QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari

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1:18So I was in my grandmother's house in South Jersey. It was my senior year of high school. I got this letter in the mail about QuestBridge. This program that would help students from low-income backgrounds go to the top and the most elite universities in the world on a full ride. I almost thought that it was spam initially. I read it like three times to make sure that it actually said what I thought it said. That's entrepreneur Cody Coleman taking us back about 15 years to a moment that changed everything. That letter, the one inviting him to be a Questbridge scholar with all his college expenses paid he still doesn't know why it arrived.

2:07Like why me? I'm just like some kid from South Jersey going to poor public high school. I wondered if it was my trigonometry teacher Mrs. Chantel Smith-Winslow So she was kind of like my unofficial adopted mom. So I wondered if it was her that kind of put in a good word or saw this and was like, oh, you know who needs this? It's Cody. I did pretty well in math on my SAT score. So I was wondering if that was like something that happened. I had never even heard of QuestBridge. And I think when I went to my guidance counselor, they hadn't heard of it either. I came from a super humble background.

2:42My father left before I was born and my mom was in prison when I was born. So I actually grew up with my maternal grandparents. My grandmother only had a fourth grade education and my grandfather only had a second grade education. So this whole notion of college or anything like that, they had no idea about. So I was completely on my own and deciding what I wanted to do. He decided to apply on the fly. I think it was like an all-nighter that I pulled to get it done. And then I completely forgot about it until the decisions came back. I believe later that year, I didn't have a computer at home.

3:25So I actually had to go to the county library in order to check my email, to even check on the status of the QuestBridge application. And I get this email that I've been selected as a finalist for the National College Match Program. And I was like, what? This is like impossible. Something happened there where all of a sudden I was like, oh wait, people think that I'm capable of going to like elite schools like this? Someone reviewed my application. They read those essays that I wrote up in a blur. And they selected me as a finalist for the national college match. I realized that someone like me could actually go to a top school like this.

4:10As he looked into schools, he let his interests guide the process. I loved science and technology. I was a kid that was, like, glued to the science and discovery channel. And I was really into computer games. And I remember finding out that there was this major called computer science. And I was like, what? Computer science? Those are, like, my two favorite things combined together into a single degree. I, like, have to go and do that. And then I remember looking up, what are good schools in computer science? And at the top of the list, there was this place called Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

4:45Cut to a few months later, decision day. MIT releases their decisions on Pi Day 3.14. Cody's at the library computer again, staring at an email. And I'm like starting to read it and it's like, congratulations, Cody Coleman. And in that moment, I'm like, oh my gosh. I got into MIT.

5:17I got out of my chair, but I'm about to like yell, I got into MIT. And then right before my mouth could open, I realized like, wait, I'm still in a library. And I happened to work at the library as well. So I got up from the computer and then I went back to the break room where all the librarians were. And then I was like, oh, I got into MIT. And they were all so happy. They couldn't even believe it because as the first student from my high school to go there, to actually pursue this dream, I'm going to be able to study computer science at like the best school in the world for this. Cody went to MIT and thrived.

5:55He continued on to get a master's degree there and then a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. Today, Cody is CEO of the company Coactive AI, which he co-founded with a fellow QuestBridge scholar. It's hard for me to even imagine the alternate reality of if that letter from QuestBridge had never come or if I had never applied. I can't even fathom it, given how everything has turned out. Cody is one of more than 30 ,000 students who have gone to college through school partnerships brokered by QuestBridge. QuestBridge is a true scale story. From a local summer program for high schoolers, it grew to a national force to fully fund undergraduate degrees at dozens of colleges and universities.

6:41This year, QuestBridge helped a record number of students, with 2 ,242 accepted to its partner schools. QuestBridge scholars make up significant numbers of the incoming class at schools like Princeton, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. Over the course of its history, it's matched students with$5 billion worth of scholarships. The QuestBridge story holds important lessons for founders and entrepreneurs of all kinds around focusing your mission and why growing your impact can mean letting go of what you thought you were setting out to do.

7:22You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

7:52This is Masters of Scale.

8:00I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host.

8:09As students at Stanford, Anna Rowena Mallari and Michael McCullough became passionate about how to tap the potential of motivated students from low-income backgrounds. The co-founders transformed their not-for-profit, called QuestBridge, from a summer program on campus into a scaled organization that transforms the lives of high school students applying for college. Over 30 years, QuestBridge has carefully evolved and grown as an important platform in opportunities for higher education. Today, co-founder Anna Rowena Malari is also CEO of QuestBridge, and she sat down to talk about its journey.

8:50Anna Rowena Malari, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you. So wonderful to be here, Reed. We started by exploring her original motivation. Anna was the first in her family to navigate the college admissions process in the U.S. She went to high school with students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. She had close friends from less well-off neighborhoods, including areas in Stanford's backyard.

9:20I went to a public high school. We were within 20 minutes' drive. of the university, Stanford. And the amazing resources that that university had were so enriching and empowering to the students who attended. But I realized that the students I went to high school with, that I had classes with, that I played on sports teams with from all over the surrounding communities, East Palo Alto, East Redwood City, many of them were never going to be able to access those kinds of opportunities without being able to attend a Stanford or a similar institution. Anna felt so fortunate to be at Stanford, yet knowing that others she grew up alongside would maybe never have such an advantage prompted a deeper question.

10:13What did she truly want to achieve with the opportunity she'd been given? Anna found herself animated by a specific challenge. How to Use Stanford's Resources to Help Students Who Might Otherwise Never Experience Anything Like It. So what was the first iteration? What was the first, like, okay, let's do this, let's try this, and why, and what was it? Yeah, it was a very small residential summer program on the Stanford campus. We had 20 students from all over the country. They were high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds, and they were high school juniors, and we lived with them for almost six weeks in the summer program.

10:55They had classes with Stanford professors. We went on field trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station. We went to symphonies, and we had picnics in the park, all the sorts of wonderful educational opportunities that Stanford and the Bay Area offer. And we realized very quickly that these amazing students were just as bright as any other student we ever encountered and were totally impressive because of what they had experienced prior to coming to this summer program. I mean, they were extremely hardworking. They were very compelling humans. And then we saw what happened when they applied to college, which we helped and supported them in the process.

11:38all of them were extremely appealing and attractive candidates. And like 90 % of them went to Stanford over years of time. Then actually, I will say that very first summer program, when they first walked in and I just saw their faces and their spirits in many ways, I was like, I could do this for a lifetime. And I didn't know that I would be here today. But you would be doing this for a lifetime. Yes, exactly.

12:09What was the next, you know, kind of turn of the card? What was the, and we should now create a organization? After five or six years of doing this small residential program, we realized that, in fact, these students were extremely attractive to institutions. And not only were they highly successful in the admissions process, but they were also highly successful as undergraduates. At that time, we were supported by a number of private individuals and foundations in the area, all of whom, when they came to visit, they said, something really special is going on here. It's got to be more than just 20 students a year.

12:47You've got to scale this thing. And so we ended up exploring multiple models of scale. One of them was actually just replicating this little program that we had at different campuses. We tried that on one campus on the East Coast, which was extremely successful in terms of the outcomes of the students, but also an incredibly hard lesson learned that scaling that way was not going to work. I was traveling eight times a year back and forth and just trying to manage two campuses in different places. It was just a very high-touch program and really hard to scale. And at this time, we had something like 3 ,000 applicants for 20 spots.

13:24And so we ended up having to sunset the summer program, which was heartbreaking. People would say, the program doesn't exist without this thing. But we realized and we knew from our lessons trying to scale that actually we couldn't scale if we insisted on holding on tightly to this particular model. It can be painful to sunset beloved aspects of your business, especially areas where you've been incredibly hands-on and that you enjoy. For QuestBridge, the summer program was the original product, bringing underserved students to an elite college campus to enrich and inspire them. But it was incredibly expensive and not scalable to pay for travel and expenses for a five-week residential program that required nearly one-to-one staffing with each student.

14:14Yet it proved the students' potential as they would so often go on from that summer session to apply for and get accepted to elite universities. To that end, Anna and her team had already started another program to sync up high-potential students with college admissions help and scholarships. It was called National College Match. They decided that match program was the part of the Quest program that could scale. In the mid-2000s, they brought in a new executive, Tim Brady, to accomplish that. Many of the company scale journeys involve bringing in key executives. So like I did with Jeff Wiener and LinkedIn.

15:00So talk a little bit about how you connected with Tim Brady and Tim's early contributions. I consider that a pivot point for the organization because he had come from Yahoo. He had already had lots of management experience and innovation, and he was plugged into technology. But he also brought a very rigorous management and leadership style. He was questioning everything we had done before, but he brought this clarity around what we shouldn't worry about and what we should worry about. And this was so revolutionary for us because as founders and people who cared about every little piece, he was like, you know what?

15:41I understand you care about that, but we've got to focus over here. I always remember he kept on saying, we need this to be sustainable and we need to have interchangeable parts. Everything we did had to be scalable. And so it felt sort of counterintuitive to all of us who had felt like this essence of this program is that personal touch. It was like, wait, you're telling me I can't, you know, call the student and talk to her mom, you know, or whatever it is. He was able to convince us in a very compelling way that actually we could do much more if we just stepped back a little bit and allowed our energies to go towards a larger number of students at one time.

16:24Because at any given moment, you can pour a lot of time into one or two, and then suddenly you don't have enough time for, you know, the larger questions. He was absolutely right. And I feel so grateful for his wisdom. Then and now. Anna and Questbridge did find ways to foster and maintain relationships with many individual students. They didn't just give that up. She's even officiated the wedding of two Questbridge scholars. But the guidance to step back and not tend to every detail for every applicant opened up a new chapter for the organization. It allowed the time and space to consider how they could reach exponentially more students.

17:09Our back-of-the-envelope calculation, which we just literally did on the back of an envelope, was like, wait, there's not just 3 ,000 students. There's actually more like 30 ,000 students out there. Much more opportunity, much more talent out there across the country.

17:28With its mission now centered on applications and funding for college, QuestBridge set out to match thousands more students with schools that would pay for their education and potentially change their lives. After the break, hear how that wasn't the easy sell you might think it would be.

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19:25So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free.

19:40QuestBridge got laser-focused on college acceptance and scholarships. Its model set out to match supply and demand. Accomplished, motivated students with scarce financial resources applied to be a QuestBridge scholar. And if a participating school accepted them, their degree would be fully funded. Amherst, Grinnell College, and Rice University were the first partners for the QuestBridge National College match. Where could there possibly be friction in offering free college, you might think? But reaching potential scholars and convincing them to take part in the process involved major trust building.

20:18Anna expected this. She knew her customer. Since I had the fortune and privilege to be with you on parts of this journey, to dig in a little bit. One of the things that I learned from you guys was that it was also a key thing was trying to get these young, talented students to realize this could be part of their future. Because that elite college for rich people outside my community, that's not for me. That's for other people. Very much so. How did you get to them and say, no, no, this could be for you and this could be magical for you, your family, your community? What was the way that you built that into the scale journey?

21:02Yeah, absolutely. A few things were really interesting. One of them was, this is like something I wouldn't have expected, but we used paper mail quite a bit. And we actually surprisingly still do. And it's interesting because to your point, even to this day, many people say there's no way this could be true. This is a scam. Stanford University giving me a complete full ride. Are you kidding? I'm from this kind of background and everybody around me says this is impossible. And if you look at the sticker price online, it looks like to attend, in many cases, more than their family income for a year.

21:37So the barriers are really profound. Even if you can convince them that as a student, they are qualified and would be attractive, the paying for it part is really challenging. So one of the things that we did was on the paper mail, we always made sure to use the logos of our schools, because the logic was the schools would never let them use the logo if it wasn't a real opportunity, right? So that's one is just like literally the signaling that actually this is legitimate and this is real. The other one that is really important that we continue to employ because it's so effective is this near peer effect.

22:14In other words, to say, look, here are 10 students who really did go through the same experience that we're trying to tell you is available to you. And their voices are very important. The program needed to build trust with other stakeholders too. With the colleges who'd be accepting QuestBridge scholars, the program needed assurance that they understood these students' needs. Partner colleges had to agree to cover scholars full tuition and then some. From working closely with lower-income students, Anna and her team knew nothing less would do. QuestBridge approached schools from a position of strength, they deeply believed in the value of their students.

22:57I am deeply inspired and energized when I think about our students and who they are and how amazing they are. It's not hard to convince the schools just how much they are worth bringing onto the campuses. In the early days, we had to translate in some sense for the schools the importance of making the financial aid offer simple enough and clear enough and sort of categorical enough for a family to take a risk to send their student to a school like one of these schools. The vast majority of our students, 70 to 80 percent in any given year, are in the first generation to college, so their families are not familiar with the college process.

23:43We had to say to the schools, please, we need you to offer a full financial aid offer. That includes not just, in many cases, not just tuition and room and board, but also additional expenses, maybe some plane tickets for the family to come or the student to come. Maybe it's if they want to do other activities like art or photography, you know, they don't have this sort of discretionary funding to just pay for whatever equipment they might need for their activities. And the school's actually have been very generous in this regard for our match students. Schools really do offer a guaranteed full four-year scholarship.

24:25But in the beginning, we had to convince them of the importance of that. We got a lot of no's in the beginning. A lot of folks were like, nope, we can't do that. Sorry, aren't going to do it. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Try someone else. Try that school down there. No, forget it. Never going to happen. And I think it's because it was unconventional to say, this has to be what you offer them or they're not going to apply and they're not going to go. We also had real examples of incredible applicants that we could say, look, this is a real applicant that could go to your school if you just offered them this type of aid.