bring access to these amazing professors? Cause adjuncts in my experience tend to be like more likely to be great teachers than they're passionate about teaching. Teaching is what gets them out of bed. It's not research. It's, it's not, it's not, it's not the politics of it all.

18:44Yeah. Teaching's paid the worst in the college, which is ironic, huh? Exactly. And, and especially in the sort of first two year curriculum, adjuncts generally get, you know, get the brunt of, you know, sort of introductory class and teach class teaching load. And so the idea was like, well, what if we can give everybody access to this amazing, amazing teaching supply and build a network kind of like Uber did, for driving where it's like, hey, you can teach at UCLA or Princeton or Morehouse during the day. And then in the evenings, you teach on campus.edu and we're going to pay you double the average wage.

19:16So the average adjunct makes about$4 ,000 per class that they teach. In community colleges, it's closer to two and a half K. And we pay$8 ,000 to our adjuncts today and they love it. And, you know, our very first professor was a guy called Stephen Keltz. He was, he taught at Princeton Monday, Wednesday, Friday, NYU, Tuesday, Thursday, lived in Newark, New Jersey because equidistant from both. He's like, it's like now he's like said, hey, I'm going to focus on folks on Princeton and campus in the evening. So he gets to do it all from, from, from Jersey and, and gets to like teach this really interesting student population.

19:51It's not, you know, all super, you know, affluent, super academically motivated students. He also gets to help some of these first generation students and it's really exciting. And he also gets to, he keeps his job. He keeps the Princeton logo, the office on campus, all the faculty, intellectual stimulation that comes from that. And then he also gets to earn a lot of teaching with us. That's amazing. And how many professors have you guys hired like this now? Just about 300. Wow. on the network from all from top 50 universities or top five HBCs. And I mean, how big is campus going to be? We mentioned earlier, maybe you don't need quite as many community colleges if a few of them could be just better and scale in a way that's useful.

20:30Like, how are you thinking about that? Yeah, I do think there's going to be consolidation in community college. Like one of the great examples of this is Dallas College. Actually, the former chancellor of Dallas College is on our board of trustees, Dr. Joe May, amazing, amazing human being. He led the charge. So originally Dallas, I think I had nine different community colleges, all state owned and funded. And if you like, if you lived on like the west side of town and you were at the local community college there, and then you sort of moved to the north side of town and you wanted to transfer your credits, like some of them wouldn't transfer.

21:08Nice. These guys didn't get along. You have to retake those classes. It's absolutely insane. So Dr. May basically said, you know, and it was not easy to do this. We're going to make this one institution. And that means a lot of people, you know, who had fancy titles had to lose their fancy titles. And then there's a lot of political cost to get it done. But then it was extremely important, both for the economics of the institutions, but also for the experience for students. When did he do this? It must have been, do you have to work with the governor at the time, I'd imagine? I mean, he had to work across the board.

21:42He had to sort of deal with the sort of more liberals, the conservatives. I'll let him tell the story. I think he just became Chancellor Emeritus and stepped down after. I really admire people who could do things like that in government. It's so hard to do to take together all these things and kind of make them all in one and make it more efficient. You basically just need to be a very stubborn, persistent person. Absolutely. And you have to be driven by, I think, this intrinsic desire to actually help students. and make things work the way they're supposed to work, which is very rare. Exactly.

22:13And to me, it's like a lesson in the challenge that I think a lot of community colleges face, which is that they have so many different constituents. You have your local governments, you have your actual communities, you're a large employer. It's not like, oh, we get to say, our job is to get as many students, the skills that they need to be productive members of society as efficiently as possible, full stop. I don't know if there's a single community college in the country that gets to say that. They have to balance faculty unions and all these different... This is a problem. Once you become a large employer in a state, you actually end up existing sometimes for your own sake as a large employer.

22:50That's very powerful. This is why you have the really powerful healthcare interests and education interests. I come from California. We have a lot of special interests all across the board here. And I went to Texas. I'm like, oh, it's going to be better. But guess what? In Texas, you also have healthcare and education interests because they're large employers and it's not always aligned with what they're supposed to be doing. Exactly. And so it's, it's, and you know, and then you can talk about the campaign finance. We can go down that rabbit hole, but like, it's like, it's, it's, it's tough when you have to serve like three different people who care about three, three different sets of people who care about three different sets of things.